David Nyeste

Be Brilliant Subject matter expertise has its perks. Being an expert on any field requires deep learning as well as deliberate practice over years and years. The more professional experience you gain the more you'll swap a minimum principle mindset ('What do I need to do to achieve XY?') for a maximum principle ('How much can I possibly achieve with my available resources?'). When I started as a consultant I had a very basic and fragmented knowledge in most of the technical aspects in my subject matter. At the time I was already a certified and experienced supply chain management expert with some merits. However, as the branch I had worked in (military and defence) neither used the latest technology nor had a business model that promoted short development or change cycles in leadership or management, I did not feel 100% competitive. Therefore I faced some serious challenges when I started my career in the private sector.  At the time when I joined a consulting compa...

Be Prepared To Pay The Price Excellence comes at a cost. In my years as a teenage swimmer I learned about the effects of deliberate practice and the possibilities to tap into my own potential to a depth that I would never have thought possible. Johnny Weismueller is remembered for two accomplishments: First for playing the legendary Tarzan figure on screen as an actor and second for being the first human to swim the 100m freestyle in less than 60 seconds. At the time the 60 seconds mark was an incredible feat to accomplish. These days anyone can break the minute mark. We know what it takes and we know how to train for it. Nevertheless, only few people actually break the minute mark. The reason is that only few people are willing to pay the price (approximately 2-4 years of deliberate swim training as a grown up). Let's face it: (Luckily) there is no shortcut to excellence - no cheating yourself to brilliance and mastery. You have to be prepared to pay a price in time, sweat and blo...

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...

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...

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 ...

Murphy's Law Working Last week I had a small IT hick-up and had to reset my computer. While I was staring at the progress bars and only occasionally hit 'ENTER' for the downloads and installations to proceed, I contemplated that besides all the configuration that needed to be done again to become productive (Outlook, Powerpoint, file structures, software installations, etc.), I would have to recreate some of the work I had lost because it had not been backed up yet - no lives in danger sure; only a few hours of my lifetime wasted. Other than that all incoming work would also queue up during the downtime until my PC would be up and running again. So much for the grim outlook of the potential devaluation of my work time. Instead of banging my head into a wall, I made a different plan: I focused on getting as much done as possible in the meantime.  Power of Pen and Paper Luckily I always have pen and paper with me, mostly because I like to scribble. There was a time when I tho...