Welcome
This is my personal website for teaching and research purposes. Thank you for visiting.
Professorship of Strategic Management
After years in various management and executive positions, after significant experiences in the area of startups, and after some time as a management advisor I am now a Professor of Strategic Management at CBS International Business School in Cologne. In addition, I also work as the Managing Director of the Gateway Gründungsnetz e.V., which has the aim to support founders and to-be-founders to startup their own business.
The subjects I lecture are from the area of Strategic Management which include Business Administration and Digital Topics: Mergers & Acquisitions, Business and Financial Analysis, Business Plan Writing, Financial Consulting, Agile Project Management and Design Thinking, Organisational Design, Digital Network Economy, Digital Strategy Development, Digital Management, Digital Organisation and App Development in JavaScript. You can find out more about myself on my LinkedIn page.
My research is centered around the topic of organisation. Please also visit my website https://agile-organisation.com.
As a foundation of my strategic courses I use the Business Model Components Map. The Business Model Components Map exists in different variants and can be downloaded as a PDF-file in English or in German. This map also serves as a basis for a tool called Visual Business Planner which I have developed to help companies or startups to easily create a financial, customer and marketing plan. I also use the Visual Business Planner as an interactive tool in my lectures for business plan writing and for validating product ideas.
Important: The project Visual Business Planner has been selected by the German Foundation Stifterverband as one of the “Top 100 Projects” for eduction, science and innovation. Please, read more about it in the Blog.
The business world is more and more moving into a gig or project economy. Project management skills become essential. Bringing projects to a successful end is largely based on having and using the right infrastructure elements and applying them correctly. In this regard I am developing THE PROJECT STATUS app.
Learning Is Trying
My credo in teaching is Learning Is Trying. For optimum learning I consider it as absolutely necessary to not only understand content theoretically and conceptually but also to try it out and apply it.
For instance, for the financial lectures I have developed a financial reporting spreadsheet which contains the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, shareholder’s equity statement and all common ratios. In comparison with slides or books, this spreadsheet allows the students an interactive and cause-effect approach towards financial reporting. At the same time the spreadsheet computes the most common analysis ratios and explains each of their purposes.
As a reference you will find here the definitions of the most common and significant ratios for the financial analysis of companies.
I pursue the same approach also for my lectures in (agile) project management. We use software for making project plans or backlog lists. We develop personas, stories and epics, we estimate efforts by help of agile poker, we conceptualize project control sheets, or make interactive investment calculations.
Blended learning with Excel-based Interactive Financial Reporting Analysis
Teaching Methods
Videos and Online-Teaching with OBS and a Green Screen
Apart from the classical and tested methods for teaching I also employ new forms of knowledge transfer, e.g. by help of producing webapps, escape rooms or videos.
In a digital network economy with tight global markets it is absolutely essential to communicate ones own ideas, innovations and products. Therefore, I also teach how to put own content into videos or websites. In the meantime, many of my students have already created videos or programmed websites. Websites are programmed with JavaScript or Markdown using the workflow of GitHub.