Category: General

Sometimes I get the question: Why do you call yourself “The Wolf of Berlin“? Quite frankly, when I was looking for a branding, The Wolf of Berlin was the natural one for me to pick. I selected it without a lot of thinking. My first name is Wolfgang and I live in Berlin, the capital […]

As a coach you often meet clients who are totally frustrated claiming: “I have tried everything but nothing worked to solve my problem“. Of course you have seen a lot of similar cases and you are tempted to make suggestions. You might simply care about this person and hate to see him/her in disarray or […]

I was educated as a mathematician and worked in IT for my entire business life. I grew up in a binary world driven by logic and algorithms. No wonder that I thought that what made me a human being was my brain and that everything else was just a vehicle to help me navigate and […]

During my career of 40+ years I kept wondering what having real power actually means. In hierarchical organizations power seems to be associated to your position on the org chart. The higher up you are, the more power you are supposed to have. I have seen managers who took pride in the fact that getting […]

The idea that we can actually change another person is one of the biggest misunderstandings in any relationship. It is driven by our expectation that a person has to behave in a certain way. In most cases we do not like the effect that the current behavior has on us. If that behavior is totally […]

A some time ago someone asked me: if you look back a couple of years, which insights do you wish you would have had then as business leader and a coach? This post is the first one in a series where I am sharing some examples. When I was young, the entire educational system in […]

There actually is a so-called Primary Question that we ask ourselves many times each day, whenever we assess a situation. This primary question is connected to our beliefs and as such it can have empowering or disempowering influence on us. Examples of disempowering primary questions are: Why am I not good enough? Why doesn’t everybody […]

In his paper “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team“, Patrick Lencioni describes the absence of 5 basics characteristics of a team making it dysfunctional.  I’d like to give it a more positive twist and look at it as 5 powers that are critical for a team to be cohesive and ultimately successful. POWER #1: TRUST […]

“If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”. This is probably the most quoted statement from this documentary which provides incredible insights from former executives of the social media tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, YouTube etc. but it is a bit more sophisticated: “The product is the gradual, slight, […]

With the European Football Championship coming to a close on Sunday, I was again and again reminded of what we can learn in leadership by watching football games. STATE IS EVERYTHINGIf we define state as our physiology, what we are focused on, what meaning we are giving to things and what we are saying to ourselves,  you come […]