David Nyeste

The World Is Full Of Problems  This is good news. Actually it is great news. Problems are opportunities for growth - if you are able to find -and successfully apply- the solution to a problem that will help someone in any way, you will inevitably create value. If you can find a solution to a big problem (e.g. cure for cancer) you will create an immense value. If you can find a solution to a not so gargantuan, but widespread problem, you will have created tremendous value. But even if you find a solution to a small problem that will benefit a few people, you might still have the benefit of being able to learn something valuable that you can apply later in the solution of greater problems. Don't let yourself be discouraged by the (lack of) magnitude of problems: keep your eyes open and help people even if they do not approach you proactively - this will invite good things to happen to you in the long run. However not everybody in the workforce seems to have the proclivity to solve pr...

Strategic Considerations To me it has always been of paramount importance to have a vision of my model identity. In order to develop towards that ideal my role models would help me strengthen that vision. One effective strategy to find fitting role models is to pick the right environment. Certain organizations will promote specific types of personalities over others. For example in the military there is a tendency to recruit engaging, clearly structured people who have a natural preference to take decisions and action in the face of danger, i.e. under pressure. Thus firm leadership is a skill that is highly valued in military organizations. Other organizations might promote creativity, diversity, individualism and so on. Ask yourself which values you regard as the most precious and then look out for organizations whose values might match best. How To Be A Role Model The good news: setting the bar for being a role model will entirely be up to you. It is your own mind first that you need...

Regardless if you're a young professional or an experienced veteran of the workforce, there will always be areas where you will have plenty of opportunity to earn the respect and the trust of your colleagues and clients. Here are my favorite focus areas for professional excellence that require zero talent whatsoever: 1. Diligence The quality of the work you deliver to your customers on a daily basis is your signature. In the perception of your customers and colleagues the impression of how much you care about delivering value to them is visible in the quality of your output. Hence it is always quality first and quantity second. Always put quality on top of your priorities. That being said this does not mean that you have to get everything right one hundred percent of the time. Often you will have to abide by deadlines and circumstances you can not -fully- influence. Oftentimes 'highest quality' means that you take a caveat of a given deadline into account. As a result a rou...

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility Meetings have become more ubiquitous during the pandemic. I am engaged in a constant competition to manage my own time and schedule against various interests. Therefore I regularly spend a reasonable amount of time in order to contemplate on the best ways to invest my own and sometimes also my colleagues' time. The best thing I could come up with so far are a few principles that serve as checks and balances against wasting time. But before elaborating on those principles, let me give you a visceral truth about the use of your own and other people's times in a business context: "If you are conducting a one-hour meeting at your company, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room. If there are twenty people in the room, your presentation is now the equivalent of a twenty-hour investment. It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that you do not waste the hour..." [Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy] The Dem...

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...

Just A Feeling Despite all the drawbacks caused by the pandemic I have to admit that ever since the kids were born I have been feeling more happy in general. To set the stakes even higher, I have already been pretty damned happy ever since I met my wife several years earlier. Maybe it is because the kids fill me with hope that all is good and is steadily improving. Also they give a whole new purpose to everything in my life. I have only really had a few significant stretches where I felt so beaten down or lethargic, that I had issues to motivate myself. There were only three significant times I was struggling with my decisions and had serious doubts that I made the right choices.  Freaking Out In The Barracks The first time was in 1998, when I signed a contract as a contract soldier for 12 years. During my first couple of days with the military the magnitude of my decision sank with the utmost brutality. It totally freaked me out. I spent the first night in some spartan barracks in...

Writing Helps Clarify Your Thinking I started this blog in 2010. It was without any specific agenda or strategy. (Yeah, I used to do that :-) In my first post you can read about my humbling experience at the Ironman Spain in Lanzarote. I still like that article because that specific experience has forever changed the way I compete. If I would not have written that article, I might never have realized in all clarity why I love to compete. According to the statistics it has some hundred views. Judging merely by the lack of public interest one might suggest I should never have written that article. I am convinced that is a wrong conclusion.  Clarity of mind is invaluable. Up until a few weeks ago I was not seriously committed to blogging. It was a sporadic pastime I used to engage in whenever I felt like sharing something important or even trivial. It has been almost one year since I started writing on a daily basis. For the longest time I only wrote for myself in order to clear my th...

Digital Minimalism Is Overrated Over the past years I have strived towards a more self determined digital and professional identity. Minimalism is a huge and timeless topic. Social media, video and streaming platforms, books and magazines are filled with digital and material minimalism content. It seems the present value maximizers (e.g. #yolo) are currently losing ground in the battle for attention against the end value maximizers (e.g. #firemovement). However I am convinced a focus on minimalism only misses an important point: the road to happiness in modern day's fast paced communication cycles is not a question of principle, but a question of the right balance. Hence the answer to the question of the right digital strategy, regardless whether private or professional, can not be answered by a one time decision to embrace a monk like minimalism. Rather you should continually reevaluate your options, necessities and focus on balancing your digital habits. Why I Turned Off All Push...

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...

Popular work ethic in consulting  has aspects of self exploitation. Most consultants I met had a tendency to stretch the definition of 'fit for work' to its limits. I remember an assignment a few years back where I took the 6am flight on Monday and flew to the next client in the middle of the week or home at the end of it. The problem was that at one point during the winter I caught a really nasty flu that would not go away for several weeks. At its peak it was so bad, my ears would pop on the Monday flight and I would only be able to hear everything in a damp, silent mode. It always took a few days until my hearing was back to normal again, and guess what: that was usually just the time I would take the flight back - back to square one. Another issue was that this situation occurred a few weeks before a major go live of our client and the entire project team was on fire pretty much 24/7. After a successful go live and the first week of hypercare, when the excitement of any maj...

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.", Mark Twain The Mindset Feedback is all about your Kaizen and not anyone or anything else. It starts with you asking for it and it perpetuates with you extracting value out of it and eventually adapting your behaviour accordingly. However it doesn't end there. Imagine the impression of junior staff when asked for their feedback on senior staff! You have to be a fan of 360-feedback. Think in value added instead of hierarchy and rank.  Don't expect feedback from others as a given and don't try to force feedback on anyone without having been asked for it. Not all people like to give feedback, let alone receive it. Any form of feedback requires a strong urge towards improvement as well as an open mind. Without either of those any feedback will be rendered futile. In order to progress in life and to improve professionally the assessments and perspectives of others can not be overvalued. Proactively asking for ...

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...

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 ...

Meetings are the Mirror of the Soul of an Organization  The way meetings are held in a company tells a lot about the corporation's culture and its values. Most large or medium sized companies have some kind of formal values they are committed to and a mission statement, that clarifies the purpose of the organization. However it is in everyday work life only that one will truly experience how much an organization and its members live up to these values and how purposeful they act upon their vision and mission on a daily basis. When I set up and invite to meetings, I like to provide the participants with three basic elements in advance: 1. The purpose of the meeting (Why are we meeting? Why are you invited?) 2. The outcome and participants' expected input (What will be different after the meeting? What is expected/required that you bring to the table?) 3. Some basic agenda, if applicable. (Plan of time and topics) Though most do, not all my meetings have a formal agenda. That is...

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...

God, Grant  Me This is a meme -read the following headers- I see very often these days. I have to remind myself of its validity from time to time. Even though I am not a religious guy, I believe there's a higher force that is present in all matter and in all life. Thus I am going to refer to this higher force as 'God', even though I don't think there is some devine entity that steers the fate of all things and living creatures. Alright, let's not get too philosophical here. Let's start with a lesson I've learned in my early years and that I like to challenge every once in a while: The Strength  to Accept the Things I Cannot Change People usually learn this lesson the hard way in school. I gained the impression -actually still valid to this day- that the German school system is majorly flawed in its concept, that it is the mission of education to make young people memorize knowledge instead of understanding concepts. I still have those in/famous rhetorical qu...