David Nyeste

Writing Helps Clarify Your Thinking I started this blog in 2010. It was without any specific agenda or strategy. (Yeah, I used to do that :-) In my first post you can read about my humbling experience at the Ironman Spain in Lanzarote. I still like that article because that specific experience has forever changed the way I compete. If I would not have written that article, I might never have realized in all clarity why I love to compete. According to the statistics it has some hundred views. Judging merely by the lack of public interest one might suggest I should never have written that article. I am convinced that is a wrong conclusion.  Clarity of mind is invaluable. Up until a few weeks ago I was not seriously committed to blogging. It was a sporadic pastime I used to engage in whenever I felt like sharing something important or even trivial. It has been almost one year since I started writing on a daily basis. For the longest time I only wrote for myself in order to clear my th...

Digital Minimalism Is Overrated Over the past years I have strived towards a more self determined digital and professional identity. Minimalism is a huge and timeless topic. Social media, video and streaming platforms, books and magazines are filled with digital and material minimalism content. It seems the present value maximizers (e.g. #yolo) are currently losing ground in the battle for attention against the end value maximizers (e.g. #firemovement). However I am convinced a focus on minimalism only misses an important point: the road to happiness in modern day's fast paced communication cycles is not a question of principle, but a question of the right balance. Hence the answer to the question of the right digital strategy, regardless whether private or professional, can not be answered by a one time decision to embrace a monk like minimalism. Rather you should continually reevaluate your options, necessities and focus on balancing your digital habits. Why I Turned Off All Push...

Masters of the Multiverse One of the highest privileges in life is to relive childhood with your own offspring. The experience of being a parent is by far the most intense and life changing transformation that any person might go through. Being accountable not only for your own, but also for another person's actions and life is a tremendous responsibility. As overwhelming as this might sound, there are definitely also some perks to the job: you get to watch Ninjago. As a kid I was seriously into Lego. Short disclaimer: I am -sadly- not affiliated with Lego in any way. The following statements regarding Lego are only my own opinion and not advice of any kind. It's perfectly ok if you're not the Lego type of person. A life without Lego is entirely ok, though meaningless ;-) Lego is just cool. My brothers and I used to throw together all the different sets and construct entirely new structures. At one point we rebuild robots from Transformers that could change into different m...

Own Your Digital Identity Yesterday I ended the post by making a point to shed your fear of change. Having put some thought into it, it turns out that I foster all kinds of fears myself. One fear I had for the longest time is that somebody might criticise me for the things I say and do publicly on the web. For safety reasons my standard procedure was to use fake names on my public profiles on blogs, streams or sports platforms. I started this blog back in 2010 with my real name, which was an exception to the general rule. The purpose of using my real name was mostly to occasionally tell some of my stories to friends and family and because I wanted people to be able to connect to my stories on a personal level. I am not sure this fear was justified or not, but it resulted in a set of measures for precaution.  In my view everybody who aspires or claims to be a leader needs to be visible and approachable to a certain degree. That is kind of the minimum requirement. I guess that explai...

Learn from the Best  Over the years I have been able to contribute to numerous projects in various roles. Some of them were large ones with international teams and dozens of consultants working around the globe. Some were small in scope, short in timeline, or regionally focused. Some I have overseen and delivered with client staff only. A few were gigantic, long running transformations of entire corporate structures and cultures. Regardless of the set up of any project there are a few crucial ingredients that need to be incorporated into the project set up and execution to enable success. Projects lacking these vital ingredients will lag behind deadlines, miss budget targets and in the worst of cases fail to achieve their desired results. I don't necessarily consider myself one of 'the best'. However I certainly had the opportunity to gather rich experience by witnessing leadership excellence at its best over many years in different environments and situations. Here's m...

Now for something different Today was a bank holiday and I spent the day with my family at home. On days like these, when we don't expect any visitors and don't have any agenda for the day we just hang out at home and everyone is pretty much free to do as he wishes. On this occasion we even managed not to spend too much time on housekeeping or gardening, a default activity of house owners with virtually no substantial return on investment. Because of my morning routine I am always the first one to get up and I consider it an utter privilege to witness everybody's 'start the day process' as the morning unfolds. The first ones to join me early are our cats - the standard routine is that I prepare their breakfast. Eventually they eat, I read. Then they either take a nap or they leave to follow nature's call. Today however something extraordinary happened: our lady cat approached me in my reading chair and complained about something. I didn't get what she wanted...

Virtual Coffee Break Strategies for networking had to be rethought in the times of the pandemic. Here's one of my favorite networking strategies that I usually apply on Fridays, to start a conversation with colleagues I would otherwise not have the opportunity to work with: 1. Visit your company's staff list, e.g. on the intranet or in your company's contact list. 2. Pick a specific unit within the organization (e.g. sales, IT, production, etc.). Repeat this top down approach if you like in order to make the next step less random. 3. Pick a random person within the contact list of the identified organization unit. 4. Call that person. This is important: don't write a message, but call her. 5. In case the person is not available, move on to the next person in the list and go to 4.. 6. Ask the person if she would like to have a short and spontaneous virtual coffee break with you (real coffee, remote meeting). 7. If yes: Hooray! Go get some fresh coffee, call again and enj...

The fairy tale of excess capacity In consulting it is fashionable, sometimes even mandatory to work hard and to work excessive hours. Of course when it comes to formal documentation of the hours worked everybody is 100% compliant with German labour laws...'of course'. However the 'informal reality' often gives a different impression. The notion that anyone is capable of working more than ten hours highly concentrated on a daily basis over several days or weeks time by pure willpower is something I always considered suspicious to say the least. I witnessed a decent count of occasions of late work and night shifts, where a team had to hit a deadline for a proposal or some documents for workshops or a steering committee and so on. On these occasions I noticed two different types of colleagues: the ones that were staring holes into their laptop screens while typing and clicking away on their computers frantically and the ones that were not. You guessed it: 4 out of 5 of the...

Focus on Impact You might know this 'law of the vital few' under one of its synonyms: the 80-20 rule, pareto efficiency, the rule of diminishing returns, to name a few. There's a wide range of matters where this rule can be applied successfully and some others, where it cannot. In this post I will build a strong case why you should apply this rule in your everyday work life and how to best leverage it on some of the most vital aspects of life. Theory Basics According to the 80-20 rule 80% of outcome is caused by 20% of input. For instance this could be applied in sales as to a company that makes 80% of profit with 20% of its customers, or a carpenter that uses 20% of his toolset for 80% of the work, or that most people spend 80% of their total time consumed by their smartphone on 20% of the apps and so on, 80% of global CO2 emissions are caused by 20% of the nations worldwide (probably even significantly less). One significant fact to note is that this rule is indifferent t...

Popular work ethic in consulting  has aspects of self exploitation. Most consultants I met had a tendency to stretch the definition of 'fit for work' to its limits. I remember an assignment a few years back where I took the 6am flight on Monday and flew to the next client in the middle of the week or home at the end of it. The problem was that at one point during the winter I caught a really nasty flu that would not go away for several weeks. At its peak it was so bad, my ears would pop on the Monday flight and I would only be able to hear everything in a damp, silent mode. It always took a few days until my hearing was back to normal again, and guess what: that was usually just the time I would take the flight back - back to square one. Another issue was that this situation occurred a few weeks before a major go live of our client and the entire project team was on fire pretty much 24/7. After a successful go live and the first week of hypercare, when the excitement of any maj...

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.", Mark Twain The Mindset Feedback is all about your Kaizen and not anyone or anything else. It starts with you asking for it and it perpetuates with you extracting value out of it and eventually adapting your behaviour accordingly. However it doesn't end there. Imagine the impression of junior staff when asked for their feedback on senior staff! You have to be a fan of 360-feedback. Think in value added instead of hierarchy and rank.  Don't expect feedback from others as a given and don't try to force feedback on anyone without having been asked for it. Not all people like to give feedback, let alone receive it. Any form of feedback requires a strong urge towards improvement as well as an open mind. Without either of those any feedback will be rendered futile. In order to progress in life and to improve professionally the assessments and perspectives of others can not be overvalued. Proactively asking for ...

Why Recovery Is Existential The most valuable lesson I learned in my years as a competitive swimmer was that the human body has one major advantage over machines: the power to super-compensate. Supercompensation is the capability of the human organism to restore above the initial performance level after exercise. Basically how this works is this: Training/ physical exercise does damage to your body - muscles, mitochondria, neurons, tendons are strained, energy reserves are depleted. After your workout your organism immediately starts to rebuild your body. The exceptionally cool thing that distinguishes living organisms from machines is that your body is smart: it will recover a notch above the initial level - this magical behaviour is called ‘supercompensation’. If you manage to hit the right volume, intensity and most importantly: the appropriate recovery repeatedly, you will improve over time. If one could apply this principle to machines you could for instance buy a Fiat Panda and w...

Be Brief, Be Bold and Make a Difference In a professional context effective communication is all about the impact you make on people. I see a lot of emails, presentations, workshop preps and other attempts to convey information which all often lack the one and only essential ingredient to make an impact: a clearly stated key message. In this post you will find a comprehensive and basic methodology to create business presentations with impact.  Even though I sometimes create my own presentations and papers the largest part of my work is not tangible. That is because in order to create a great presentation the actual craft of creating slides is the smallest -and easiest- part of the work. 90% is deep analysis and thinking. Most of the time I receive positive feedback for my presentations the compliments are focused around the esthetics and the design of slides or about the look and feel that attracts people's attention. Though I welcome these compliments I often contemplate whether p...

Meetings, Minefields and Mindfields Today I will elaborate on why it is necessary to have a strategy for focused work. In case you don't have a clear strategy for how you can finish complicated, demanding tasks on a regular basis, you should start to think up a solution for this problem immediately. How and why I do this is revealed in the next lines. This will hopefully stay an exception, but let's start with a rant: it often strikes me with what level of ease and with what level of total disregard for people's time and schedule some colleagues invite to meetings of questionable purpose on short notice. By 'questionable purpose' I mean those meetings, where you don't have any agenda, you don't get any info on your expected input or why you're being invited in the first place and of course -the classic- : no documentation of the outcome. My impression is that as I proceed through my work-week those spontaneously created 'alignment-meetings' keep ...

Negotiation Strategy Basics Before engaging in any negotiations you should set up some rules and guidelines for how you plan to approach the situation. Let me elaborate on some basic principles of negotiation and focus on some specific strategies that I was able to apply effectively on multiple occasions. I was able to negotiate multiple work contracts that were mutually satisfying and I was always happy to sign each one of them. Most importantly however: looking back at all the deals I am still happy with each one of my decisions. I accredit this fact to successful negotiations. Principle I The Invariant of Negotiations: Foster Relationships All negotiations should lead to better relationships between the parties. Your paramount objective ought to be to enjoy the debate and to learn something, regardless if a deal is cut or not. Remember you all have a mutual interest and both parties will do their best to find common ground. Hence your focus should not be on convincing your counterpa...

Meetings are the Mirror of the Soul of an Organization  The way meetings are held in a company tells a lot about the corporation's culture and its values. Most large or medium sized companies have some kind of formal values they are committed to and a mission statement, that clarifies the purpose of the organization. However it is in everyday work life only that one will truly experience how much an organization and its members live up to these values and how purposeful they act upon their vision and mission on a daily basis. When I set up and invite to meetings, I like to provide the participants with three basic elements in advance: 1. The purpose of the meeting (Why are we meeting? Why are you invited?) 2. The outcome and participants' expected input (What will be different after the meeting? What is expected/required that you bring to the table?) 3. Some basic agenda, if applicable. (Plan of time and topics) Though most do, not all my meetings have a formal agenda. That is...