Index

Thoughts

Writing on leadership, organisations, strategy, and the work of building teams that last.

Much of this thinking now lives in a book: Unresolved, on how complex organisations move, stall, and cost the people who lead them. More

01Meetings Are the MediumAndy Grove called meetings the medium of managerial work. How to design them for decisions, what breaks them, and when to cancel one. 02OKRs Are Not MagicOKRs fail when organisations overcomplicate them. A simple version that works, the common traps, and what I learned when mine failed.
03Onboarding Is Leadership in Its Purest FormOver four leadership roles I have refined a nine-part onboarding system. The first days decide trust and momentum, so I treat them as leadership work. 04The Calibration GapProjects derail when people assume alignment before it exists. Four conversation habits close that gap: questions, mirroring, check-ins, and reframing. 05Feedback That LandsMy open-source feedback training in full: why receiving feedback is hard, ground rules for giving it, a simple structure, examples, and a team exercise. 06Why Transformation Fails Before It StartsMost digital transformations fail, and rarely because of the technology. They fail on people, focus, and pace, and that is where to start. 07A Critical Review of Design ThinkingDesign thinking is a sound way to understand a problem, and it is oversold. What it does well, where it breaks down, and what it leaves out.
08–12

Tools for teams

08The Stinky Fish: Making the Unspeakable SpeakableTeams know what is wrong long before anyone says it. The Stinky Fish brings it out, and my adapted version sorts concerns first so the group can act. 09Working Agreements: How Teams Build the Rules They Actually FollowA working agreement is the set of rules a team writes for itself. What it gives a team, how to build one, and what keeps it alive. 10Feedback at Five LevelsMost feedback training teaches you how to give it. This is how to receive it: nine common mistakes, five levels of reaction, and three choices. 11Remote Retrospective CanvasI made a canvas for remote retrospectives. The team fills it in over a few days, and a 40-minute call turns the input into at most four owned actions. 12Team Check-Ins and Check-OutsOne question per person at the start and end of a session. Why this small ritual works, what it did for my teams, and the questions I would start with.

Niklaus GerberDigital & Platform Executive

Twenty years making digital stick in organisations not built for it.

Vice President Digital at Vorwerk Home, responsible for product, platform, and e-commerce across Europe. Before that, I founded the product function at NZZ.

My work sits where digital ambition meets legacy platforms, many stakeholders, and teams that need a reason to change. At NZZ, we shipped AI audio in 2018, among the first publishers anywhere to do so.

Playground

I build tools when the thinking needs a shape. Lately that means hands-on work with agentic AI. Most start as a fix for my own team and then find a wider audience. Each one tests an idea before I put more weight on it.