Introduction
Welcome to Digital for Productivity, the podcast for productive digitalization. By and with Thorsten Jekel. Nice to have you with us again for another episode of Digital for Productivity. Last week we had the first part of the interview with Peter Blum from the Performance Manager Podcast. If you haven’t heard this part yet, it’s best to listen to the previous episode again. And now it’s time for the second and final part of this interview about my latest book, Using Digital Tools Effectively. I hope you enjoy listening and have good ideas.
Thorsten Jekel
Sometimes solutions can look very simple. You said it about moving from know-how to do-how with a simple asterisk. That’s pragmatism and that’s how your tips are sometimes knitted, because you want us to make progress and not get bogged down in philosophical discussions. Another big topic is notes and of course there are many, many differences these days. There are people who use digital notes with digital tools, but you also see paper again and again. You even see paper slabs on some people’s desks, who use page after page after page and are then proud to start the next one, in quotation marks, when another slab of paper is full. Perhaps you can say a little something about this topic, but what are the advantages and problems of digital notes compared to traditional paper notes?
Peter Bluhm
I am far from saying that there is no use case for handwritten notes. In self-reflection, for example, there are definitely useful applications, such as simply writing things down in a paper notebook every morning: What are the things, my ten goals, that I have set myself for the next twelve months? What is my one-day goal for today? And reflect at the end of the day: What have I achieved? How much progress have I made on my topics? So this topic of journaling. And the process is almost more important than the result. And the topic can also involve handwriting – and I’m also a fan of beautiful writing instruments. So that’s why analog journaling can make sense. The moment I say: “Hey, you just mentioned it. The notebook is full. Now I need my notebook from last year. I have notes in my OneNote, which I think I’ve been using for 20 years, some of which are already 15 years old, from seminars I attended 15 years ago, where I recently said again: “Now I need something from this seminar, I have it in my OneNote because I always have all the seminars with me.
Peter Bluhm
I don’t or rarely have the chance to take 15 Klatten with me when I have a new Klatte every year. In other words, I don’t always have access to them myself. Point number two: I may have written something down in the office, taken the notebook home from the office or vice versa. That means I don’t have access to it everywhere. The next one is, what if others need access to it? So the secretary’s office, colleagues. And it’s not for nothing that Microsoft Teams now automatically includes a OneNote notebook with every new team. And another point is that with OneNote, even if I have a website, I can say that I want to save this website in a notebook. Now one or the other says: I can make it a bookmark. Yes, but I can’t search the full text of the content as a bookmark. Secondly, one or the other is always familiar with the issue: I can never find what I once bookmarked on Google, or the page may no longer be there. It remains available in OneNote. So it makes sense as an information storage for seminars, for lectures, where I am.
Peter Bluhm
It makes sense when I save web pages. It makes sense if I have notes that don’t fit into a document, that are unstructured. In my private life, we have a camper-man, as you know, so if, for example, we’ve found a good pitch somewhere, I make a note of the GPS coordinates on my smartphone straight away. It’s much easier digitally and even if I lose my device, I always have this information because I only have to sign in to my Microsoft 365 account again. That means you don’t lose things, you have an automatic data backup and you can access everything. One of the biggest challenges with this topic is that many people don’t use the option of having it synchronized on all their devices. So a note system like this only makes sense if you have it available on your smartphone, tablet, PC or Mac and in your web browser. I’m not sponsored by Microsoft, but I’m going to say that anything other than Microsoft OneNote is just a game. So I say that’s okay for personal use. Now you may or may not like Microsoft’s monopoly claim, but at the end of the day, the system has been around for, I think, 25 years or 30 years, it will still be around in the future.
Peter Bluhm
You don’t want to change your system all the time. I have already taken this with me across x different hardware platforms, my notes, which is also important, this topic. But also, coming back to what I said earlier: Please don’t convert bad analog habits into digital one-to-one. The former boss of Telefonica is always quoted as saying: “If you digitize a shitty analogue process, then I have a shitty digital process. And that’s a classic example of when I had an analog notebook and took meeting notes and meeting notes. It used to be difficult to keep track of tasks and to-dos. That’s no easier now in OneNote. You use other tools for that. But notes are an essential building block and ideally digital. And if I then have links, I can of course access them much more easily than in a paper pad. So for me, notes are also a building block in a sensible digital self- and team organization.
Thorsten Jekel
What I took away was that there is no silver bullet. Paper still has its place, perhaps even for things that you make a quick note of and then throw away, things that you don’t want to archive at all. And, of course, the issue takes on a further dynamic. For example, if you work in a team with digital notes – you mentioned Microsoft Teams OneNote. For example, I’ve also personally experienced that if you use Teams or OneNote in a team meeting and also take live minutes of what you discuss, so to speak, then of course the demarcation of the minutes is sometimes no longer so clear and that in the end, if you don’t set clear rules about what you actually record, you might even be in a fog: what have we actually decided? Because the discussion and decision are somewhere in a OneNote. A very specific topic. This means that rules are of course necessary at this point.
Peter Bluhm
Very, very important. And of course there is also a difference between a progress report and a results report. It’s an essential difference. There are still people who write progress reports. In very few areas do you need to say: “So, this was discussed, that was discussed and so on. The intelligent thing is that if you do this in online meetings today, for example, it’s now done by AI. This means that I can use the co-pilot in Microsoft Teams, for example, to say at the end of a competition: “So, what are the resolutions that we have just defined here? And what was discussed? I can even have the AI create a table and say: “What were the pros and cons of the specific topics? What did we do? And the results today are such that I can say … Well, that’s not all from the co-pilot, I’m thrilled, but the integration into teams is really extremely good. It works brilliantly. You can save a lot of time and I also work a lot in the area of Fox and Raiffeisen banks, for example, where the issue is that certain things still have to be documented in the board area.
Peter Bluhm
Yes, many people say: “I need something again and that’s why I have OneNote. Stop, in OneNote I can only ever share an entire notebook. But I can’t share a single note. That’s why it makes more sense in this case to create a Word document for this in a clear format, have it in Teams and then create a link in the corresponding Planner Board. And you can even automate this. So that’s another keyword where I say that many people don’t use the options that are available with Microsoft 365, for example. With Power automate, there’s the option of automatically documenting things in an audit-proof way.
Thorsten Jekel
A brief interruption on our own behalf at this point. We at Advisio are expanding our consulting team. If you would like to experience business intelligence tools and projects in practice, then become part of our team and apply as a consultant, junior consultant or for an internship. You can find all information at www. Advisio. De/career. I’m looking forward to getting to know you and continuing with the podcast. You’ve already touched on a topic that I also wanted to discuss with you and that we announced at the very beginning of this podcast, namely artificial intelligence. You mentioned Copilot. Now some people will say: “What kind of co-pilot? I’ve never heard of it. I’m familiar with Chatgpt. What kind of thing is that again? Maybe you can shed some light on it first.
Peter Bluhm
Yes, Microsoft has done something very intelligent. They have taken a strategic stake in OpenAI, the inventor of ChatGPT, and have done what other companies are also doing more and more in the BI area – you are certainly much deeper into this than I am – that many companies are saying: “Okay, artificial intelligence is of course nice when I open a browser and I go into ChatGPT, but wouldn’t it be much more productive if I had integrated artificial intelligence into my existing business applications? And that’s exactly the idea behind Microsoft’s Co-Pilot. And there are three levels here. In other words, there is the level where each of you can already go to the browser and use the Bing search. It’s now not only possible in the Edge browser, but also in other browsers. And without logging in, you even have the option of making queries on mobile devices, even with ChatGPT 4. Step number two is that if you have a Microsoft 365 account, you can log in to the browser with your Microsoft 365 account and then data protection kicks in. This means that this data is not returned to OpenAI. Particularly in the area of controlling, it is of course an important issue to say which sensitive data do I want to feed the AI with?
Peter Bluhm
This means that if I have a Microsoft Microsoft 365 account, the data will not be returned. And the third level is that I can book an additional license, which is user-related. So I don’t have to do it for the whole company. Maybe some of you remember the 300 license number that Microsoft originally went out with. Microsoft said that from 300 licenses you could also have an improved version of Co-Pilot, where it is integrated. This 300 license limit has been dropped. That means you can even say that if I now have a controller in a small company, I can now give the controller another Co-Pilot license for Microsoft 365 and then you have it integrated in Outlook, in Word, in PowerPoint and, of course, highly interesting for the controller, in Excel. This means that I can say I have a spreadsheet and then I can say: Let’s do this and the evaluations and the results are excellent, also more and more integrated in Power BI for those who use Power BI. So that’s the idea of Copilot, that I don’t just have the intelligence of ChatGPT separately, but integrated into my solution, which I work with every day.
Thorsten Jekel
Let’s make this a little more concrete. You’ve just mentioned this: how can you use this type of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, how can you use it in your daily business, in your daily working life, to become more efficient, to become more productive, to simply make your life easier?
Peter Bluhm
Yes, for example, I can … So AI can do two things in particular that are highly relevant in controlling. On the one hand, it can summarize things, i.e. compress them, and on the other hand, it can compile things, i.e. create them. And that’s why, especially in the area of controlling, you often have a jumble, a multitude of information. The topic of auditing is often also included in the area of financial and accounting controlling. Perhaps one or two CFOs are also responsible for auditing. After all, it’s about analyzing a jumble of data. And here you can say: “Man, I’m loading PDF documents, I have Excel files, I have Word files and I can then use this Copilot, which has its own tab, then also Copilot, I can say I’m practically querying my own data that I have in my company. And that is very interesting. In other words, whether it’s Teams data, Outlook data, Word data, PowerPoint or ERP data, I can query it there. I can create overviews, I can identify patterns, because evaluation is a very important topic. Point number two, one or the other controller is also familiar with the fact that pivot tables are often used today to create evaluations that have been coordinated and then the sales department comes along and says: “I need a slightly different evaluation.
Peter Bluhm
I need that again, I need that again? In the past, the solution was to use pivot tables to say: “So, here you have the relevant things that you can select, or if you work with business intelligence solutions, then of course I have this at a higher level with Qobes and so on, so that I can do this accordingly. And the idea is that both in the simple solutions, Excel-based through BI to business intelligence solutions, it will be increasingly possible to make ad-hoc evaluations, that different things, where I perhaps had to spend a lot of time today as a controller, simply adapt this for the addressees of the reports as they need it. Once again, this goes in the direction of making it easier for them as controllers, right up to the topic of self-service, where I say: “Okay, the users can do a lot more in self-service. I think you can almost say more about that than I can. I think the systems are moving more and more in the direction where I say: “Please relieve the controller of the billo tasks, in the sense of “Push to the left, push to the right, but they should really deal with the data.
Peter Bluhm
And AI is very, very good at recognizing patterns. And on the other hand, I can also use it to formulate a report for myself, to say: “I have a report, I have a decision recommendation, then AI can help me, for example, to say: “I’ll enter five keywords somehow, then it will write me a complete report. Or, which is also intelligent, I can say: “I have an idea for a recommendation here. Please give me five counter-arguments as to why this is not a good idea. So you can also use this AI wonderfully to be challenged, to say: “I have five recommendations here. Please give me some more recommendations based on our data, or on external data if necessary. So AI can analyze, AI can generate and AI can also be a very valuable sparring partner because we as humans simply have a slightly smaller hard drive and don’t always have as much access to things. And that’s why I don’t always like the term “artificial intelligence”, but I always like the term “augmented intelligence”, because I say that it’s practically an extension of controller intelligence, that they say: “Before we start with AI, I always prefer common sense.
Peter Bluhm
But if I can now extend this with artificial things, then controlling can concentrate even more on the topic of “decision support”, which in my view is the core task.
Thorsten Jekel
Now, of course, you could make a whole podcast series about ChatGPT. It would probably go on for years. In other words, we could say a lot more about this. But I would perhaps like to take the opportunity, because you have just given me a concrete example with five counter-arguments to an argument that I see more and more often that a prompt, i.e. a command, is entered, a request is entered in ChatGPT. You get a result and accept it, and if you don’t like it, you start all over again, so to speak, and enter a new prompt. And many people don’t understand, perhaps because it’s important to use these tools, that when you’re in a conversation, in a thread with ChatGPT, you’re basically like in a briefing. In other words, you can say: “Watch out, I don’t like what you’ve delivered here. The five arguments are too shallow. Please adapt them again. In other words, it’s like talking to a person, like briefing a person, giving feedback, getting a new result. And I believe that many, many people have not yet realized this, but it is important.
Peter Bluhm
100% agreed. So I always like to compare it with a new employee. If you now have a new controlling employee, you can say: “So, let’s do a sales analysis. So, what’s the result? But if I say: “So, I have a sales meeting next week, Friday. So, I need an evaluation of the regions. I need actuals, I need a forecast, I need a plan over which period of time to say, “What conclusions do I want to draw from this? And a good employee will ask again afterwards. So you can also say with a ChatGPT prompt, for example: “Please ask me more questions to optimize the prompt again. And I always ask him beforehand: “Did you understand everything? Is everything correct? What other questions do you have? There are also questions. And that’s exactly as you rightly say. It’s like with an employee. If I say to the employee: “Make me a sales analysis, of course I’ll get completely different information than if I say: “That’s the goal, that the target group: “Please look at these documents, look at this sample. I’d like to have it the way we need it, for example, and then make several loops.
Peter Bluhm
So please don’t always believe the first result straight away. It’s the same when you ask a person. So with certain questions, I also know who I’d rather not ask. And maybe you ask two or three people from time to time. So it’s also a good idea not to forget the basic principles that you have in the human world in the artificial world, because then you often get this frustration effect. So there’s this Gartner hype cycle in various areas and the idea is always that we’re particularly good in Germany, a new technology comes along and then we’re super excited at first, everything’s great, ChatGPT, artificial intelligence can do everything. And then comes this valley of disappointment. That’s where we are right now in Germany and in 2024. Miriam Meckel has just written a great book, which I’ve just read, where she says: “Man, in 2024 there will be a lot of disappointments in this area, because a lot of people say: “Oh, they’ll get stupid results because they ask stupid questions. So, and then they drop out instead of working on this prompt, on the use, on the input.
Peter Bluhm
The better I train an employee, the better I brief them, the better I give them feedback, the better they work. And ultimately, AI and IC are intelligent colleagues and should be used in exactly the same way.
Thorsten Jekel
I might also chat a bit from the sewing box here. You can also prepare podcasts this way. You can ask AI: “What could be ten questions for Thorsten Jekel about his new book “Using digital tools effectively? And then you actually get ten very, very useful questions. And you can then say or ask AI: “Do you know Thorsten Jekel’s book? And then, funnily enough, AI says: “No, I don’t know the book, but these are my questions about Thorsten Jekel, because I know Thorsten Jekel and that will fit to some extent. And then you can say to AI: “Man, I’ll give you the outline of the book and then see what you can make of it, in addition to what you’ve recognized so far. Then AI says: “That’s great that you want to do that, Peter. And that’s how AI talks to you: You have to work with ChatGPT in the same way and in the end you get very, very good questions. Of course, you then have to edit them a bit. You have to think about it: What do you actually want? But at the end of the day, it’s also a very specific example of how you can possibly prepare presentations in the company.
Thorsten Jekel
Keyword companies. You work a lot in medium-sized companies and if you take a look at the status of digital tools there. What would you say are perhaps the three biggest areas where you would talk about productivity boosters that should be tackled?
Peter Bluhm
Yes, so for me, and I don’t get a commission for this, so for me this topic of Microsoft 365, if it is used intelligently, is really a productivity driver, because I can simply continue to collaborate within the company and with external parties. So that’s point number one. Point number two is to say, please don’t just dump it in as a system, but as with any IT introduction, as with business intelligence solutions, where you are the professional, to say, first switch on the brain, then the technology. So to say, how do we use this, not to implement processes one-to-one, but to either kill them or make them better? So when using it, not just one-to-one, but then. And of course the big topic at the moment, also in connection with Microsoft 365, but also beyond that, is artificial intelligence, because artificial intelligence has the potential to generate cost savings of up to 60% in companies by automating repetitive activities and can also be used to create new business areas. So if I look at the bottleneck behind many resources … And I’ll give you an example: a good friend of mine deliberately converted his company into an AG last year because he said he wanted to set up an online MBA program here and needed capital as resources to generate this content, build it up and so on.
Peter Bluhm
So, he said that he now does this via AI. So that means he would no longer have needed these financial resources. That means there’s the possibility that I have a clear efficiency advantage anyway, but you probably also know The State of AI by McKinsey. They take a look at what particularly successful companies are doing with AI and what less successful companies are doing with AI. And the less successful ones focus on costs. The absolute champions always ask themselves the question: How can I even get into a new business area? For example, if I’m in the online sector or have things where I can’t get into markets today because I don’t speak the language, then I can say, I can upload German videos in HeyGen today, I can get them out in Indian, Chinese, whatever, and I can immediately go into other markets or communicate better within the company. So these are the key points where I say Microsoft 365, please switch on your brain first, then use the technology, the processes, and thirdly use AI to become more productive and open up new business areas.
Thorsten Jekel
Now, of course, you can already feel throughout the podcast how dense the information in the book is. There’s one point after the next and then the next point and you’re just gushing. All of this is contained in the book “Using digital tools effectively”, plus the extensive additional materials we discussed, which basically make up a whole video course and add another book on top, so to speak. Published by Gabalverlag, it costs 30 euros. So it’s really recommended for anyone who says, “I don’t just want to think about it, I really want to take concrete action and optimize myself, perhaps a little out of necessity, so that I realize: “Man, time is limited. I only have 24 hours and I have to make good use of them because otherwise it’s not healthy. Is there anything else – and this is probably a question that I’m not allowed to ask – in your book that we haven’t discussed and that is particularly close to your heart, where you say: “Man, I have to say a few words about that.
Peter Bluhm
So one of the key issues that I’m also talking about in terms of controlling, for example, is that yesterday, I was with a customer and the sales manager said: “My dream would be if I could automatically generate a forecast from AI without having to nag the sales team again on this topic. And the biggest bottleneck here is not the technology, but the data quality. And that’s an issue where I think I’m running into an open door with you, to say that the quality of the evaluations naturally depends on the question: How good is the system? How good are my questions? Only if I don’t have any data, no structured data, no good data quality, then things get tight. In sales, this is often the case with CRM. So that means, even if you might say, as listeners. I’m not so keen on the topic of AI yet, start now and it always helps to work on your data quality so that you simply create awareness among sales representatives as to why this is so important. You can also use AI to a certain extent to cleanse data, but doing it right the first time is a good idea and you simply have to think about it.
Peter Bluhm
I’m assuming that it’s also in line with your experience that you say there’s always this saying “garbage in, garbage out” and that of course applies to the topic of data in particular. So data quality is an issue where you should ideally work on it every day.
Thorsten Jekel
You’re right about that. Automated forecasting is playing an increasingly important role, an ever greater role, because forecasting has almost become more important than planning, annual planning. We live in dynamic times where a one-year plan is no longer of any use; you have to constantly adapt. And this adaptation of constant forecasting is of course only possible if you think about: “How can I simplify this? “How can I have AI support this somewhere? “How can I automate this? Otherwise, there simply isn’t enough time in controlling, because you don’t have to twiddle your thumbs, you have enough to do. And the exciting thing and the good news is that it’s no longer a case of looking into a crystal ball, where the witch sits behind it and then something comes out, but medium-sized companies are also taking a very pragmatic approach to the topic. You always have to make a big deal out of it, but you can also tackle very specific individual issues. We’ve already talked about this in individual podcast episodes, where customers say: Wow, we had a very specific issue. We have even increased the accuracy of our forecasts compared to how we proceeded before when we interviewed people.
Thorsten Jekel
We still consult them, but our forecasting accuracy has improved so much. And that not only leads to us patting ourselves on the back, but also to us saving euros, to put it bluntly. And if you’re interested, you can also find one or two podcast episodes on this very topic, where customers report on how automated forecasting in small project modules has had a huge impact in medium-sized companies. I’m not just talking about large corporations that do things anyway, but about medium-sized companies with limited resources. You’re absolutely right that this is a key issue. That’s an absolutely correct observation, which I also share. Let’s move on to the last question of the podcast, Thorsten. And that is: When I started the podcast around seven years ago – has it been that long – I always asked the gesture at the end: what advice would you give to young controllers to help them get ahead professionally? I stopped doing that at some point, because at some point everything had been said. But now I’ve been approached again recently by controllers who have said: “Wow, yes, you asked that seven years ago, but the world has changed a bit.
Thorsten Jekel
Please start again with this question at the very end of the podcast. We want to hear what your experts have to say. What is your tip? What advice would you give to young controllers today to get them on the right track?
Peter Bluhm
I think that’s a very good and very important question. And sometimes you wish you could go back into the profession with the experience you have now, then some things would be easier, which leads me to a few tips, and you can’t go back longer in the job itself, but if you’re starting out, you can use the potential of your more experienced colleagues. In other words, I’m a big fan of approaching those who you might initially perceive as digital dinosaurs with respect and saying: “Yes, maybe they’re sometimes not as digitally savvy as you would expect. However, you often have the advantage that the more experienced employees know the business extremely well. And if you then say that there are also companies, reverse mentoring programmes, that even institutionalize something like this, that you say: Man, how can we learn from each other with respect? Learning from each other, so to speak. It is often the case that the experienced employees know the business much better, while the younger employees are perhaps a little more digitally savvy. Which brings me to the second point that the manager asked yesterday: we used to work for each other.
Peter Bluhm
I currently notice that we are working together more. How can we get back into a culture of leadership? So, and when you’re young and you go in, there’s a nice video of Barack Obama where he’s also asked, how much do you like the younger employees? And that’s an important point, to say that you work for other people. Be helpful, be off service, fucking deliver. Sorry for the F-word, but to say, simply deliver, be valuable and ultimately something that I have always done in my own experience, that they say: “I’d rather say sorry than ask permission. So please be courageous and, if in doubt, don’t get another 35 safeguards, because I recently posted another quote from Steve Jobs this week where he said: “Ideas win in good organizations, so politics win in bad organizations. And that’s why you don’t play the game, you just do it and if it goes wrong, then say clearly: “Okay, sorry, I screwed up, maybe I overstepped the mark a bit. I won’t do it again. I’ve learned that and if you have a good manager, they’ll even support you.
Thorsten Jekel
That was Thorsten Jekel. We talked about his latest book: Using Digital Tools Effectively, published by Gabal Verlag. And I thank you, Thorsten, not only for talking about your book, but also for taking the opportunity in today’s podcast to really hammer out the content, I’ll say that very casually at the end. I absolutely recommend buying it and anyone who listens to the podcast knows that I don’t actually do that, but the book is a practical book. Anyone can immediately extract their efficiency potential from it. So thank you very much for your contribution today.
Peter Bluhm
Thank you very much for your invitation, dear Peter.
Conclusion
This was the second part of the interview with Peter Blum from the Performance Manager Podcast. I hope you got one or two good ideas from it and look forward to the next interview episodes, which will also be part of this interview podcast. Of course, I will also be doing my own solo episodes afterwards, but I always find it very exciting to have this exchange with others and to share it with you as part of my podcast. Feel free to let me know which topics you would like more information and podcast episodes on and which interview guests you would like to see. I’ll be happy to invite them to this podcast for you. Until then, all the best.
Yours, Thorsten Jekel.
Also available in: Deutsch
