David Nyeste

Deliberate planning and acting make teams more resilient Brittle bridges over beautiful Bonn As a “self made Bonner” it worries me to see what is going on in Bonn. Because of my deep affection for Bonn it hurts me that lately it has frequently been the center of attention in the media for reasons nobody can possibly enjoy: One of its three bridges over the Rhine river was shut down on short notice due to risk of failure. Apparently a combination of insufficient maintenance, inadequate oversight, and decades of increasing traffic led to severe damage that went unnoticed until some dangerous cracks were discovered. Most Germans still remember the sudden and unexpected collapse of a bridge in Dresden in September 2024. One incident is a tragedy. Two are patterns. However Bonn’s Bridges merely symbolize a wider misconception: people’s illusion with change happening ‘by accident’ or being brought to them, rather than having some agency in it and driving change. Von Moltke, Eisenhower and Ty...

  AI Doesn't Change the Most Important Leadership Question Every endurance athlete eventually learns an important lesson. When training starts paying off and your aerobic engine gets stronger, there is a temptation to simply train more. Ride another hour. Add another interval. Fill every available minute with more work. Ironically, that's often the moment progress slows down. Experienced athletes know that improved fitness is not a reward to be spent. It is a resource to be invested wisely. Sometimes the smartest decision isn't another training session. It's recovery. It's refining technique. It's improving nutrition. It's studying race tactics. It's preparing for tomorrow rather than exhausting yourself today. The goal was never to maximize training volume. The goal was always to maximize performance. I have the feeling that organizations are about to face exactly the same challenge. The Wrong Question Artificial intelligence promises significant produc...

Good leaders give good answers - great leaders ask the right questions Yet most organizations spend enormous effort debating answers while hardly questioning whether they are asking the right questions in the first place. That may be the single biggest reason why so many strategies fail. Strategy is important … and so is culture “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a famous quote for the importance of organizations’ behavioural framework over their business strategies. I agree to disagree. Pitting culture against strategy is like discussing whether your left shoe is more important than your right. Organizational culture and business strategy should be regarded more like the Yin and Yang, since in a best case scenario they complement each other and enable a virtuous cycle. The world’s greatest cooks will fail to satisfy customers with bad recipes and vice versa. The question is not which one is more important, but how to create a great, durable culture and create consistently good s...

What can we learn from Germany’s failure in the FIFA World Cup 2026? Germans have a special relationship to soccer. According to Jürgen Klopp, a famous German football coach, “Soccer is the most important of unimportant things on earth.” So after being kicked out of the tournament in the round of 32 the most obvious question in the room might be:”What can we learn from it?” Here’s my personal five take-aways: See the bigger picture Football unites people all over the world. It makes no practical sense to watch 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes - actually there’s little activities imaginable that are less productive. Nevertheless those people that watch games for fun are usually all fired up and really emotionally invested. If we could all just see past our local affiliations and acknowledge our broader affection for the game itself, rather than just for “our team”, we might actually enjoy the rest of the tournament as well. Don’t play the blame game It did not take long until a ste...

  If you're still looking for good reading material for your days off, you might find one or two gems here. These are my personal book recommendations for those beautiful, quiet hours. Looking back at the books that moved me most recently, I realized they all explore one central question: How should we live in times of rapid change? Novel Death of an Ordinary Man – Sarah Perry An impressively sober account of David's final months. The author recounts her father-in-law's journey toward death with remarkable restraint, yet in a way that still cuts deeply. My Take-away The story reminded me once again that life is short and fleeting and therefore must be lived in the present. At the same time, there is always hope for a better tomorrow. A Private Man David, a priest who has taken a vow of celibacy, falls in love with Margaret. Their forbidden love tells a story of personal and cultural identity, loyalty, faith, and the deep fractures in relationships that can emerge fr...

AI is shifting the value from software applications to software orchestration Is that a Meteor approaching? Since the start of the year SAP and Salesforce stocks have lost significantly - the trend of valuation losses has engulfed the entire SAAS industry since early 2025. While several factors contribute to declining SaaS valuations, investors and stakeholders appear increasingly concerned about one question: What happens when AI becomes the interface layer between users and software applications? Resilience Required The SaaS business model typically sells software products and charges customers per user. With AI replacing human workers it eats into the profits of legacy products, as AI agents eliminate ‘seats’. This is also true in case established SaaS companies offer their own AI tools. The costs of AI tools however are driven by usage, which leads to a tricky question: How to adapt the SaaS business model to AI? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  Horeseman #1: AI reduces th...

This Post could have been a Meeting  The reason for bad meetings is not a lack of knowledge or discipline, but a lack of honesty and excess of tolerance for unproductive behaviour. This loss of productivity results in costs to any organization. Being bold about bad meetings helps to improve productivity. Recently we discussed meeting culture and discipline in one of our team off-sites. Participants unanimously agreed that there's significant potential in our organization to improve the efficiency of meetings. Start and finish on time, define a specific outcome, stay on track throughout the duration of the meeting and others were mentioned as key guardrails for efficiency. We're all familiar with them, yet we often neglect them. Improving meeting quality is one of the most effective ways to ensure people's time and resources are not wasted. Imagine you and I worked for the same organization and I would send you an arbitrary invitation for this topic with the following suffix...

Note to My Future Me If you're steering your organization with just one KPI, you're not managing. You're hoping. Before you read on, a quick warning: What follows might shift your perspective on organizations—maybe even radically. Turn back. Take the blue pill. Keep your beliefs unchanged - about your team, your department, your business unit, your company, your industry. Or keep reading…and risk taking off the frog goggles. And s ee things differently. You’ve been warned :-) Crash Course in Controlling When people hear the word “controlling,” they often think of numbers, spreadsheets, maybe men in gray suits with ties, horn-rimmed glasses, and little sense of humor—or the latest cost-cutting initiative (#travelpolicy). Others associate management and control with something more exciting: a Formula 1 car, the cockpit of a jumbo jet, or a conductor leading an orchestra. All of these associations are valid (although the “no humor in controlling” cliché has been tho...