My Biography
If I had to pick two leadership skills worth practicing, I’d go with kindness and curiosity.
Hi, I am Robin. I am a leadership strategist and entrepreneur operating at the intersection of strategy and organizational change… and the open ocean. I help executives develop and execute strategies for organizational transformation by combining leadership practices with an entrepreneurial mindset and technological understanding. The result: Systems that actually work in dynamic environments and develop teams that are robust enough to survive the next crisis. My philosophy is simple: Leadership starts where control ends. It's the art of activating people toward a common goal, even when the context shifts. I don’t just teach this but I live it. As a founder of the venture capital firm Njordis and the education company Global Institute of Leadership and Technology, I’m a builder first. For more than a decade, I’ve been advising leaders and executives across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas on how to develop progress-driven teams. I also work with HR teams to design organizational learning programs that not only deliver content but instead focus on behavior change and actual skill adoption. I don’t hand out generic motivation. I partner with you to fix problems, seize opportunities, and move from stagnation to progress. Over the last decade I:→ Worked with 3,000+ executives on their transformation efforts to deliver results in dynamic environments across Europe, the US Asia, and the Middle East.→ Designed leadership development strategies for Deutsche Telekom, Lufthansa, Volkswagen, and Banco Santander, among others.→ Advised 650+ founders and startups on strategy, fundraising, scaling, and organizational development.→ Taught leadership, entrepreneurship, and innovation at universities including the European Business School, Frankfurt School, the University of Barcelona and NYU.→ Advised global bodies like the European Commission and the World Economic Forum on innovation ecosystem strategies.→ Built ventures in software, education, healthcare, logistics, and retail — and am now launching an investment platform to scale innovations in the blue economy In my work, I’m most interested in what people do when things are unclear. Not what they say in slide decks, but how they sense the next step, adjust to take action, and challenge their decisions. I believe leadership should feel real and that kindness and curiosity are key skills to focus on. And that the most useful question is often: “What’s one thing we can do by the end of today?” If you’re looking for someone who brings structure without rigidity, energy without theatrics, and clarity without fluff, I’d be happy to talk. If there’s good coffee and a marker in the room, even better.
Essays
Upping the Game: How AI forces you to be significantly better than before
AI has raised the "productivity floor," making the ability to generate polished drafts a cheap commodity rather than a sign of competence. As the bottleneck shifts from information retrieval to critical judgment, value is no longer found in the volume of output but in the ability to filter, verify, and make defensible decisions. To thrive, individuals must move beyond "good enough" AI summaries and focus on high-level synthesis and sharp questioning that anchors automated work in reality.
The Great Lie of Complexity: Why the “Big Picture” is where progress goes to die
Big Picture Thinking is often just sophisticated procrastination that paralyzes us by widening the gap between a problem's size and our ability to act. We use complexity as camouflage to avoid the risk of execution, but this only stalls progress. The solution is to ignore the vastness and find the "Minimum Unit of Meaningful Motion", the absolute smallest action that moves you forward. You cannot control the ocean, but you can always control the next stroke.
The Hidden Tax of Curiosity: Why Possibility Overload Leaves You Fragmented
Curiosity expands our world, but it also comes with a hidden tax: every spark of interest opens a mental loop the mind continues to monitor. Over time, these unresolved possibilities accumulate into cognitive debt and emotional residue, not because we commit to too much, but because we consider too much. The dilemma isn’t distraction but the bandwidth required to process possibility. Curiosity remains essential, but its value increases when we learn to close loops intentionally instead of generating more of them.