I’ve always been an engineer at heart. Not just by education, but by instinct. I look for structure. I want to understand what holds a system together, where it breaks under stress and what needs to change so it becomes stable again. Early in my career I believed – quite honestly – that the hardest part of progress would be technology.
In real industrial environments, the toughest challenges are rarely technical. The real friction sits between functions, between regions and headquarters, between short-term pressure and long-term direction. It sits in unclear decision rights, in meetings without outcomes, in the silent gap between what people say in presentations and what they do. At some point I realised: if you want to create impact, you don’t just need a good solution. You need a way to turn complexity into decisions people can trust. That is the context in which Frankfurt School became important for me.
When I started the programme, I didn’t do it because I wanted to “be more technical.” I did it because I wanted to become more consequent in how I form judgment. Data, for me, was never the goal. It was the discipline behind the goal. Frankfurt School trained me to slow down where it matters: to separate signal from noise, to ask better questions, to be precise with assumptions and to test what I believe against evidence. In day-to-day life, that changes something fundamental. I became less interested in being right, and more interested in seeing clearly. I stopped arguing about opinions and started aligning on what would actually reduce uncertainty.
But there was another lesson that grew alongside that: even good evidence doesn’t move an organisation if the decision system is weak – I see that every day due to my profession as Top-Management-Consultant. That’s why this special programme felt like the missing complement later on. It sharpened my understanding of responsibility, governance and long-term value. Not governance as bureaucracy – but as a form of protection- protection of trust, of accountability and of the organisation’s ability to act without tearing itself apart. It helped me look at leadership decisions through a different lens: not just “is this clever,” but “is this sustainable,” “is this owned,” and “is this resilient under pressure.”
Somewhere in between sits a third influence in my life: innovation and startup thinking, which I also explored through an MBA focus in that area. That mindset keeps me honest. It reminds me that speed matters, that customer reality matters, and that learning beats perfection. It also taught me that innovation is not a romantic story of creativity it is a discipline. It’s the willingness to test, to adjust, to learn – and to accept that progress comes from iteration and to a fewer extent – from planning.
What Frankfurt School did for me was help these worlds meet. It gave me the analytical backbone to treat uncertainty professionally. It gave me the governance perspective to treat responsibility seriously. And it strengthened my belief that innovation only becomes real when an organization can absorb it – when it has the operating model, the decision cadence and the leadership maturity to scale what works.
And then there is something that is harder to describe, but just as real: the spirit among alumni. Across countries and industries, you feel a shared tone – curious, pragmatic, international and direct. You meet Frankfurt School people and the conversation quickly goes beyond small talk. It becomes a real exchange: what have you learned, what are you seeing, what is changing, what would you do differently? In a world that is moving fast, that kind of community is a part of staying sharp, grounded and connected to reality.
If I try to express my lessons in life in one sentence, it would be this: complexity doesn’t disappear. You either learn to navigate it – or it navigates you. Frankfurt School supported me in building that navigation skill. Not as theory, but as a way of thinking. And that way of thinking is what I carry into everything I do today: staying curious, staying structured, staying responsible and never confusing activity with progress.
I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful for the people I met along the way – because in the end, learning is never just about content. It’s about becoming someone who can make better decisions when it matters most.
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