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
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 Illusion of Progress: Why we are Addicted to Activity but Starving for Outcomes
Most of what we call progress is just motion. Like Skinner’s pigeons pecking for pellets, we keep pressing buttons... emails, dashboards, tickets... mistaking activity for achievement. The comfort of busyness feels safe because it produces signals we can count, charts we can show, and rituals that look productive. But these are illusions. Fake wins hijack energy, distract from outcomes, and slowly make leaders worse. Real progress looks different: it’s narrow, uncomfortable, and leaves a bruise when it’s absent. If no one feels it, it wasn’t progress.
The Flow Illusion: How Productive Leaders Become Organizational Bottlenecks
We mistake personal productivity for progress. A leader with perfect inbox zero can still paralyze an organization waiting on their decisions. Productivity is not only about finishing more work but also about freeing more work. Throughput Stewardship means measuring not how much you do, but how fast you unblock others. Because sometimes, the most valuable thing you finish today… is someone else’s delay.