David Nyeste

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...

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...

To be able to lead others, first you need to lead yourself  When my 12 years contract as an officer in the German armed forces came to an end, I left the Bundeswehr as an Air Foce Captain with mixed feelings. On one hand I felt happy for the perspective to start something new. My learning curve had dampened during the final period of my 12 years time contract with the armed forces and I was left with the impression that my constant challenging of the status quo often times annoyed or plainly outraged some of my colleagues and superiors alike. During my final months in office I recruited my successor and convinced him to take my job. Few weeks later he started and we immediately started the transition process in which I shared my knowledge, introduced him to my contacts, familiarized him with everything of importance so he would gradually take more and more responsibility to fill the new role. As my work required me to collaborate (remotely) with multiple experts all across Germany...