David Nyeste

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...

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...