It´s not that easy to describe myself with just one word, because I´m constantly wearing so many different hats and my head is always full of different ideas, so that I sometimes struggle with focusing on whats really important. But when I look back,  there definitely is one constant in my life: Change. The urge to question the status quo. To let go what used to work and boldly try out new ways of doing things. To live a life based on my own terms. Change and transformation are the read thread that have always accompanied me through the various phases of my own development and more than once have been the reason that my life was heavily shaken and turned upside down from one moment to the other.

During my civil service – for the first time ever – the work with mentally and physically disabled children showed me that there is more to life than just the same old faster-harder-stronger. And I discovered one of my greatest strength: Empathy. At the age of twenty, I left my hometown Lübeck to study economics and marketing at the universities of Greifswald, Mannheim and Hamburg. But I wasn´t spending much time in the lecture hall, because I had so many awesome jobs. I worked as an interpreter for a Texan construction company, drove with Nigerian businessmen through rural northern Germany to buy armoured sedans, was a business development manager for a software company and wrote business plans for StartUps in the age of the New Economy (yes, I´m that old).

Despite all that I chose – driven by my fascination for sales and consumer behaviour – a pretty conservative career in retail. At the age of twenty seven, I started as the youngest store manager for Germany´s largest departement store chain Karstadt, and for the next seven years I was responsible for ten different locations all over the country, lead thousands of employees and managed sales figures in the three digit million range. But while my career just began to kick off, the organization driftet into a huge crisis, so that – together with my teams – I had to fight various internal and external changes on a daily basis (think: VUCA). Locations, Strategies and every single job could me gone from one day to the next, so uncertain was the permanent reorganization. As a leader, I had to shut down department stores. lay of lots of good people, but was also able to plan and execute future oriented projects.

When I was thirty three, I was in charge of one of the largest department stores of the country, and if you would have seen me from the outside, you probably would have said: “He´s made it!” But on the inside I was becoming more and more frustrated, so I gladly said yes, when I was offered a contract by the Swedish furniture company IKEA. During my time in the organization, I got to know the Scandinavian way of leadership as well as the other side of change – the innovative, active and future oriented one.