In this episode of Live it, Lead IT! I am going to be talking you through the Disney Strategy, a straightforward, effective tool based on three distinct stages to help you realise your dreams.“The Disney strategy says: Start with the dreamer phase. So dream, dream, dream!” Do you want an average life, or do you want to live your dream life? While it takes courage to reach for the stars, as soon as you start imagining what your ideal life looks like, you can work toward its realization. To achieve that life, you have to start with visualization – you cannot realise what you can’t imagine.So how do you go about dreaming up an image of your ideal life? My best advice to you is to head out into nature, void of any gadgets or other distractions, and let your imagination run wild. Often, when thinking about life goals, people believe that they are undeserving, or that their desires are unrealistic. Put all of these concerns to one side and imagine what you would love to be doing for the next five or ten years. Try to avoid overcompensation, where you only picture having those things that you don’t have now. For instance, time to spend on a beach in an exotic location. Ask yourself if it will really fulfil all your desires.Once you have a clear picture in your head, create a vision board. Preferably using a large sheet of paper, collect images, whether you print them off the internet or cut them out of magazines, to create a visual representation of your dream. Keep it somewhere visible where you can see it often.“The realization phase opens the world of opportunities!”Now that you have created a clear image of your dream life, you will need to start planning how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Treat this as a project plan and break down the steps you need to take you to realise your ideal life into smaller chunks. Don’t overcomplicate it and be sure to write it down.“What will I have when I live in that dream life? Think of the Consequences!”The third and final part of the strategy is to consider the consequences of realising your dream. You will need to ask yourself several questions to assess what the outcomes are of you living your ideal life. These include, ‘What will I have when I live my dream life’, these will include all the positives of you achieving your dream, which might include recognition in your industry or a larger wage; ‘What will I no longer have when I live that dream life’, which might include for example a boss that you need to answer to on the positive side; and ‘What might I miss when I achieve my dream life’, which for example might include less time with friends or loved ones. This latter question asks us to focus on the positive things we have in our current life.“Use Disney’s strategy to make a huge step in your life.”The beauty of the Disney strategy is the simplicity of the three phases. Be sure to spend most of your time focusing on the dream phase and try to expand your horizons as much as possible to ensure you are not limiting your ability to dream. Try reading books or studying others to explore new options. Dedicate a quarter of your time to the realisation phase as this is where you will see how you can move closer to your dream. Finally, spend the rest of your time on the consequences, as the final stage. Use the Disney Strategy to take a massive step in your life in the right direction, and, if you can please share the results with me.Happy dreaming till next time.Stay in lead!Olaf Kapinski

“Can we do this Agile, please?” “No, we can’t!” Still, so many IT-coworkers are (t)asked to do this project agile, rather than “classic”. I believe, this is the wrong approach: Use the right tool for the problem. Today’s Episode will define the criteria which leads to use waterfall or agile methods executing a project: * Complicated tasks shall be done using waterfall * Complex projects best are approached the agile way To give a very short differentiation here: Landing on the moon was complicated. A child’s birthday is complex.   This Year’s LeadershipStars Program will have a focus point on those methods. Mail me, if you are interested! Stay in lead OLAF KAPINSKI    

I work with People responsible for IT and even in 2020 I hear statements like “Olaf, I shall digitalize, can you help?”

“Perhaps in your countless episodes, there is already this hidden theme somewhere: What do you think are the first “tools/methods” that a manager should learn, use and above all improve? “ That was the question on Xing, the German competitor of LinkedIn. I was surprised that I couldn’t come up with an episode right away, nor did I find anything exactly fitting in the archive. Over 280 episodes and still no such summary? Let’s go! The first and most important management tools I have formed four segments and now recommend something for each one. Management Philosophy The profession of a manager is rarely defined and certainly not uniformly described. This starts with the names of the hierarchy levels and does not end with the different understanding of goals. Often it is a mixture of laziness and ignorance, which then says sentences like “Staff Meetings are done by HR for us.” Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik has laid the foundations here with “Leading Living Performing” and created a uniform and universally applicable management definition. I can only advise every manager to have read the book and do it again and again. Management tools Anyone who takes on personnel responsibility changes careers. Away from the specialist to the manager. The new job is no longer about the specialist tasks, but about getting other people to do the right things for you. The new job is about people, no longer about the profession. If you don’t want or can’t do this, please leave the task to someone else! We already have enough bad managers. Communications To interact with other people, communication is necessary. Communication is a craft that needs to be learned. Good leaders have even mastered it. There is a whole range of models for communication. Many theories, much structured knowledge. Managers want to make it their hobby, so to speak. I teach some models in the LeadershipStars Program that I find very helpful. In the coming program, this area will be expanded again heavily. Some recommendations: * Communication Styles * Schulz von Thun’s “Four Page Model” * Much of the neurolinguistic programming is directly usable You are interested in interpersonal communication. Selling, arguing, convincing, all just communication. But there are three tools that I consider fundamental and say that every manager must know, be able and use them: One on One Regular discussions with the employees. Feedback The only way to get permanently better employees Meetings They are still the biggest item on the calendar for many people and just as often there are complaints about poor meetings. Specialist tools In addition, each profession has its own specialist knowledge and methods. How your field is to be organized is probably already exhaustively described in several papers. For my IT department, ITIL is always being used. However, all managers want to be professionals in project management. Here is the standard PRINCE2. Again and again I can only recommend that you build your own area of responsibility along established standards. Understanding these and adapting them to your own needs is the fastest way to success. The third specialist tool is to align the organization with the goals to be achieved. I have already published a lot about this. Stay in the lead Your OLAF KAPINSKI

"Do tech gadgets make us more or less productive?!" Today we will discuss whether digital tools make us more or less productive at the workplace. This is a very interesting topic, because it is a bit heretical. All of these tech gadgets that are very nice and very fancy and very expensive can maybe reduce our productivity in the workplace. check our Youtube Channel "The more devices you have, the less focus you have on what you want!" Think about your average office environment: you have the person working there, they have their laptop or phone and the purpose of these devices is to connect us and to allow us to do our work. Unfortunately these are designed to get our attention. The more devices you have, the less focus you have on what you want. If you have a notification blinking up on your laptop every two seconds about an email or about a calendar meeting that’s for tomorrow, or next week, you cannot focus on the important tasks. In order to be a modern individual in the Western world, you have to be able to switch your attention quickly. It’s something that we adapted to as we are no longer working on farms and doing the same tasks over and over again. We need to be able to think quickly and adapt. However it’s this very act of adaptation that’s allowed you to become quick and to handle all of these digital tools that has made you less productive at certain other tasks. "Your brain gets used to patterns!" Why has this become so widespread? Your brain gets used to patterns. If the majority of time you’re required to have a very short attention span so you can jump for one after another or one topic to another, it’s going to be very difficult for you to sit down and switch your mind back into that long, slow, continual process of doing a very long task. It’s hard to switch between these different types of attention spans that you need. What’s the solution? The solution is having a little bit of order in your life We spoke a lot about is good. Have a designated time to check your digital tools so you’re not a slave to the device. It gives you that discipline. As leaders we need to reduce the amount of tools that people need to play with. If you’re responsible for a team of people, you need to understand that this can affect your concentration. As a manager you should be setting the example. If you have designated a time to do something, then stick to it and do only that specific activity! Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

Today’s topic should be an important lesson for any manager. Your employees are neither robots nor slaves. You hired your employee for their brain. As a manager you usually have ideas of what you want to achieve, but if I need to deep dive into how to achieve this then you can do this yourself! "Your employees are neither robots nor slaves!" When you tell your employees exactly what you want step by step, there is no space for their creativity; you also block all of their good ideas. Many managers out there complain about that. They’re still stuck in the daily business, and they are quite big when it comes to control. So control has lots of negative things. I do understand why we need to control from time to time. But control doesn’t feel good on your side! I hate to be controlled. Control is also a lot of effort. Instead, if we as managers assess the delivery of our employees and give constructive feedback consistently, after a while trust develops on both sides. I think it’s a very innovative style of leadership. If you think back 50, 60, or 70 years, you didn’t really need creativity as a worker. I have spoken many times about how the world is changing. Lots of consumer and offering markets have opened up! That means we have higher competition. The emphasis is on speed and innovation. check our Youtube Channel "Control the important stuff, not the easy stuff!" Now let’s go back to delegation and into control and trust. If I rely on my own brain, then I can only produce the stuff out of my own genius brain while ignoring all of the other brains in the company. I believe this is not the right approach for the majority of industries which are left in Europe. Control the important stuff, not the easy stuff. Lots of people just control the easy numbers. And the easy numbers are just not really related to the real outcome. If I give you this task out of the blue and the next morning I say, “Can you tell me this? Can you tell me what happened?” I would just ruin trust this way. "You control everything that is business critical!" This is this is not a fire and forget process. This is a permanent process of you handing over responsibility and decisions to your employees step by step by step. I call this management. You must understand which of your employees you can handle a little bit more responsibility. You control everything that is business critical. Don’t waste your time with controlling rubbish. Usually the real success is not really in the numbers so make sure that you control the right things and let go of the right things! Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

"The definition of leadership is to execute change!" Today we will be discussing change!  Every organization wants to change in a positive way. Whenever we do a topic like this, it’s always best to define what a word is because a lot of people have different conceptions. The definition of change: the verb is to make or become different and the noun is the act or the instance of making or becoming different. check our Youtube Channel "People create rumours if you leave this information gap open!" Let’s create one example which we discuss in depth. We have a business in 2020 that is now trying to rush into digitalization and online strategy. Let’s take a grocery store with maybe 100 stores or something. The change has to do with building up and online store and some delivery services. How does that make the standard employee feel? When there’s a change in a company, many times there’s a possibility of downsizing which means you lose your job! We discussed before that people slip back into fear when they do not know. And so you start feeling this this hectic and stressful thing. The morale of the team of your team is going to suffer and so the product that you put out will suffer. People feel this irrational response when you have an authority, which would be the management, that is not communicating properly.People create rumours if you leave this information gap open. To avoid this, when you start a big change than communicate, communicate, communicate! Share all the information that you have in a way that people can digest. I made a point in an earlier episode about how reacting is like being on autopilot. As a reactive individual, you do not need to make a decision because the decision is made for you! On the other hand, as a proactive individual, you have to assess and use your brain. Always make a decision. It could be the wrong decision, but make a decision. Don’t wait until a decision is made for you because by then it’s too late! Whether that be a business decision or a decision on a project that you’re delaying until the path becomes clear. Sometimes the path does not become clear and you have to choose. Nobody likes a reactive individual, but everyone wants to be one because it’s very easy! "3 Positive ways of fostering a team environment!" The definition of leadership is to execute change. So everybody who wants to become a leader must make decisions. Once you get into a leadership position, you don’t automatically become better at making decisions. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of skill to be able to transform into making a decision for a group of people. If you have a hard time making a decision for yourself, imagine what it’s like making a decision for a group of people! There are 3 positive ways of fostering a team environment,

Why do people, even intelligent, well-balanced throw themselves into fear and panic? This is similar to the phenomenon of managers being busy in an office and running around telling everyone how stressed and busy they are. It is a reactive lifestyle, but humans are naturally a reactive species. Reacting is safe, and much easier than being proactive. Not making decisions proactively saves you from having to predict what might happen; instead, you wait for something to happen and then adjust accordingly.  "Relating to the COVID-19 outbreak, we simply do not know!" Now, Coronavirus or COVID-19: the core of the problem is that we do not know, and as humans we fear what we do not know. Fear of the unknown has kept us alive for thousands of years. Relating to the COVID-19 outbreak, we simply do not know. Due to the prevalence of mis-reporting by authoritarian regimes (China, the origin of the outbreak is notorious for censuring domestic and international news outlets), or the fact that up to 80% of the population are asymptomatic, or the underestimation by developed countries such as the US and members of the EU has left a void.Conspiracy theories fill the void and can be explained by what in psychology is called teleologic bias, or the desire to believe that everything happens for some greater purpose. No one, regardless of level of education, is immune to these feelings. So reading and spreading doubtful information is going to happen when the authorities have no idea what they are talking about. You could say that this COVID-19 outbreak panic is a way for people to cope with something they know nothing about.  check our Youtube Channel "We can take for granted that our more basic needs will be met!" There is a psychologist named Abraham Maslow who coined the term “Hierarchy of Needs.” In the West and other developed countries, we can take for granted that our more basic needs will be met. Few of us have to really worry about food, clothing, or shelter, and even next-level worries, such as physical safety and security. Now suddenly some of these basics are under threat. Suddenly panic and hopelessness is part of every day life for many other countries.The act of hoarding buying up supplies when this all began is a method of coping psychologically. People feel safer when they took steps, even though hoarding all those supplies will not prevent you from catching a virus. Under crisis situations, people typically tend to rally around one another (this boosts our chances of survival). However, you can disrupt that if you deprive people of the opportunity to act in a coordinated way. If there are no trusted sources of information, such as when the authorities continually change their stories, then you get much less coordinated information. "People tend to rally around one another!"

"Home Office, or Pan-Office?" I’ve been reading a lot recently about doing home office. Because of the viral outbreak, many companies have started to explore the option of working from home. However, my thesis is this: nobody at the moment is doing home office! This thought stems from the Leadership Stars program, where we were very obviously talking about how we do this. There are several heads of IT in this program and we had conversations about how this works. It turns out (not really surprisingly) that the output of the people it’s far lower than what it was before!   check our Youtube Channel "Three differences!" I have three criteria which are, from my point of view, the differentiators between home office and what we do today. What we do are doing today I call “Pan-office,” or Pandemic office. I do not want anyone to call this home office because then otherwise, some people in six months time will come up with this crazy thesis and say “No, home office doesn’t work for us.”So what are the differences? The first is that home office is prepared. This means the company is prepared, the processes are prepared, the whole office itself is prepared. The companies know what they can give the employees in home office and the employee knows what to do in home office.This second differentiator is that home office is planned. I mean that I know my project requires deep work with no distractions. And I can do this best from home because there I can plan this. It’s naive to think that the people are at home. No, it’s the families who are at home! Kindergartens and schools are closed. Parents are kind of forced to do some home parenting, home learning or teaching at. People sit at home. They need to take care of the kids if they have them, they need to take care of the spouse if they have them, they need to take care of everything around. "Relationship power keeps organizations alive!" This is not home office in the in the way that we use the word in the middle of March 2020. I need to sit in a silent environment when I do my conference call. But sorry. There is no silent environment. And additionally, there’s the biggest differentiator: some of them are just simply afraid. Now we talk about trust! To trust the management that they will steer the ship through the cliffs and through the oceans. Some of them are scared because they don’t know if their company will survive. These are the three things that are so different from what we called home office and Pan-Office. Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

Today’s topic is for those who have been leaders for a while now and think it’s time for becoming better! Whether it be about new habits or introducing some new tools, improving yourself is the best thing you can do. "There are a variety of factors that are limiting their potential to change!" I know many managers that have been doing this for a long time who want to change. But there are a variety of factors that are limiting their potential to change. One of these factors is that they don’t want to change because of other people. What does this mean? Think of a manager that knows she has room for improvement. When it comes to making a decision in the office and all eyes on her, she resorts to her old behavior again because she is to shy to do otherwise!  So we have three main obstacles to your success: One is vanity, the other is laziness, and the final one is cowardice. If you are an individual that realizes they have a room for improvement, you are already ahead of the curve! But change takes more energy, so make sure you know WHY you want to change. My first advice for your process of change is this: Don’t look at back at your past! Don’t judge your past mistakes and how you failed to change them. Focus on what you hope to you achieve with your new behavior? Another issue is that people care too much about what others think of them. People are paralyzed and don’t want to move because they’re worried about what others think. Don’t be that person! This is known as the middle finger approach, because its all about doing what you think is right and forgetting what anyone else thinks! Be self-confident, even a little bit arrogant.  check our Youtube Channel "Many leaders are knowledge giants, but execution minions!" The main idea of this podcast is Live It, Lead IT. You need to take control and live your life in order to enhance your own experiences. There is a saying that many leaders are knowledge giants, but execution minions. They know what to do but they don’t do it! So what can you do to change that? Number one, don’t overestimate what others think about you because the others are too busy thinking about themselves! "Do not be afraid of change and shut off the autopilot!" Number two even if they judge you, you don’t need to care at all (remember The Middle Finger Approach!) Even if everybody knows you as the grumpy guy with the grumpy face, come to the office with a smile! Forget your reputation. I like when leaders are self-confident enough to say, “Okay, here’s something that we will try out. Give it eight weeks, and if it doesn’t work then let’s throw it away.” Do not be afraid of change and shut off the autopilot if you want to change a habit. Make sure you’re not too lazy, not too vain,