David Nyeste

The Power of Inclusion My first post on this blog was in German. At the time it was a spontaneous idea to share a unique experience that I knew would mark a significant moment in my life. I shared it foremost with my friends and the members of my sports club. Later I started to write posts in English just to test how it feels. As a German native speaker I only speak English as a second language, so why would I write in English? A simple and obvious explanation is that English is spoken by a lot more people than German. I do not intend this blog exclusively for a German speaking audience. In order to grant access to this content for as many people as possible is of course a very obvious, however not my most important reason. More Eloquence is More Potential for Clutter During my professional experience on multiple international projects and assignments I have realized that English native speakers can sometimes fall into a squabble where they talk a lot but say very little. Especially Am...

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...

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...

The Image of Leadership Whenever I think of the vital aspects of leadership I think of a cartoon sheep with a red tie: the Leadersheep (google it!). Words like values, vision, mission, purpose and all those ingredients flare up in my mind. I think of principles, role models, charismatic people and of Barack Obama. In fact 'What would Obama do?' is a question I sometimes ask myself - first off he would start a sentence and then in the middle pause for a minute. Only when we have to put leadership into action do we realize the first hurdle: communication. For instance change management, admittedly one of the more challenging fields of leadership, is virtually all about the right communication strategy. Mindset of an Agile Leader To be an agile leader you have to be prepared to improve on a daily basis. Take every opportunity and everyone you encounter - every client, colleague, mentor, memo, every email, every pitch, every conversation, status meeting, project kick-off, and so on...

How NOT To Write Emails Work without email is hardly imaginable these days. Emails have become so ubiquitous that sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself: is this still communication or is this art? I am pretty sure, what I received today was the latter. To give you the necessary context, here's how it went: Sender wrote an email to multiple TO-recipients, of which I had the privilege to be one. Subject: FWD:FWD:FWD: "<<lots of acronyms none of which I was familiar with>> contract" Content: "Hello, this with supplements of <<more cryptic acronyms>> <<27 lines of signature>>" Attachment: <<acronyms>>.xlsx Somewhere not too deep in my mind I have three simple drawers for emails:  1. do now,  2. delegate,  3. art.  Upon first scan the lights of the art-drawer immediately started to blink. But then I hesitated. I doubted. I questioned. I contemplated:"Nah! That's too easy. Let's do this old...

Understand Your Customer's Desire A generally underrated part of successful negotiations is knowing your potential customer's desire. You've clarified your own desires in the previous step. Now it is equally important to find out what your customer longs for. There is a big difference between what your customer 'needs' and what your customer 'desires'. Desire is more powerful. Appealing to a need will satisfy your customer. Appealing to a desire will excite and delight your customer. Always keep in mind: Desire is the fabric of which dreams are made of. When Apple marketed its first iPods, how did they do it?  Did they use the standard 'Super-awesome MP3-player'-pitch of their competitors? Of course not.  They came up with something simple and brilliant: They invented the slogan '1000 songs in your pocket'. BAM! The rest is history. Understanding your customer's desire makes all the difference. Answering the question, what desire you inte...

Know Thyself (Sokrates) Breaking news: You're in a marathon, not a sprint. Therefore the first step towards successful salary negotiations is a clarification process: you need to be very clear on your desires. Which values are important to you? How do these translate into your expectations on your potential occupation? Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years from now? Ask yourself this first: What do you really really want from life and who do you want to be? And by 'want', I mean the thing you are burning for so much, that you are willing to make sacrifices for it. Do you want to learn and become an expert in a specific field? Do you prefer to work in a dynamic and rapidly changing or in a well predictable environment? Do you rather want to work with a certain type of people e.g.  with creative, analytical or highly energetic colleagues? Do you prefer to work  in a certain environment, e.g. in an international, globally distributed team? Bonus task:  Also be very cl...

The Default State of Society The other day I read a post on my company's intranet that stuck with me and made me think. I'll try to give it in my own words: A teacher entered the class room and started to write equations on the board. 1x9 = 9 2x9=18 3x9=27 The class watched and there was only the usual murmur while the teacher proceeded. 4x9=36 5x9=45 6x9=54 7x9=63 8x9=72 9x9=81 10x9=91 On finishing the teacher turned to the class and noticed some murmurs and giggles. He paused for a moment and the giggles increased. Some pupils started to laugh and after a while others joined in until a majority of pupils found amusement in the teacher's mistake and joined the laughter. After a while, when the laughter dampened down, the teacher said: "I made this mistake on purpose in order to demonstrate a point. I wrote ten equations on the board, of which nine were absolutely correct. Most of you however decided to focus on the one equation that was false. None of you gave me any ...

DISCLAIMER I am not making this public to brag or to make anyone feel bad or jealous. Negotiating my salary is just one of many habits I applied over the past decade regularly, so I acquired some experience in what worked and what didn't. Depending on the context, this experience may or may not benefit others. I regard the consequential increase of my salary rather a side effect of my actual overarching self improvement strategy, than the result of merely smart ninja-negotiation tactics. My foremost desire was -and still is- to become the best possible version of myself. But that itself is a topic for another post.  In this series of posts I will share some details of my salary, its development over time and some further specifics that I hold necessary to demonstrate my point. So in case you should feel offended, jealous or bad in any way about gaining insight on that kind of information, this is your opportunity to exit this post here and now and to skip to the next one right away...

Start with a purpose Any business related document should start with a purpose. Unless the purpose of the document is not entirely, 100% clear, don't put any effort into the creation process. The typical archetypes of purposes of most business documents can be summarized into three categories: 1. create deeper insight into a subject matter, 2. trigger some decision, 3. trigger some action. Once you are clear on the purpose part, you're free to start into the creation process. Structure your creation process There are certainly myriads of ways and methodologies to create business documents. Chances are you will develop your own approach along with your own style and flavour to create business related documents eventually, once you have sufficient experience. However, as long as you have not created a ton of great ones, a standard framework is a great way to start off and to acquire some practice. In my career I have created more than more than 10.000 slides and hundreds of pro...