E-books

E-books, free to download

On this page I make two longer papers available that were written during my studies. You may download and read both free of charge – without registering, without giving an email address, without anything in return.

The self-understanding of the coach from the perspective of NLP

This paper deals with a question that comes before any method: with what inner attitude does a coach enter a conversation?

In coaching, what matters is that the person accompanying is aware of their own values and takes a client-centred, open stance. Anyone who does not know their own convictions brings them unnoticed into every conversation – and thereby steers where it goes, although the direction should belong to the other person. It is precisely this attitude to values that I examine in the paper, using NLP as an example, a format from humanistic psychology.

The example is only the way in. The same question arises for every other format just as much – for Theme-Centred Interaction, for Transactional Analysis and others. Each brings its own assumptions about human beings, and each requires the accompanying person to know those assumptions rather than take them for granted.

Who will find this interesting: people training to be coaches, managers who want to work with a coaching attitude, and anyone who wants to know how coaching differs from consulting and from therapy.

Download (PDF, 761 KB, in German)

Innovation in IT departments and IT companies

The full title is “Developing a model and deriving proposals for promoting and establishing innovation in IT departments and IT companies”. It is my master's thesis, written during my studies at the Europäische Fernhochschule Hamburg.

The paper develops a model of the conditions under which innovation arises in IT organisations – and why it fails even though the idea was good. It was not written at a desk but grew out of my work as an enterprise architect in the IT department of Audi AG, a company of the Volkswagen Group. Over the years I observed there what happens to a good idea on its way from the first thought to implementation, and which obstacles turn out to be the same ones again and again.

Why this is relevant for smaller companies: the mechanisms are the same, only the scale differs. In a business with thirty employees, proposals also sink without trace – because nobody is responsible, because day-to-day work takes precedence, or because the person who had the idea is not the person who decides. What becomes visible in a large corporation through long decision-making chains can often be remedied in a mid-sized company with far simpler means – once you know what to look for.

Who will find this interesting: IT managers and department heads who wonder why good ideas disappear in their own organisation; and the management of small and medium-sized companies who want to enable innovation rather than decree it.

Download (PDF, 1.7 MB, in German)

Why I make these available free of charge

Knowledge sitting in a drawer is of use to nobody. Both papers took considerable effort to write, and the questions they address come up in many companies every day. If a single paragraph helps you, the work has served its purpose – even if we never speak to one another.

Further material

Besides these two papers you will find more material to download under Resources: some 60 free tools for coaching, project work and enterprise architecture that run entirely in your browser, as well as the technical documentation of the MC4Y Suite. Reading on the themes of these papers can be found in my book recommendations and in the blog.

If one of the questions from these papers concerns you in your own company, I am glad to talk about it – get in touch for a free initial consultation.