The 14 Principles Behind the Manifesto

The six theses of the Manifesto for Humane Leadership are deliberately open. They are a broad frame that gives a rough direction, and an invitation to reflect on leadership in general and on your own leadership style in particular. As with the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”, however, more concrete and actionable principles underlie the theses.

People are at the Center

Companies are more than places of value creation and profit maximization. Profit is not an end in itself. It is to companies what air is to humans: we breathe to survive, but a fulfilled life is about more than breathing.1 Profit is a necessary condition for the organization’s continued existence and the proof that it satisfies an important customer need, as Peter Drucker notes: “Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity.”2

Economic success results from developing human potential. “Business means working for each other. People are the purpose,” Götz W. Werner unequivocally states in his autobiography.3 People are not just means and resources but the heart of economic activity. Fully developing people’s abilities within the organization is the decisive competitive factor. The company is therefore what Bodo Janssen aptly calls a “workshop for a flourishing life,”4 a phrase he takes from the Regula Benedicti (4.78):5

However, the workshop in which we are to carefully realize all this is the monastery and the permanence within our community.

This sentence ends the fourth chapter of the Regula Benedicti, which St. Benedict of Nursia wrote around 540 to regulate life in the monastery he founded at Monte Cassino. Ever since, the rule has formed the basis of the Benedictine order. Janssen stayed in various Benedictine monasteries, and the Regula Benedicti inspired and guided him in transforming his Upstalsboom hotel chain into a workshop for a flourishing life.

The term workshop raises the question of which instruments are used there. Benedict answers it in the same fourth chapter with 73 “instruments of good works.” These instruments are more like good habits and answer the question: “What can I do every day to ensure that my life is successful, that I enjoy my time with my work and the people around me?”6

Even 1500 years ago, the principle of eye level was central to Benedict. In the feudal order of the early Middle Ages it was at least as radical as it would be today in the hierarchical culture of our organizations. Our actions are often guided by the ego-oriented question, “What do I gain from the existence of others and the community?” Benedict asked the opposite: “What does the community gain from my existence?” Such a community resembles a network far more than a hierarchy, and the network lives from individual contributions. In the words of the Regula Benedicti (72.7): “Let no one look to their own interests, but rather to the interests of others.”7

Start With Self-Care

Anyone responsible for others must first manage their own physical and mental resources responsibly. If you sacrifice yourself and constantly overtax yourself, you will overtax the organization and the people entrusted to you. The result is a culture of hysterical busyness in which work becomes a vain end in itself.

We all know such a (predominantly male) colleague or boss: he is always the first to arrive and the last to leave. He doesn’t get tired, and he ignores illness. Four hours of sleep must do; there is so much to do, and everywhere his skills are needed. He would like to go on vacation, but it just doesn’t work without him. That’s why he is always available. His commitment to the company knows no bounds. His hard work is legendary and the driving force behind his rapid rise.

The history of humankind is full of heroes. We love heroic stories. That’s why we admire firefighters who risk their lives to put out fires and rescue people. We pay far less attention to the countless fire safety officers who calmly and patiently prevent fires every day and thus save more people. Without smoke and danger to life, there is no heroism. Prevention is not very heroic.

Some situations do require total and sometimes heroic commitment. But firefighters work like this only when deployed, which is the exception. Most of their time they spend waiting, preparing themselves and their equipment, learning, and practicing. That is a good thing, because being constantly on duty would lead to life-threatening mistakes.

Back to our “hero.” He sacrifices himself for his organization, work, career, and status, not just in an emergency but always and on principle. This is unhealthy, but adults remain free to decide what risks they take in life. Beyond the personal sacrifice and the risk to health, the question remains whether this heroic commitment benefits the organization and deserves admiration and promotion.

Hopefully, his efforts achieve and move a lot. Let’s assume in his favor that our hero has superhuman abilities and still does an excellent job on long days with little sleep. Even under this very benevolent assumption, another severe problem remains: the behavior of such a boss shapes the culture. Here it breeds an unhealthy cult of presence and performance. Ambitious employees will try to outdo him, because in such a culture diligence and unconditional commitment are essential for recognition and promotion.

In the long run, no one will be satisfied or thrive in such an excessive performance culture, not even our hero. Pressure, fear, guilt, and bitterness will characterize the atmosphere, as Anselm Grün points out:8

Anyone who takes responsibility for others must also be responsible with their own resources. If they constantly overtax themselves, they will not help the community. Because they will then demand more from the community than it can provide. If I spend myself on others, I unconsciously will make demands on them, for example, that they should thank me for it or show the same level of commitment. If the community does not fulfill these expectations, I become bitter. My work will then become a constant reproach to the community and cause feelings of guilt in my coworkers.

Leadership begins with self-care. Anselm Grün rightly demands that those who take responsibility for others deal responsibly with their own capacity. Others will imitate a leader who is at peace with himself and goes about his work with serenity and composure, and so create a serene and safe atmosphere.

Unleashing Potential, Building Bridges

Strengthen Strengths

Leadership aims to empower people, to let them grow instead of keeping them down. It means strengthening strengths and making individual weaknesses irrelevant.

Everyone is a genius. But if we judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid. This saying is often attributed to Albert Einstein. There is no evidence for the attribution, but it fits Einstein’s life perfectly. He began to speak at the age of three, and although he was not bad at school, especially in the natural sciences, he was no child prodigy either. His strengths remained undiscovered for a long time. When his groundbreaking first publications appeared in his Annus Mirabilis of 1905, he was an assistant examiner at the Swiss Patent Office. That position was already a success: after all his applications for assistant positions at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) and other universities were rejected, he had worked as a tutor.

In his book “The Effective Executive,” Peter Drucker devotes an entire chapter to making strengths productive.9 His basic assumption is that everyone has some individual strengths–and many weaknesses. So far, so painfully familiar from our daily encounters. The essential question is how to deal with the weaknesses. It starts with admitting that they are unavoidable, as Drucker clearly states:10

The idea that there are “well-rounded” people, people who have only strengths and no weaknesses (…) is a prescription for mediocrity, if not for incompetence. Strong people always have strong weaknesses too.

Yet since our early school days we have been trained to focus on our shortcomings. In job interviews, we are asked about our greatest weaknesses. In every annual appraisal, we discuss our areas for improvement, all to achieve the most well-rounded profile of skills possible. According to Drucker, this almost inevitably leaves our strengths to atrophy and go unused while we develop our weaknesses to mediocrity at best. The result is a well-rounded profile with no great depths–and no great heights. His advice is therefore:11

To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.

The organization’s optimal performance requires balancing individual weaknesses, but not one by one, as a private, local optimum. To stay with Drucker’s favorite image of the orchestra (see Section “Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”): no one would tell the tuba player that he plays the violin poorly and should work on it next year.

Leadership begins with leading yourself, i.e., with knowing and accepting yourself with your strengths and weaknesses. It means remaining true to yourself without constantly emulating other people or an abstract, well-rounded ideal. In the age of social media, this is a much greater challenge than in Drucker’s day. All the more reason to “be yourself; everybody else is already taken,” as Oscar Wilde quipped.

Recognizing your strengths and weaknesses does not come naturally to anyone; it results from systematic reflection. Effective managers set goals for themselves as they do for their business and regularly review their performance. Drucker recommends a simple but effective method for systematically recognizing your strengths, the so-called feedback analysis: “Whenever one makes a key decision and whenever one takes a key action, one writes down what one expects will happen. And nine months or twelve months later, one then feeds back from results to expectations.”12

After a few such feedback loops, a clear picture emerges of your strengths and of the thought and behavioral patterns that stand in the way of developing and applying them fully. From this analysis, Drucker derives five actions: first, focus on and consciously use your strengths; second, consistently build on them; third, reduce or eliminate behaviors and habits that run counter to applying your strengths effectively; fourth, stop doing things you are not good at; and fifth, waste as little effort as possible on remaining weaknesses.13

Leadership Means Relationship

Families today are already more advanced than many organizations. Most parents now reject the strictly authoritarian, fear-based upbringing that was common a few generations ago. Some authors tirelessly uphold discipline and obedience, but educational scientists are pretty unanimous about the harmfulness of this backward-looking “black pedagogy.”

Instead, the Danish family therapist Jesper Juul holds that “parenting means relationship.” Relationships in the family need a certain quality for this, for which Juul coined the term “equal dignity”:14

Equal dignity means both “of equal value” (as a person) and “with the same respect” for the personal dignity and integrity of the partner. In a relationship of equal dignity, both partners’ wishes, views, and needs are taken equally seriously.

Equal dignity is not only about equal rights and obligations. It means recognizing the individuality and subjective needs and wishes of the other members of the community and granting them the same dignity, instead of degrading them to mere objects. In contrast to laissez-faire or democratic approaches, the task of leadership remains with the parents, but with the aim of empowering the children.

Not only parenting but leadership in general means relationship. Leadership always happens in and through relationships between people. We should therefore pay close attention to the quality of our relationships and shape them with equal dignity, not fear. The ultimate goal is again empowerment and self-leadership–in the words of Götz W. Werner: “First and foremost, leadership means raising awareness with the aim of bringing as many employees as possible into an entrepreneurial mindset.”15

For Father Anselm Grün, humility is the most crucial virtue in dealing with people. Humility is not about making oneself small but about having the courage to face one’s imperfect humanity: “Those who know about their abysses will never put themselves above others.”16 Those who lead with humility treat people with reverence and kindness.

The good word, in the sense of the letter to the Ephesians, is decisive for this encounter in humility: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” (Eph 4:29)17 Relationships of equal dignity are characterized by care, respect, and interest. In them, people grow and flourish; fear does not weigh them down but care builds them up. The good word awakens life–in the individual and in the network of equal-dignity relationships that forms the organization. Leadership, therefore, means praise, as Anselm Grün describes:18

Anyone who leads others must, above all, master the art of praise. Praise means speaking well of a person (benedicere) and saying good things about them and to them. Those who speak to the good in people also bring it out in them. With that, one motivates people more than through criticism and control.

Leading Like a Gardener

Context Not Control

What does Netflix have in common with a nuclear submarine? At first glance the two could not be more different, yet their extraordinary management cultures are more alike than one might think. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, prides himself on making as few decisions as possible, preferably none at all for an entire quarter.19 So does Captain David Marquet, who on the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe decided to stop giving orders. Both rely on context rather than control, and both are incredibly successful.

Marquet spent over a year preparing for his new role as captain of the USS Olympia. He learned every detail of this particular nuclear submarine. Everything went as planned until he had to take command of the USS Santa Fe at short notice. The two boats belong to the same class of nuclear-powered fast attack submarines (Los Angeles-class), but the Santa Fe was a much newer type, and Marquet knew relatively little about it. Too little, as it soon turned out.

During an exercise in his first month in command, Marquet recognized the danger of a team trained to obey combined with a boss of limited knowledge. The exercise simulated the failure of the main reactor. While the reactor was being repaired, the Santa Fe had to maneuver with a battery-powered electric propulsion motor. To challenge the crew and increase the pressure, Marquet gave his officer of the deck the command, “Two-thirds ahead!” The officer immediately passed the order on to the helmsman and … nothing happened!

Marquet confronted the helmsman, who explained dutifully, “Sir, we don’t have two-thirds here.” Everyone else on board knew that, too. The officer of the deck knew it in particular, but he passed the order on without hesitation because he was trained to obey. It was a classic HIPPO moment: “Highest-paid person’s opinion.” It was also a moment for Marquet to question himself. He realized that, with his limited knowledge and experience, he was a dangerous bottleneck in the organization. And he saw the potential lying dormant in his team’s collective experience, expertise, intelligence, and creativity.

So he decided to stop giving orders. Except for using the nuclear missiles, he let his crew make their own decisions. To enable them, he communicated the intention and goal, gave them the full context, and, like a coach, asked specific questions that helped them decide increasingly independently.

When an officer asked for permission to initiate the dive, for instance, Marquet gave no order but led him to consider whether diving was safe and right for the overall mission. Gradually, fewer and fewer officers asked for permission. They began to think like the captain and took responsibility for their decisions and those of their teams. Where the crew had followed commands more or less disconnected from the situation, now even the rearmost engine room clearly understood the situation and the ship’s mission. This understanding led to far better decisions, for example avoiding noise in the engine room when an enemy ship was nearby.

Marquet turned the ship around, which is why his book is titled “Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders.” Through this extraordinary leadership culture, the Santa Fe went from the worst to the best submarine in the US Navy and remained so after Marquet’s service ended. It also became a de facto training ground for several aspiring captains who learned their trade under him.20

Despite this impressive demonstration of leadership focused on empowerment, examples of this culture in large hierarchical organizations are hard to find. At Netflix, the seventh-largest internet company in the world, one finds them quickly, particularly in the legendary “Culture Statement.”21 The original 125(!) slides on culture at Netflix were viewed over 17 million times, and Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) COO Sheryl Sandberg called them “perhaps the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.”22 The revised version on the Netflix website makes clear who makes the decisions at Netflix:23

We strive to develop good decision-making muscles at every level of the company, priding ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior leaders make. We expect managers to practice context not control—giving their teams the context and clarity needed to make good decisions instead of trying to control everything themselves.

Leadership does not mean deciding everything yourself but creating the conditions that enable employees to decide for themselves. That’s why Reed Hastings prides himself on making as few decisions as possible at Netflix, and why David Marquet stopped giving orders on the USS Santa Fe.

Leadership means cultivating and demanding self-management of the people entrusted to it. Like gardeners, leaders create an environment in which human potential can unfold.

Gardener Not Chess Master

The military is often cited as an example and blueprint for hierarchical organizations. And rightly so: in the course of industrialization, many companies were indeed inspired by the military’s organization. But we often forget that the military has long relied on the speed and effectiveness of autonomy and self-organization, especially in complex and unclear situations.

The Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke (1800-1891) already recognized: “No operational plan extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy force.”24 He therefore granted the subordinate levels of command extensive freedom in executing the combat mission. Ultimately, this led to the extraordinarily successful concept of “mission-type tactics (Auftragstaktik).”25 Its decisive advantage is that those on the front line make decisions quickly and autonomously, trying to accomplish a set mission within clear boundary conditions. Before, information had to travel slowly and imperfectly up the hierarchy, and the orders had to travel back down.

The slowness of central decision-making is one thing; the superhuman demands on the central decision-makers are another. Stanley McChrystal, who as commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) led much of the special forces operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2008, points this out: “Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage.”26 Hierarchical decision-making is neither efficient nor effective in our VUCA world. David Marquet recognized this when he took command of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe. As an alternative to the ingenious chess master, McChrystal suggests thinking more like a gardener:27

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.

McChrystal describes a radically different understanding of leadership than we are used to in Taylorist, hierarchical organizations. Managers there usually act like chess masters who think through and control every move; the manager’s role was designed that way: omniscient, planning, and controlling. In the chess master’s worldview, the pieces are mere puppets, and he is the hero.

The gardener’s understanding is much more modest. A gardener knows he cannot produce tomatoes or cucumbers himself. He can only create and maintain an environment in which those plants thrive. Nor is he the best and most efficient tomato, promoted to manager for those skills. As a gardener, he has and needs different skills. That is the difference between management and leadership, and it is precisely what makes a difference today.

Unfortunately, the classic development path in traditional companies follows a different and rather simple logic: excel as a specialist, and you get promoted. It almost seems that leadership qualities such as empathy and trust rank below exceptional professional qualifications. As a result, the new boss often remains his own best employee, which hinders his progress and his team’s.

The tomato plant’s task is to grow and produce tomatoes; the gardener creates the necessary conditions. The specialist’s task is to gather knowledge and experience to solve problems and ultimately generate value. Leadership creates the environment in which this work can succeed today, tomorrow, and the day after. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, sums up his understanding of leadership this way:28

As a leader, a lot of your job is to make those people successful. It’s less about trying to be successful (yourself), and more about making sure you have good people and your work is to remove that barrier, remove roadblocks for them so that they can be successful in what they do.

Good leadership has a leverage effect: it makes others successful and effective. Leaders who remain too much specialists–and, in the worst case, their own best employees–neglect this leverage and thus their actual (new) task. The best tomato does not simply become a good gardener. At best, it becomes a kind of senior tomato who explains the trade to the junior tomatoes and enjoys this expert role far too much.

Busy Is Not Productive

Principles Not Rules

Lenin made the unfortunately not entirely unfounded observation: “Revolution in Germany? It’ll never work; when those Germans want to storm a train station, they’ll buy a platform ticket!”

Everything has to be in order here in good old Germany.

That’s why lawn edges are so popular in Germany. And that’s why the myth persists that most of the world’s tax literature concerns German tax law. We are known and appreciated for our conscientiousness and sense of order, even if we occasionally overdo it. Our relationship with creative chaos is strained, to put it mildly.

There are always good reasons for another rule, a new instruction, or a new process. After all, we must consider every eventuality, regulate every special case, and prevent every abuse.

Where would we end up otherwise?

Good question. The Dutch traffic planner Hans Monderman went and looked. He studied the busiest intersection in Drachten, where two two-lane main roads meet and where, every day, 22,000 cars, 5,000 cyclists, and numerous pedestrians pass (as of 2005).29 Surely such a crossing needs rules, signs, markings, traffic lights, and a clear spatial separation of cars, cyclists, and pedestrians. Everything must be regulated. But when we treat people like children, they behave like children, or in Monderman’s words: “When you treat people like idiots, they will behave like idiots.”30

This overregulation is unnecessary, as Monderman proved with his shared space concept. No cycle lanes, road markings, right-of-way signs, traffic lights, not even sidewalks–and still order emerges from the chaos. Monderman liked to demonstrate how well this works by walking backward with his eyes closed across one of “his” intersections.31

Where rigid rules no longer regulate coexistence, confusion reigns. That is precisely the point, because now people have to think and communicate. There is much more eye contact, and everyone pays more attention to other people than to traffic lights and their own right of way. Shared space has lowered speeds, improved traffic flow, and significantly reduced accidents, not only in Drachten but in various other cities. In the Danish town of Christiansfield, fatal accidents fell from three to zero per year after the removal of traffic lights and signs. In the UK, several cities removed the center line from the road, and a study found 35% fewer accidents.32

Let’s focus on shared values and fundamental principles, not only on the streets but also in our organizations. Instead of a plethora of rules, let’s trust people and their good judgment, as Laszlo Bock, formerly Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, aptly points out:33

Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.

Less is More

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. This ideal, crafted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, reveals some room for refinement in public administration and large corporations. Wherever many people collaborate, rules grow wild and processes become more complicated.

What happens to an administration when there is less actual work? Cyril Northcote Parkinson asked himself this question. He investigated the British Colonial Office, the department responsible for administering the British colonies from 1854 to 1968. Parkinson found that staff grew regardless of the amount of work: the Colonial Office had the most officials in 1968, when it was integrated into the Foreign Office for lack of colonies to administer. The organization was busy with itself but not very productive. Parkinson summarized his observation in his law on the growth of bureaucracy:34

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Simplification is not the sweet spot of public administration and large corporations. Yet less is more. The Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used this famous motto to describe his art. His colleague Richard Buckminster Fuller took a similar view, though he referred to function: “Doing more with less.” What sounds so simple is arduous work.

Less is more–especially more work. And not only in architecture. In his sixteenth Provincial Letter of 1656, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal apologized for its length: “The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.”35 His Hungarian colleague Paul Erdős, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, believed in “The Book,” God’s book, which, in his opinion, contains all the short, elegant, and perfect mathematical proofs.36

If these great thinkers and artists agree that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, as Leonardo da Vinci aptly put it, how does the cancerous growth of public administrations such as the British Colonial Office, and their excessive bureaucracy, come about? The same phenomenon appears almost identically in large corporations that have grown over decades, and it regularly defeats attempts to reduce bureaucracy.

Perhaps we busy knowledge workers are like Blaise Pascal: we simply don’t have time to streamline our processes. But the cause may lie much deeper in the human psyche. When searching for solutions, we prefer to add new elements instead of removing parts, even if removing would be significantly more efficient or cheaper. At least that is what research published in the journal “Nature” suggests.37

Lego experiment

In one experiment, participants had to improve the stability of a LEGO building so that its roof would support a heavy load. They would receive a dollar if they succeeded, but each additional brick used to stabilize the building cost 10 cents. The roof initially rested on a single brick far off center, and most participants added more bricks to stabilize it. It would have been much easier and more profitable to remove the single brick at the edge, letting the roof rest stably on the rest of the structure.

Removing things doesn’t seem to suit us. We prefer to do more of the same. And if that doesn’t help, we do even more. “Having lost sight of our goals, we redoubled our efforts,” Walt Kelly aptly observed. Combined with German thoroughness, this universal human tendency also explains the extensive German tax legislation and the finely chiseled travel expense guidelines in our companies.

Bureaucracy was also rampant at FAVI, a French die-casting manufacturer. One rule said that a worker who wanted a new pair of gloves from the warehouse had to show his supervisor the old pair and receive written confirmation, which he then handed in at the warehouse to get the new pair.

On a factory tour, Jean François Zobrist found a worker waiting outside the warehouse. He did the math: the worker operated a machine that cost 600 francs per hour, or ten francs per minute. The whole process of issuing new gloves took ten minutes, during which the machine stood idle. The gloves, worth 5.80 francs, thus cost the company an additional 100 francs through this control mechanism.38

So Zobrist abolished this and many other rules and organized FAVI into mini-factories of 15-35 employees, who made all decisions for their respective customers (including the previously centralized functions of Sales, Planning, Engineering, HR, etc.). Here, too, fewer (uniform) rules did not lead to the feared chaos but to more personal responsibility and self-organization. The transformation was remarkable: FAVI grew from 80 to over 500 employees and continued to produce profitably in Europe, with above-average wages, where other suppliers had long since relocated production to the Far East.39

Leading with Trust

Questions Not Answers

Children ask questions–lots of them. But at some point in school, they ask fewer and fewer. From then on, only the correct answers to the teacher’s questions count. And so it goes on in professional life. Whoever stands at the top and in front gives the answers, and those further down or at the back had better not ask too many questions.

Questions are a great way to understand the world from different perspectives. That is why children ask so many–until they are systematically discouraged.

Who, What, Where, When, Why, How? If you don’t ask, you stay stupid. This theme of “Sesame Street” has gotten to the heart of the matter for generations. Today we need these questions more than ever to understand the interrelationships in an increasingly global and complex world, not only in schools but also in the economy and society. Instead, we have settled into a consumer attitude and demand quick, easy answers from “those up there,” whether as citizens or employees.

These answers rarely lead to insight; more often they lead to dissatisfaction. In the coffee kitchen and at lunch, everyone has an opinion–usually not a good one. Criticism comes easily. Few think of asking questions to understand the answer and the position behind it. The pattern of proclamations from above and obedience without conviction below is too well-rehearsed, and awe and fear are often too great.

This sluggish cycle also causes dissatisfaction at the top. Much time and money therefore go into communication and change management to improve how the given answers spread and are received. Unfortunately, few executives think of opening up other perspectives and solutions by asking sincere questions before giving their answers. The self-image that strong leadership must provide answers, and that asking questions suggests incompetence and weakness, is too deeply ingrained.

So everyone remains more stupid than necessary. At the top, people miss better perspectives and creative solutions. At the bottom, they see only the final, nicely packaged answer, but rarely the questions and the process that led to it.

He who asks, leads. This is a golden rule in sales. Customers more readily accept answers about a product’s or service’s features and benefits when they fit their situation and problem and make sense from their individual perspective. That’s why good salespeople ask many questions and let the product’s benefits flow into the conversation only gradually. Talented salespeople do this authentically and unobtrusively, so that the customer feels understood and well advised, not manipulated or pressured.

The converse is also true: those who lead should ask questions. Asking questions is a sign not of weakness but of wisdom. Socrates is credited with saying: “I know that I know nothing!” One of his favorite methods was asking questions to gain wisdom for himself and others. For him, being aware of the limits of his knowledge was a piece of wisdom: “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”40

But not all questions are alike; attitude matters. If you ask to confirm your opinion, you already have your answer and learn nothing; you are just manipulative. Good questions enable a dialog at eye level. Edgar H. Schein calls this Humble Inquiry in his book of the same name and means asking questions without prejudice, with genuine interest in the other person’s perspective and opinion:41

Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

Instead of enabling constructive dissent, closed questions often (unconsciously) serve to confirm one’s position pseudo-democratically. Instead of asking, “Do we want to do it this way now?” or “Is that okay?” and being happy about the broad agreement, a more humble and open question such as “What could we do to improve this even further?” is far more inviting. Or perhaps “On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident do you feel about the proposal?”

Anyone who asks questions this way, and can listen even when the answers contradict their opinion, will significantly strengthen relationships and nurture a climate of psychological safety, which according to Google is essential for team success (see Section “Diversity and Dissent”). In effective teams, members dare to speak their minds openly, show vulnerability, and take risks.

Psychological safety paves the way for an open learning culture, which is at the heart of the impressive transformation at Microsoft under its CEO, Satya Nadella. He aptly describes the central challenge as the transition from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all culture.42 Those willing to learn constantly ask more questions and are less likely to fall into the complacency that Risto Siilasmaa perceived at Nokia after Apple introduced the iPhone: “The unspoken message I heard was: We are Nokia. We invented this industry. Let’s keep doing what we do so well. Nobody does it better.”43

David Marquet also questioned his attitude as captain of the USS Santa Fe and established an entirely new leadership culture when he decided to stop giving orders. He trained his crew to think and decide like the captain by asking specific questions (see Section “Context Not Control”).

Asking questions instead of giving answers is not a sign of weak leadership; it strengthens relationships and people. The decisive factor is an attitude of humility, authenticity, and genuine interest in the other person’s perspective. Only this creates the psychological safety to ask the right questions without fear and to express one’s opinion candidly. The resulting open learning culture protects against complacency and makes organizations fit for the future in our increasingly complex world.

Trust Is the Foundation

Sure, you can lead without trust. If your name is Caligula, you are a Roman emperor, and you have deliberately chosen the motto “Oderint, dum metuant!” (“Let them hate me as long as they fear me!”), you can. At least he didn’t hide it and lived authentically by his motto.

The resulting obedience may satisfy rulers like Caligula, who score high on the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. But fear and pressure do not at all foster the creative peak performance that the era of knowledge work needs. Knowledge workers must be managed like volunteers, as Peter Drucker already demanded (see Section “Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”), and a key ingredient is trust.

We trust another person if, first, their ideas, arguments, and competencies convince us (logic); second, we perceive them as sincerely human (authenticity); and third, we feel they are primarily concerned about us and the common cause (empathy). For Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, logic, authenticity, and empathy are the three drivers of trusting leadership relationships.44 Trust is established only when all three are balanced. As soon as one is deficient, trust is lost, like a three-legged stool that wobbles or falls over if one leg is too short or breaks.

The three drivers of trust

The three drivers of trust according to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss.

Leadership has to give orientation. The dimension of logic concerns visions, ideas, and convincing arguments. The attractiveness of the vision and the coherence of the argument naturally play a significant role. Those who are not convinced will follow only reluctantly.

Many problems in this area stem not from the issue itself and its pros and cons but from presentation and communication. The two authors recommend getting straight to the heart of the matter and giving the arguments afterward, instead of missing the point after a lengthy explanation (and the discussion it triggers). This presupposes that you can state and communicate the core of the matter clearly, which is an art in itself.

Trusting relationships develop between people who are honest with each other in all their vulnerability. If these people, consciously or unconsciously, only play roles, trust remains limited. A high degree of authenticity, conversely, leads to a high level of trust, and people can show all their individuality and develop to their full potential. Frei and Morriss are essentially concerned with authentically representing your own position on the one hand and recognizing the resulting diversity of other people’s positions on the other:45

So pay less attention to what you think people want to hear and more attention to what you need to say to them. Reveal your full humanity to the world, regardless of what your critics say. And while you’re at it, take exquisite care of people who are different from you, confident in the knowledge that their difference is the very thing that could unleash your potential and your organization’s.

Empathy is the biggest challenge for many leaders. In hierarchical organizations, leadership too often equals position and power, so it is too much about ego, assertiveness, and personal advancement. And people sense this. They feel that the leader is not concerned with them as people with unique talents, needs, and concerns, and that in the end they are just pawns, bargaining chips, headcounts, and resources.

Sometimes even small changes in behavior can significantly increase empathy. The two authors suggest, for example, observing yourself in meetings. When your interest is satisfied, your commitment drops and your gaze wanders to your smartphone or laptop and its unread emails. The signal is clear: my tasks are now more important to me than you, who are here with me in this meeting. Genuine empathy in this situation means taking responsibility for the other people in the room and their needs. It starts with putting your smartphone away more often and devoting yourself entirely to the people in the room:46

Signaling a lack of empathy is a major barrier to empowerment leadership. If people think you care more about yourself than about others, they won’t trust you enough to lead them.

Drive out Fear

Safety Not Fear

Trust and cooperation flourish best in a climate of psychological safety. Only when the members of a group trust each other and feel safe enough to speak their minds openly and take risks can the whole become more than the sum of its parts (see Section “Diversity and Dissent”). Where competition and fear have dominated, real unity is impossible.

Organizations are full of contradictions. A fundamental one is that value creation always depends on cooperation, while the culture is usually geared toward competition. The desired fruitful cooperation then decays into an envious, zero-sum game in which one person’s gain is another’s loss.

The widespread concept of Management by Objectives illustrates the paradox. Peter Drucker, well aware of the damaging effects of fear and pressure, deliberately called it “Management by Objectives and Self-Control.”47 As early as 1954, this method for managing knowledge workers relied on self-organization and leading at eye level. It quickly deteriorated into dictating goals from above. Financial incentives, which are demonstrably not only ineffective but counterproductive, exacerbate the misinterpretation.48 Fear of missing the targets is an essential ingredient of a culture of antagonism and fear.

The constant fight for budget, headcount, position, influence, power, and prestige causes plenty of frustrating friction even in good times, though on the bottom line it still works out somehow. In times of crisis, the full toxic effect of a culture based on competition and fear unfolds. A threat from outside (competitors, new business models, a pandemic, etc.) requires internal unity. But those who don’t trust the other department in good times cannot rely on trusting, unconditional cooperation in an emergency. That is why W. Edwards Deming lists the reduction of fear among the 14 points of his management program:49

Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

Roman emperor Caligula was therefore wrong with his motto “oderint, dum metuant” (let them hate me as long as they fear me). Fortunately, such radical autocrats are no longer common in politics and business. Yet fear, competition, and mistrust remain deeply interwoven in the culture of many hierarchical organizations. Leadership needs to prevent unhealthy competition and ensure psychological safety, as Simon Sinek calls for:50

Leadership is the choice to serve others with or without a formal rank. (…) Leaders are the ones willing to look out for those to the left of them and those to the right of them.

“Leadership is a service and not a privilege,” Father Anselm Grün sums it up in the same spirit as Simon Sinek, in a seminar that made a lasting impression on Bodo Janssen.51 This service includes, in particular, creating a safe environment in which employees can develop without fear. That is possible only with the appropriate self-confidence. Father Grün’s second sentence, which greatly influenced Janssen at the time, fits here: “Only those who can lead themselves can lead others.”

Leading oneself begins with knowing oneself and accepting oneself in one’s unique being. Unfortunately, many people increasingly feel that they are not enough. They constantly compare themselves with others and emulate other people or an abstract ideal image. The unique original that we all once were becomes a pale copy.

If people constantly feel insufficient, they seek confirmation and admiration from outside. That is precisely why social media attracts people and reinforces the tendency to compare oneself with others. Leaders with this inclination keep employees small and dependent. Only those who have recognized and accepted their own unique, unadulterated nature can develop the unique potential of the people entrusted to them without envy and rejoice wholeheartedly in their success.

Besides this inner image of how we are and how we should be, we hold many other inner images, more or less unconsciously. We can see life as a struggle or a miracle. We can see our work as a hamster wheel and treadmill or as a workshop for a flourishing life (see Section “People are at the Center”). We can see employees as lazy or motivated (see Section “Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”). These inner images, created by upbringing and experience, determine how we interpret the world. They may be unconscious, but they are still our choice.

Good leadership means approaching your work with hope and inspiring hope in people. For this, our inner images in particular must speak a language of hope. Seeing life as a struggle, the company as a shark tank, and work as an unavoidable treadmill and annoying evil inspires little hope. Seeing life as a miracle, the company as a place of human encounter, and work as an opportunity for individual development holds much more hope.

He Who Says A Does Not Have to Say B

When reality contradicts our beliefs and worldviews, we have many ways of resolving the painful dissonance. Astonishingly, most people creatively reinterpret reality so that their perception better conforms to their worldview. It would be more helpful, especially for leaders, to use the contradictions as a source of insight and adapt their worldview and beliefs.

At midnight on December 21, 1954, a devastating flood was supposed to wipe out all life on Earth. At least, that was the prophecy of Dorothy Martin from Chicago, who had received the warning from extraterrestrials with whom she claimed to be in telepathic contact. But there was also hope: the aliens were to rescue her and her small sect, the “Seekers,” with their spaceships.

Fortunately for us non-believers, this highly improbable prophecy did not come true. Thanks to Leon Festinger, a 35-year-old psychologist at the University of Minnesota, the story doesn’t end here but only becomes interesting. Festinger doubted that the world would end and wanted to investigate how the sect would deal with the fact that no spaceships would come to save them. In the run-up to December 21, 1954, he and his colleagues infiltrated the sect.52

How did these people cope with such dismay, some of whom had sold their homes and quit their jobs in the hope of imminent salvation? Did they lose their faith and send Dorothy Martin packing? Far from it! After a brief moment of horror, the sect found a remarkable way out of the dilemma. They reinterpreted what had happened: their unshakeable faith had saved the world from devastation and made a rescue by aliens unnecessary.

Suppressing and reinterpreting incongruous facts and events, sometimes completely irrationally, is deeply human. When reality contradicts our convictions, we are capable of remarkable mental contortions. Festinger called this phenomenon the “Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.”53 According to this theory, the dissonance between beliefs and reality causes an unpleasant tension that people try to resolve without giving up, questioning, or correcting their beliefs.

Rationally, it would be logical to follow Bertolt Brecht’s advice: “He who says A does not have to say B. He can also recognize that A was wrong.”54 In practice, however, it is hard to recognize and admit that you were wrong. Humans prefer to stick steadfastly to their laboriously constructed, more or less skewed worldviews, all the more when they have already invested substantial time and money. The cognitive distortion of sunk costs is well documented. It regularly spirals into escalating commitment, in which the sunk investments justify further ones.

Some people nevertheless manage to detach from their cognitive dissonance in a way that promotes insight and personal growth. Like the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, they see the deviation of reality from their beliefs as a welcome opportunity to learn something new:55

I really enjoyed changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised and

I enjoy being surprised because I feel I’m learning something.

In the best empirical tradition, we must measure every theory against reality, and it is valid only as long as observations do not refute it. Shouldn’t this scientific principle also apply to our worldviews and beliefs?

Leading means deciding: sometimes for yourself, but more and more, in the sense of this Manifesto, by creating an environment in which good decisions can be made (see Section “Context Not Control”). Every decision is fraught with uncertainty. If the next step is obvious or logically deducible, there is nothing to decide. Leadership therefore always runs the risk of an erroneous decision.

Only the Pope is infallible, and even on that, Catholic theologians do not all agree. For everyone else, a real decision under uncertainty is a hypothesis about a hoped-for course and an expected outcome. A good decision must be falsifiable and must not become dogma.56 It therefore requires measurable success criteria on the one hand and, on the other, the humility to correct course if it is not successful.

Correcting a decision is itself a decision under uncertainty, and if you think too long, you will miss the right moment. Anyone who buys a share is betting on rising prices. That’s the easy part. The art of intelligent investing begins with the exit: realizing profits, despite the fear of missing out on an even greater one, and consistently limiting losses, for example with a stop price 10% below the entry price.

Too often, however, our decisions in private and professional life are inalienable, and the boss’s are sacrosanct anyway. Once made, they seem without alternatives and doomed to succeed. The success is then rationalized and glossed over, which works all the better the fewer rigid criteria for success were defined beforehand. More advanced players in the corporate theater change the criteria and benchmark along the way.

“If you make a mistake and don’t correct it, you will make a second one,” Confucius warned. The ability to question oneself, one’s convictions, and one’s decisions is crucial for leaders. Their worldviews are rarely purely private matters; they affect and influence many other people. Good leadership balances convincing visions and steadfastness in pursuing goals with the humility to question one’s vision, worldview, and decisions and to correct or develop them accordingly.

In this sense, freely adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr: Give me the strength to stand my ground when I am right, the humility to admit mistakes when I am wrong, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Leading with Integrity

Integrity Over Charisma

Peter Drucker was born on November 19, 1909, and grew up in Vienna as the son of an upper-middle-class Jewish family. In the 1920s, he studied first in Hamburg and later in Frankfurt. After the Nazi regime put one of his works on the list of books publicly burned on May 10, 1933, Drucker emigrated first to London and in 1937 to the USA.

Given this personal history, it is hardly surprising that Drucker hesitates to address the concept of leadership in his work. In the few places where he writes about it, he rarely fails to cite Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as cautionary examples of how dangerous charisma without character and integrity is. He therefore explicitly emphasizes the importance of character:57

The final proof of the sincerity and seriousness of an organization’s management is uncompromising emphasis on character. (…) For it is through character that leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated.

For Drucker, charisma is not at all a decisive leadership quality; on the contrary, it is often the root of all evil, because charisma tends to lead to complacency and arrogance. Egomaniacs in particular can be very charismatic. Drucker credits real leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman with the charisma of a “dead mackerel.”58

Integrity matters more. Personal integrity, a postulate of philosophical humanism, means the greatest possible congruence between a consistent framework of one’s values, convictions, and ideals and one’s life practice in words and acts. This framework must be universally applicable: it can exclude neither individuals (oneself) nor groups of persons (others). Integrity therefore requires compliance with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative:59

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Those who lead with integrity are not afraid of strong employees but build on their individual strengths, promote them, and employ them for the greater good and vision. Those who keep others down out of fear or, like many autocrats, carry out outright purges only appear strong and in fact act from weakness. The result is mediocrity and wasteful political warfare in the corporate trenches.

In this sense, integrity is precisely the value behind the fifth thesis of the Manifesto for Humane Leadership: Growing leaders over leading followers (see Section “Encounter at Eye Level”). Leadership is legitimate only if it aims at the self-leadership of the employees entrusted to it. It is not about superiority or subordination but about working together as adults at eye level. Leadership is a service, not a privilege. And the service consists of offering people the opportunity to develop, or in the words of Peter Drucker:60

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Leadership through integrity creates a climate of psychological safety and trust in which people can outperform.

Disturbing the Comfort Zone

Leadership sets things in motion and often involves change. But change means disturbance and requires it. The new is always a challenge for the established and an imposition on it. Leadership is more than managing the status quo. It focuses not only on today but also on tomorrow and the day after (see Section “The Art of Ambidexterity”). Good leadership finds an adequate balance between stability and disruption.

In computer science, heuristic optimization methods often approximate “very difficult” problems. Many start with a random solution and improve it step by step: they evaluate several new solutions close to the current one and select the best. The procedure continues until none of the neighboring solutions is better than the selected one.

It’s like trying to find the highest peak while mountaineering by always following the path with the steepest local incline. You will certainly reach a peak, namely when all available paths lead down. But it will not be the highest in general, just a peak, a local optimum. To climb the even higher peak behind or beside it, you must first go downhill.

Such optimization methods therefore occasionally allow the target function to deteriorate. The more sophisticated methods allow larger deteriorations at the beginning and reduce the permitted degree during the calculation. With this strategy, the algorithm can overcome local optima to a certain extent (though it still cannot guarantee finding the global optimum). If you want to aim high, you must go up a lot, but sometimes you also have to go down.

It is similar in organizations. Continuously improving products and processes is good and essential, but ultimately it only leads to a local optimum. Leadership needs some humility to recognize this and then to set its sights on an even higher goal, without being discouraged by the inevitable but temporary decline that comes with it.

Leadership is therefore also the art of repeatedly drawing oneself and others out of the comfort zone and, despite initial resistance, seeking the path to new peaks, even if it appears rocky at first and leads downward. Leadership always means disrupting the comfort zone with a long-term vision that provides direction and stability and helps cross canyons. Stability in direction gives the disruption constructive power and purpose.

A good leader thus needs a broad spectrum of skills. On the one hand, they should run today’s business efficiently. On the other, they should develop and communicate an attractive, meaningful vision for the future, question the status quo, and occasionally rock the boat. Depending on personal inclination, these two poles will vary in intensity. Everyone has specific preferences and capabilities.

This calls for strengthening strengths and making weaknesses irrelevant, as Peter Drucker put it (see Section “Strengthen Strengths”). Leaders can develop both stability and disruption to a certain extent, but in the end they will always lean toward one. Making the weakness in the other dimension irrelevant can mean combining complementary strengths in a leadership team. Those who enjoy stable processes and regulated procedures and are not inclined to challenge and disrupt the status quo constantly are welcome to add some corporate jesters and other more rebellious minds to the mix.

In Scrum, for example, the Scrum Master is explicitly required to be disruptive in this way. The Scrum Guide describes the Scrum Master as helping not only the team and the Product Owner but also the organization.61 Unfortunately, this task of looking at the organization through a systemic lens and challenging the status quo so that the team can work better is often forgotten.

Leaders must not just manage and maintain the status quo; they must constantly challenge themselves and the organization. Leadership is always a balancing act between stability and disruption. Without disturbing the comfort zone, the organization becomes sluggish and complacent. The cozy picnic on the seemingly safe, high peak ends abruptly when a competitor suddenly plants its flag on the much higher peak next door. By then the disturbance comes too late and hits an organization too inert to deal with it.

  1. This comparison is often attributed to Peter Drucker: “Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don’t have enough of it, you’re out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you’re really missing something.” ↩

  2. Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management, reprint (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 32. ↩

  3. Götz W. Werner, Womit ich nie gerechnet habe: die Autobiographie, 5. Auflage, List-Taschenbuch 61254 (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2019), 108. ↩

  4. Bodo Janssen, Kraftquelle Tradition: benediktinische Lebenskunst für heute, 1. Auflage (Münsterschwarzach: Vier-Türme-Verlag, 2019), 147. ↩

  5. Regula Benedicti, 4.78. ↩

  6. Janssen, Kraftquelle Tradition, 147f. ↩

  7. Regula Benedicti, 72.7. ↩

  8. Anselm Grün, Menschen führen - Leben wecken: Anregungen aus der Regel Benedikts von Nursia, 4. Auflage, dtv 34277 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2007), 107. ↩

  9. Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, repr. (New York, NY: Harper, 1967), 71ff. ↩

  10. Drucker, The Effective Executive. ↩

  11. Drucker, The Effective Executive. ↩

  12. Peter F. Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, Management, Rev. ed (New York, NY: Collins, 2008), 481ff. ↩

  13. Drucker and Maciariello, 482f. ↩

  14. Jesper Juul, Was Familien trägt: Werte in Erziehung und Partnerschaft; ein Orientierungsbuch, 5. Aufl (München: Kösel, 2007), 24. ↩

  15. Karl-Martin Dietz and Thomas Kracht, Dialogische Führung: Grundlagen - Praxis - Fallbeispiel: dm-drogerie markt, 4., aktualisierte Auflage (Frankfurt New York: Campus Verlag, 2016), 9. ↩

  16. Grün, Menschen führen - Leben wecken, 77. ↩

  17. Bible, Eph 4:29. ↩

  18. Grün, Menschen führen - Leben wecken. ↩

  19. Anne Quito, “Netflix’s CEO Says There Are Months When He Doesn’t Have to Make a Single Decision,” Quartz, April 19, 2018, https://qz.com/work/1254183/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-expounds-on-the-netflix-culture-deck-at-ted-2018/. ↩

  20. L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (UK: Penguin Business, 2019). ↩

  21. Reed Hastings, “Culture,” https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. ↩

  22. Alyson Shontell, “SHERYL SANDBERG: ‘The Most Important Document Ever To Come Out Of The Valley,’” Business Insider, February 4, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/netflixs-management-and-culture-presentation-2013-2. ↩

  23. Netflix, “Netflix Culture,” accessed March 20, 2022, https://jobs.netflix.com/culture. ↩

  24. Helmuth Karl Bernhard Moltke, Militärische Werke, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1900), 291. ↩

  25. “Mission-Type Tactics,” in Wikipedia, August 23, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mission-type_tactics. ↩

  26. G.S. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), 232. ↩

  27. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams. ↩

  28. Devjyot Ghoshal, “’Let Others Succeed’: Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Simple but Effective Leadership Style,” Quartz, January 6, 2017, https://qz.com/india/879633/let-others-succeed-google-ceo-sundar-pichais-simple-but-effective-leadership-style/. ↩

  29. Ute Eberle, “Gefahr Ist Gut,” Zeit, 2005, https://www.zeit.de/zeit-wissen/2005/05/Verkehrsberuhigung_NEU.xml. ↩

  30. Stephen Johnson, “Want Less Car Accidents? Remove Traffic Signals and Road Signs,” Big Think, August 31, 2017, https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get-rid-of-traffic-signals-road-signs/. ↩

  31. Viveka van de Vliet, “Space for People, Not for Cars,” Works That Work, 2013, 21.03.2022, https://worksthatwork.com/1/shared-space. ↩

  32. Tom McNichol, “Roads Gone Wild,” Wired, December 1, 2004, https://www.wired.com/2004/12/traffic/. ↩

  33. Laszlo Bock, Work Rules! Insights from inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, First published in paperback (London: John Murray, 2016), 365. ↩

  34. C. Northcote Parkinson, “Parkinson’s Law,” The Economist 177, no. 5856 (November 19, 1955): 635-37. ↩

  35. Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal, trans. Thomas M’Crie (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1856), 314, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73959. The German edition reads: “Ich habe den gegenwärtigen Brief aus keiner andern Ursach so lang gemacht, als weil ich nicht Zeit hatte, ihn kürzer zu machen.” Pascal, Provinzialbriefe über die Sittenlehre und Politik der Jesuiten, Theil 2 (Meyersche Buchhandlung, 1792), 263. ↩

  36. Paul Hoffman, Der Mann, der die Zahlen liebte: die erstaunliche Geschichte des Paul Erdös und die Suche nach der Schönheit in der Mathematik, trans. Regina Schneider (Berlin: Ullstein, 1999), 37. ↩

  37. Tom Meyvis and Heeyoung Yoon, “Adding Is Favoured over Subtracting in Problem Solving,” Nature 592, no. 7853 (April 8, 2021): 189-90, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00592-0; Gabrielle S. Adams et al., “People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes,” Nature 592, no. 7853 (April 2021): 258-61, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y. ↩

  38. Joost Minnaar, “FAVI: How Zobrist Broke Down FAVI’s Command-and-Control Structures,” Corporate Rebels, January 4, 2017, https://corporate-rebels.com/zobrist/. ↩

  39. Frédéric Laloux, Reinventing organizations: ein Leitfaden zur Gestaltung sinnstiftender Formen der Zusammenarbeit, trans. Mike Kauschke (München: Verlag Franz Vahlen, 2015), chap. 3.4. ↩

  40. “I Know That I Know Nothing,” in Wikipedia, August 7, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=I_know_that_I_know_nothing. ↩

  41. Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, Second edition, revised and expanded (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2021), 2. ↩

  42. Diana Bass, “Satya Nadella Talks Microsoft at Middle Age,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 4, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-satya-nadella-interview-issue/. ↩

  43. Risto Siilasmaa, Transforming Nokia: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead through Colossal Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2019), 54. ↩

  44. Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone around You (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). ↩

  45. Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss, “Begin with Trust,” Harvard Business Review, no. May-June 2020 (May 1, 2020), https://hbr.org/2020/05/begin-with-trust. ↩

  46. Frei and Morriss, “Begin with Trust.” ↩

  47. Peter F. Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, Management, Rev. ed (New York, NY: Collins, 2008), 258. ↩

  48. Sam Glucksberg, “The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition.,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 63, no. 1 (January 1962): 36-41, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044683. ↩

  49. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, Mass: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986), 23f. ↩

  50. Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, 2017, 82. ↩

  51. Bodo Janssen, Die stille Revolution: Führen mit Sinn und Menschlichkeit, 7. Auflage (München: Ariston, 2016), 48. ↩

  52. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956). ↩

  53. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957). ↩

  54. Cited in Jan Knopf and Bertolt Brecht, eds., Brecht-Handbuch: in fünf Bänden. Bd. 1: Stücke, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 251. ↩

  55. Adam Grant, “Daniel Kahneman Doesn’t Trust Your Intuition,” Taken for Granted, accessed March 25, 2022, https://www.ted.com/talks/taken_for_granted_daniel_kahneman_doesn_t_trust_your_intuition. ↩

  56. Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung, 10., verb. und vermehrte Aufl. Die Einheit der Gesellschaftswissenschaften 4 (Tübingen: J. Mohr, 1994), 17. ↩

  57. Peter F. Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, Management, Rev. ed (New York, NY: Collins, 2008), 286. ↩

  58. Drucker and Maciariello, 289. ↩

  59. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 4: Abt. 1, Werke; Bd. 4: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1. Aufl.) Prolegomena. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, Photomechan. Nachdr, vol. 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1973), 421. ↩

  60. Drucker and Maciariello, Management, 288. ↩

  61. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, Der Scrum Guide, 2020. ↩