I have a doctorate in psychology and am a professor of organizational psychology at Furtwangen University, located in Germany’s Black Forest, where I serve as Dean of the Faculty of Business, Design and Media. Today, my work focuses clearly on leadership – especially on how leadership can secure organizational ability to act without burdening people and organizations with unnecessary coordination, control, and bureaucracy.

For many years, HR was a major part of my professional life. Before becoming a professor, I was responsible for global recruiting at SAP. I later spent ten years as a partner at the consulting firm Promerit, now Mercer. Those years shaped my thinking and gave me a close-up view of how organizations really work.

For around 20 years, I have worked at the intersection of science and practice. Along the way, I have helped shape many debates, concepts, and developments in HR and leadership and left a visible mark on practice. In 2024, the German HR journal Personalwirtschaft named me one of the 50 most influential HR thought leaders of the past 50 years.

I am the author of numerous books and articles in academic and professional journals. I have always been a critical and skeptical observer of management fads and supposedly simple answers. I am less interested in what sounds good or happens to be fashionable than in what actually works under real-world conditions. Criticism, to me, is never an end in itself. It should help us understand things better and arrive at better solutions.

In recent years, my work has increasingly centered on leadership. From this work emerged the Regulation Theory of Leadership and the Reflective Leader System, which I developed. The system combines a scientific foundation with concrete components for practical leadership development.

Today, I work primarily as an internationally sought-after speaker and as the developer of the Reflective Leader System. In my keynotes, I bring together scientific rigor, practical experience, and unconventional perspectives. I like to challenge widely held assumptions – but always with one standard in mind: in the end, what we do has to work in practice.