Yes, a book list!

As people coming back to me asking for reading recommendations, I thought it's time to create a book list here. I will update this list time by time as we go along. This list is just the start. More to come!

This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design and The Invincible Company by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

These books are a mandatory series of books for everybody who wants to innovate, create value for their company and their customers, and to see magnificent conceptual thinking in practice. If you only buy three books, then I’d recommend these.

My big Aha-Moment: Companies need to be able to manage both - their exploit and explore portfolio at the same time! Become great at this, and you will become invincible.

Pirates in the Navi by Tendayi Viki and Holger Nils Pohl

How to transform your organization into an innovation machine by being an authentic...

Just recently, during one of my Daily Clarity Sessions”, 32 participants and I were the victims of a so-called Zoombomb. Some random guy joined the meeting and spammed porn videos via screen sharing to all of us until I was able to shut down the meeting. I wasn't even aware of this phenomenon before. It was disgusting, scary, and confusing for me to witness this event in my virtual meeting.

Of course, I tried to find out what happened, and I learned that this is a real thing. It is not only a problem for Zoom, which is my (still) my trusted virtual meeting provider, but as well for all other partly open providers like, for example, Google Hangout.

I wanted to turn what I learned about how I can keep my virtual sessions safe into this blog post to share it with you. Please share this one with people you know or write it in your own words or copy and paste it...but we need to educate as many people as possible about this topic. I can't imagine how it would have been being...

In this last part of the series about “What business can learn from comic book creation,” I will write about going for the long run with a focus on how you manage your team.

In the first two parts, I started writing about my experiences while working on the comic book Biz4Kids with my team and Alex Osterwalder. Mastering your craft and knowing your customers are two game-changing elements you want to consider in everything you do. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them. They are not mandatory to read this article, though.

If I learned one crucial thing throughout the Biz4Kids first comic book project, it is this: “Value your team. Take care of your peers, and go for the long run.”

A project with many stakeholders and decent team size is comparable to a season in any sports. It doesn’t help you win the championship if you have a great start but fail to keep the energy up until the very end.

I encountered multiple situations...

This series is about my insights from our comic book project “Biz4Kids” and what we can learn from this for our business career.

In the first part of the series, I wrote about why you need to master your craft to succeed. Now I’m trying to enlighten the idea of really knowing your customer.

A customer is not always someone who buys from us. A customer might be someone who just uses what we do, and somebody else bought it for him. A customer might be someone who is an influencer for us and therefore, could spread our word. And a customer is, of course, the one who buys our products.
In the case of our comic book project, we have customers who buy the comic book – most likely parents or teachers. And we have customers who will be users – the kids who will read and enjoy the comic.

The unique thing about our paying customers is that to this point, they are all from Kickstarter. After running a very successful campaign with 131%...

Creating a new, innovative business model or even a new service or a better product or a more efficient business process can be very challenging. We can lose ourselves in the treadmill of the corporate world or the distractions of the entrepreneurial world. This is due to existing working cultures as well as to the nature of these projects. And this nature is best described with “complex and long-running”.

Since November 2017 – that’s a whopping 19 months now – we’re working on a business comic for kids called “Biz4Kids” to change the way we teach our kids entrepreneurial and creative thinking on a global scale. And even as we’re not finished yet, we are very close to the finishing line now. I thought this might be an excellent time to see how you can benefit from what we learned over the 19 months.

In this first part of the series, I will write about “Mastering your craft.” Why is it so important to learn on the job...

When it comes to workshops and meetings as such, I prefer to use as many interactive media as possible - especially when I want to share something with the other participants. There is nothing more boring than the same style of presentation all day long.

For flexibility and interactivity, I’ve found the transparent stattys from www.stattys.com my magic weapon. They stick to any surface without glue and are therefore super cool for moving them around without lifting them from the ground.

(Disclaimer: I helped Mikko, the founder of stattys ages ago to get market ready with his products, understand the value proposition of stattys and build his entire brand. I have no stake in the company beyond good friendship and soon some of my products in his store)

I’ve captured a video of me making a case for how to use the transparent stattys on a flipchart in one of my training. Go check it out here. Be aware it’s in German with English subtitles. Make sure to activate...

Everybody is making a buzz around habits, consistency and creative production, it seems. The secret source is yet hidden in the dust and still waits for its discovery.

After creating a new Visual Library throughout the last two months, I figured, that I learned some things about ingredients of the magic source that are worthwhile sharing with you.
I learned that it needs more than just drawing and that technology can be a real enabler. Preparation seemed to be a key ingredient, but there seems to be no recipe nor good rules.

More than drawing 

You might think that creating a Visual Library that contains drawings needs to be drawn. That‘s it. And that‘s true. And it‘s wrong.
The creative process needed more from me than just my drawing skills. 
After finishing the drawings, I needed my team to complete the drawings for delivery. They added white fillings to recent transparent pieces to make the PNGs work better in presentations....

It seems to be a given that pictures have a better recognition rate than written words. With ~75% of our cognition system dedicated to vision, this is not hard to understand.
This phenomenon has a name – the “Picture Superior Effect.”
That’s important especially when we think about how we work and present our work to other people.

Even more interesting is the outcome of a scientific study from 2016, “The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall” by Jeffrey D. Wammes, Melissa E. Meade, and Myra A. Fernandes.

The drawing effect

They proved that if you draw something you remember it better – even under time pressure. The researchers call this the "Drawing Effect." They were able to prove, that drawing enhances the memory effect as well for people who consider themselves as not being able to draw. 

Furthermore, they found, that even when it takes a bit longer to draw something and...

Recently Chuck Frey from the Mind Mapping Software Blog interviewed me on my thoughts around visual clarity. Head over to his blog to read the full interview.
And follow Chuck on Twitter!

I just wanted to add my favorite questions here for you to read directly. :)

Chuck: Why is clarity so rare in business today? What's changed?

Holger: As we progress into a more and more developed world – meaning technology, management theories, methodologies, and tools – live gets complex and so does business. The burden of knowing everything, seeing everything and being able to find every information that's available adds complexity to every company. Especially technologies, may they be for communications or production or whatever, are making it worse. Of course, they help us progress, but they make it more complicated to speak about things. Technology hinders us from understanding everything in detail. And that way clarity gets rare. A second argument could be, that things...