Introduction
Welcome to Digital for Productivity, the podcast for productive digitalization. By and with Thorsten Jekyll. Nice to have you with us again for another episode of Digital for Productivity. And in the next few episodes, you’ll be able to experience some interview episodes where I’ve been invited onto other podcasts or vice versa. You can now look forward to the first part of the interview with Peter Blum. In addition to the Performance Manager Podcast, which I can highly recommend to anyone who is interested in controlling and performance management. Now to the first part of the interview with Peter Blum.
Peter Bluhm
Welcome to the Performance Manager Podcast. My name is Peter Blum. I am the Managing Director of the business intelligence consultancy at Visio Consult and your host in the podcast. Have you ever cursed digitalization and longed for the analogue age? Maybe sometimes, but not really, right? But of course, digitalization also brings new challenges. Many people have the feeling that the amount of work and complexity are increasing more and more. Some manage to increase their productivity and become more efficient. Others have the feeling that they are becoming more and more stressed. Is this due to the digital tools themselves or to how we use them? Today, I have invited a guest on this current and exciting topic who, as an expert in digital working, knows more about the use of digital tools than anyone else and supports companies in becoming more productive through digitalization. He is a consultant for management boards, supervisory boards and entrepreneurs, as well as an author and keynote speaker. Today I would like to welcome Thorsten Jekel and talk to him about his new book “Using digital tools effectively. But before we get into the podcast, welcome to the podcast, Thorsten Jekel.
Thorsten Jekel
Many thanks to the Bloomy Stars. For those who haven’t heard of Bloomy Stars yet, we even produced a video together at a controlling event at Bantago. So from that point of view, numbers and controlling topics can also be fun. And it’s always fun with you on the podcast, dear Peter Blum. And what I do is I’m a personal IT coach for managers. That means, based on almost 36 years of professional experience, where I started selling cash registers at Heinz Nix in 1988, I always deal with two topics, namely the question of how to sell more and how to use technology to do so. These are my two passions and ideally, as a company, you earn money with them, which of course brings us straight to the subject of performance management.
Peter Bluhm
You mentioned that it should be fun and of course work should also be fun and if you can use digital tools, then it should also be fun and not lead to stress. And you’ve written a very topical book about this. It’s called “Using digital tools effectively. Subtitle: Move into the fast lane with new technologies. And when you’re faced with a blank page, you naturally ask yourself: “Should I write a book? Should I not write a book? After all, it’s a lot of work and you won’t earn much money with it. What was the trigger for you to write this book at this time?
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, it is now my ninth book. So with that in mind, I’ve been through the process a few times and for me, the basic motivation behind my general work – which is also largely reflected in the title piece – is that I realize that most people and most companies use technology as if they were driving a new 11-series Porsche at 60 km/h in first gear in the right-hand lane. So we have high-performance systems. Today, in the age of artificial intelligence, we have yet another expansion of our possibilities and we only use a single-digit percentage of these possibilities. And my mission is to help people and companies to move into the fast lane and, as you mentioned, to move a little bit from digital frustration to digital pleasure, because there is often this saying, I don’t know if you know it? What Windows and a U-Bot have in common. Do you know that?
Peter Bluhm
No, I don’t know.
Thorsten Jekel
That’s quite clear. As soon as you open the first window, the problems start. In other words, we often have negative connotations when it comes to IT. And I always say that if you do the whole thing right, there is definitely a parallel there. As you know, I’m married to a controlling professor. At the latest with Nicole and with you, the topic of controlling is also fun and with me, the topic of IT is fun.
Peter Bluhm
At this point, a brief interruption on our own behalf.
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I look forward to getting to know you and we’ll continue in the podcast. Now you’ve mentioned it: Many people have a 911 Porsche in their garage and sometimes drive around in it, but don’t even realize how slowly they’re going. And many people aren’t even aware of the possibilities of digital tools. They think: “Wow, what we’re doing is already using the full power, so to speak. And then you say, of course, that may be the case for some people, but for the majority of those who use it, that’s definitely not the case. So perhaps the very first question that arises in relation to your book is: Who did you write it for? Who can buy it?
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, anyone can buy it now, of course, but the target group is primarily business users, just like in my work, where it’s about how I can use technology to sell, become more productive, get better personal self-organization. So the focus is on “business users, “managers, “project managers. These are the people who can benefit most from this book.
Peter Bluhm
Of course, some people will say: “Don’t talk about the book for so long, go into the book. Of course, that’s what we’re going to do now. Perhaps you could start by giving us an overview: What topics do you cover in the book? How is it structured?
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, on the one hand, it’s not just a book, but the Gabal series that was published, Digitales Lernen is the series, is, I think, a very nice format. André Jünger has a format here where he says that there are certain topics, such as IT, that are so fast-moving and where the video format makes total sense because you can show things. It’s a combination of book and video. There are even a few hundred videos to go with this book. It’s a mixed thing. Firstly, it’s the format. Secondly, it simply deals with the essential topics, starting with the topic of “message flood, saying we’re all drowning in our e-mails, through to the highly topical subject of artificial intelligence and in between in all the areas that you need, namely the question of how to deal with documents, how to deal with notes, how to have data synchronization on all devices, how to work together with an assistant. So you can already see the classic topics that you also have in the business environment. And of course that’s also why I wrote a book in 2013, Digital Working for Managers. You’ll find one or two basic principles there, because there are a few generative basic principles that I think still apply.
Thorsten Jekel
And of course, many things such as live streaming and online conferences have been added over the years.
Peter Bluhm
We could, of course, go into the individual topics that you mentioned, but I would really like to point out the additional material that you just mentioned, because when you buy a book, normally there are two or three PDFs and maybe a checklist. It’s really different with you. When you buy the book, you also get a whole flood of online checklists, working papers and videos. Perhaps you would like to say something explicit about this, because it really is something very special.
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, very, very much so. The idea is simply that a book is no longer relevant the moment it is printed. In other words, I handed it in at the end of last year. That means it was published at the beginning of this year. There is a lot going on every week in the field of AI. And with this topic alone, we can update it much more easily online. In other words, there are current topics here. Here I show things live on the screen, where you can see how it works, because I always have the basic principle that I want to bring my customers, my readers, from digital know-how to digital do-how, because I experience, for example, that this is also the case with AI, when I always ask: Who has ever heard of ChatGPT? All fingers go up. If I then go on to ask: Who has ever used GPT at all? Then, I say, fewer hands go up. And if I then ask again: Who has used the paid version? And who has ever secured their own GPT? Then there won’t be many left. And I would like to encourage people to use the technological possibilities that we have today, but to use them wisely.
Peter Bluhm
It’s good that you bring up the topic of ChatGPT, because we’ll come back to it later, because there’s so much in it and you’ll also give very specific tips, including for CFOs and controllers, on how to become more productive in day-to-day business, in controlling. But that will come at a later date. Now, of course, I thought to myself: “Gosh, we can’t cover all the topics in your book. If we did, we’d be in a five-hour exam and would probably only have discussed everything superficially. But I always picked out individual topics. And one topic that is very acute for all of us is the flood of emails. When you’ve barely left your desk and gone to the kitchen to get a coffee and you come back, there are already ten emails and lots of spam too, of course. How do you deal with this? How can you possibly minimize messages and make them more effective?
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, there are several starting points. Firstly, if I start on the receiving end, when I’m sitting at my desk as a manager, I allow someone to run into my office every two minutes and slam a pile of mail on my desk. I wouldn’t allow that, especially when I might be working on an analysis in peace. In other words, when the door is closed and I’m working on it in peace and quiet, I wouldn’t have any mail slammed on my desk. So why do we have digital mail slammed on our desks? So that’s why, I always have the analogy of saying: would we do things in the analog world that we do in the digital world? No one would have mail slammed on their desk. Don’t do it in the digital world either. Point number two: I know this. My father used to be a top manager before there was e-mail. He had a secretary’s office. I, for example, am a big opponent of abolishing assistants. But then I see that even board members and CFOs who have assistants don’t use them to pre-sort their digital mail. No manager used to open their own mail.
Thorsten Jekel
Today we open the digital post, where I say: “Please think again. That’s why I always say switch on the brain first and then the technology. Things that you didn’t do in the analog world as a manager shouldn’t necessarily be done in the digital world either. And also, if I may use another analogy that I always like on the subject of production. Imagine I’m tightening a tire on the assembly line and a colleague of mine is on the other side. So now it goes bing, I run back to the foreman’s office and check my e-mail. I run back again, but of course I have to go five meters further because the car has already moved on. Then it goes Bing again, I run back again. By the third time at the latest, my colleague would ask me if I had lost a wheel, in the truest sense of the word. So that’s also the issue: in the office situation, we often still work the way we did in the last millennium, whereas in production we optimize a lot. And that leads me to the broadcasting side, if I take a look now. The technology we use in production back in the 1940s was invented by Toyota.
Thorsten Jekel
When I say today, for example, in a jour fixe I recently had, I asked a board secretary: “How many e-mails do you have in preparation for a jour fixe that you have once a week, 50 times a year? And she said: “Well, I always have at least 20 e-mails before and after. That means, six people, 50 meetings, 20 e-mails, I have 6000 e-mails a year. We’ve replaced this with a planner, a board where I say I have a topic memory, I have topics, current meeting, I have to-do, I have done, I have documented. The whole thing can even be done in such a way that decisions are automatically archived. In other words, this is the sender side, where we simply don’t use technology today because we say: “Okay, we just have a paper letter and we’re not going to do it digitally, instead of saying we’ll use Kanban tools. Or even, the best email is the one that hasn’t been written, namely to say: “Okay, for example, I recommend companies to be rude internally, to stop saying thank you internally. To give you another very specific little tip, I would say that we are often socialized to say: “I’ll write her something and then she says: “Thank you back.
Thorsten Jekel
If I send an e-mail to 20 people, I get 20 e-mails back. I can leave that alone. And especially when I use Microsoft 365, for example, I even have customers who say that there is an in-house zero email policy, that they say I can do it differently. And when you introduce new technologies, it’s important that I consistently switch off old technologies. Ideally, I don’t just switch off one old system, but I switch off two old systems when introducing a new system, which reduces complexity.
Peter Bluhm
There’s already so much in there for you, Thorsten. You could turn that into a podcast of its own. Let me perhaps simplify this once again. You talked about the piles of mail that you just throw on your desk, so to speak, every minute. If I understood you correctly, that means we live in an online world, but it has become necessary in an online world to consciously go offline from time to time, to have the courage to a certain extent. For some people, this may also mean having the courage to go offline with the self-confidence, the self-image to simply leave this online world, the online world, and then really take up what has happened online again in a targeted manner, in addition to everything you have said, of course.
Thorsten Jekel
Absolutely. So if I take a look now, the target group of this podcast is CFOs, controlling managers. And I don’t think the target group for this podcast is someone who has to deal with production downtimes, the IT helpdesk or other emergencies, but rather with structured analysis, decision support, decision recommendations and the evaluation of business management measures. So of course, if I’m in the fire department, I can’t say I have an answering machine and I call it once a week, then the box is burnt down by the time I’ve listened to it on Friday. Sure, but as a rule we don’t have that. And I even have a very specific tip, for example: in my email signature, it says at the bottom: “PS: I read my emails once in the evening at the end of the day, usually after my customer appointment. In urgent cases, please send me an iMessage text message at this cell phone number. And you know, I’m the one with the two watches. I already had the analog watch before, I didn’t want to throw it away now, I’ve been saving up for it for a long time. And the Apple Watch, I have a watch face where I can see immediately when I receive a text message. In the days of WhatsApp, nobody writes text messages anymore, it’s extremely reliable.
Thorsten Jekel
And if you don’t have an Apple Watch there, most people have a smartphone and can say, for example, I’m deactivating all notifications except text messages. In other words, of course it’s important to have an emergency channel, perhaps between the assistant and the manager, but not everything is an emergency channel. And just now, before our talk, I spent half an hour talking to Lothar Seiwert, the time management expert, who is now a good friend of mine and with whom I have also written a book. And 30 years ago, when I bought your first book, he showed me the Eisenhauer Window, the Eisenhauer Matrix, where he said it was important and urgent. And sometimes, of course, these are old concepts, but I would say that breathing is also a pretty old concept, but it has somehow stood the test of time. So sometimes, especially in the digital age, as you say, it’s really good to concentrate on the focus that we as managers sometimes lose with all the digital noise.
Peter Bluhm
Let’s talk about a second classic topic. It’s not a new topic at all, but it really is a classic topic that is still unresolved for many. And that is the digital file storage structures. We have files that we will not be able to prevent, that we will not be able to abolish. And of course there are now also tools in which they can be stored, including in Teams and in SharePoint. But the question remains, of course, what structure do you give yourself for filing? What do you have to contribute?
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, so a few thoughts. The first thought is to keep saying: What can I do to ensure that there is no document at all? So to say: “Okay, what do I have to do? That’s the first question: “How can I avoid it? For example, if I create a Planner Board in teams in a Jour fix via the Planner, then I no longer need to create a written Word document that I have to file somewhere, but all six or ten participants in this meeting who have access to this Planner Board always have the current status without there being new meeting minutes every week. So the first step is to avoid documents. The second step is to have a clear structure. And this structure is not about saying: “This is the structure, the only true one. I always like to give a reference plan point, namely in accounting. Some of the controls work together with them from time to time, as they also generate this data. There is often a joint management structure, which means that controlling, finance and accounting are often jointly responsible. There is a filing plan in every accounting department. In other words, there is always a filing plan where you say where you file what and ideally you should follow it.
Thorsten Jekel
And in my case, for example, I say that I have customers, I have interested parties, I have presentations. I then have this structure accordingly. It’s important that the structure you have in the files is also one-to-one in the email system and, if you still have paper files, also in the same system, i.e. the same filing structure in everything. If you work in Teams, you should be able to have a central filing system, so it’s not the case in accounting that everyone in accounting copies all the documents themselves again, but there is a central filing system. Please also do this in Microsoft Teams, especially if you are working with the latest systems. And then another very important issue is to differentiate between three types of documents, especially in projects. There are documents that are result documents, which I need after a project. There are template organization documents that I might want to use as a template for another project. And – and this is the biggest part – there are intermediate statuses that you will never need again. And that’s why you should have at least these three subfolders in a project from the outset and at the end of the project I can immediately delete this folder with the intermediate statuses without having to look in it again.
Thorsten Jekel
And the issue I often have is that people can no longer find anything in the systems and the main cause is that we simply delete far too little. And that’s because we usually don’t have a system for filing. And then there’s another additional impulse that I have when it comes to email, paper filing and digital filing. This is the one-minus-two principle. The moment I file an email in a subfolder, the moment I file a file in a subfolder, I always go into this subfolder and delete at least two documents. And that always works. It always works. So it used to be a one-way street for me and if you do that, you regularly clear out and then there are fewer of them. And now, when it comes to email filing, for example, many people say: “Yes, I have to archive everything. Sorry, you just have to archive the last status that you have, which is usually in there, and I even have more process uncertainty if I run the risk of not finding the last status of an email in the search result, but the one before last. And then there are three more iterations.
Peter Bluhm
Now some people will say: “Wow, those tips work really well. Maybe I’ve already used them and I’m using them. They work really well on my own laptop, on my own notebook. But when a team comes into play and you store files in teams or in a Dropbox or wherever, then we always have the situation – and I also observe this in teams that I am part of – that someone suddenly creates a subfolder and a subfolder of the subfolder and some file shoots across somewhere and puts it where it doesn’t belong. Of course, everyone has their own idea of filing. Some people have an idea of chaotic filing, others don’t understand filing. How can you do this a bit more justice so that you can organize a sensible digital file storage structure with a team?
Thorsten Jekel
Yes, there are different behavioural styles of employees in organizations. So the keyword “disc” perhaps says something, that it is a behavioral model where you say, okay, how do people behave? And to put it simply, the disc says that there are people who are more extroverted, i.e. loud, but people who are more introverted or quiet, people who are more fact-oriented or people-oriented. This results in four quadrants and four types. No person is just one type, but everyone has parts. And there is one type that is more introverted and fact-oriented. These are the blue or conscientious types, one or the other knows this model. In teams, you’re usually lucky enough to have someone like this in your team. And that’s the one, the red one, who says he’s extroverted and fact-oriented. He says: “We’re going to create a filing structure. So, then there’s the yellow initiative, who says: “Oh, I’ll have a look with X department to see what things are already there and get a few new ideas. The blue one, the conscientious one, is the one who works out a topic in a quiet little room. So please don’t give it to the initiative yellow, he’ll despair and won’t deliver a sensible result.
Thorsten Jekel
And then there’s the introverted, people-oriented, steady type. You put him in the meeting, who looks over it once a week and says: “Wait a minute, my dear colleague Blau said that this is the structure we have adopted together. I make sure that we always adhere to these things. That means it’s important – and I’m also a big fan of this – to ask: how well and how efficiently are we using our digital systems? “How consistent are we in our digital filing? For me, this is a point that should be included in regular meetings. And it doesn’t have to be the manager, but ideally they delegate such things. This can also be in rotation. So I’m also a friend of the fact that if you have people who are perhaps not so strong in certain areas, you can say a week in advance: “Man, can you please make a half-hour slot in the meeting where you show us how this works? Then I force the person, or us to a certain extent, to deal with the topic in the run-up to the meeting. So please don’t embarrass them by saying without prior notice: show them and embarrass them.
Thorsten Jekel
That’s bad management culture. But demanding people in the sense of next week you have to present yourself in front of them. That helps, but I think it’s done far too rarely. We talk far too rarely about the question: “How do we use this topic? And once we’ve done it once, that’s not the end of it – you always need someone and the role can certainly change, who is then always the filing officer or digital work officer in a meeting.
Peter Bluhm
I think what you said is very important. There will probably never be a situation where a digital file storage structure works perfectly in a team, in a large team. There will always be one or two people who build something that makes sense for themselves, but perhaps doesn’t make sense for the team. And that’s why it makes sense to talk about it, because you develop a common understanding of this filing structure and are on the way to optimizing it so that you are never perfect, but understand more and more what the idea of this structure is.
Thorsten Jekel
Perhaps one last concrete tip on the subject. What I sometimes also recommend is to say that there is a filing structure. If there are then new folders, they are only filed in coordination “So, and now you say: “Wait a minute, I can’t wait a week until I file a folder. Then a tip is to give new folders an asterisk in the file name, for example, and then go through these asterisked folders once in the meeting. In other words, the person who created the asterisk folder says: “I’ve created a new folder here, I need it. Let’s leave it as it is and then remove the asterisk. Let’s change it. So it’s also a mixture of the topic, you have to be able to file something in some form from time to time, but then with this asterisk you can institutionalize it in the meeting and then determine what the final filing structure is. That was the first part of this exciting interview and we look forward to the second part in the next episode. Yours, Thorst Jekel. This was another episode of Digital for Productivity, the podcast for productive digitalization. And always remember: Switch on your brain first, then your technology.
Yours, Thorsten Jekel.
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