Peter Kreuz: “If you build fences around people, you get sheep.”

For two decades, Peter Kreuz has been tracking down people and organizations on every continent who have the courage to think and implement the unconventional. Companies that are joined by the best talents and customers. People who are passionate about making a real difference with their work.

With his presentations, Peter Kreuz encourages people to rethink leadership and work. Instead of following familiar patterns and old concepts for success, the aim is to discover new ways of thinking and acting and to work on the future with personal responsibility, speed, experimentation and a clever error culture.

What do you get out of it? An idea of how your work leaves its mark. An anything but ordinary guide for your personal and entrepreneurial future. The courage to think and implement the unconventional. And employees who become creative activists. Because in each of us – and in every organization – there is undiscovered potential that needs to be awakened.

Peter Kreuz Lecture topics

  • Rebel Ideas: The incitement to think differently

Digitalization. Changing customer needs. New business models and competitors. Change doesn’t crawl forward, it leaps. In a time of hyper-competition and unpredictable crises, even the most successful companies have to regularly question every aspect of what they do.

But how can you open up new paths where others have previously only seen limits? How can you question conventional patterns of success when the pressure to avoid mistakes is so great? How can you promote a culture in which the ability to develop something new is both demanded and encouraged? In short, how do you initiate lasting, positive change in turbulent, fast-moving times?

Peter Kreuz explores these questions in his provocative and inspiring keynote speech. His message helps employees to lead their organizations into the future and become or remain pioneers in their industries. He brings his message to life with vivid examples of companies that have successfully driven change and shaken up their industries.

  • Don’t waste a crisis!

In a world that is changing radically, we need to rethink: above all, the crisis is also a magnifying glass and amplifier for change, which has to happen anyway. It is not the crisis that dictates the future agenda, but people who are prepared to radically question old certainties and bring issues of central importance for the future into the debate: What is coming? What will remain? What urgently needs to change?

  • Why experiments are uncomfortable, but certainties are absurd.
  • Why change is the new normal.
  • How to create a smart learning and error culture.
  • How “thinking without guardrails” can be put into practice.
  • How psychological safety promotes high-performance teams.

When not only technologies, markets and business models are changing in record time, but the entire world is becoming increasingly volatile and unpredictable, is there still a strategy worthy of the name? Yes, … but it has completely changed its nature. The modern strategy is the experiment.

  • Leadership in the digital age: culture, attitude & new work

How can we create a culture in which the willingness to change and think in new ways is just as natural as the ability to develop and implement new ideas? Even if there are no ready-made answers, there are helpful patterns of action for new and agile forms of collaboration. Keywords: self-determined work, personal responsibility, speed, experimentation and a culture of error.

  • Hidden champions, pioneers & rebels

Behind the headlines about the business practices of successful large companies lies a quiet, inconspicuous force from which we can learn a lot about sustainable success and global competitiveness, away from all the management hype. These are the hidden champions, the pioneers and rebels at work. Highly specialized SMEs that dominate international markets and have lifeblood running through their veins. The three German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland alone account for almost 60 percent of the world’s hidden champions.

This lecture takes a look behind the scenes of these global market leaders and pioneers, who often disregard the management fashions of corporations and follow their own rules.

  • Jazz Mindset: Leadership, teamwork and innovation in times of change

Jazz is a forward-looking model for leadership in an environment of digitalization, disruption and profound change because a team of jazz musicians achieves maximum creativity with a minimum of rules. This lecture is extremely inspiring thanks to its jazz soundbites. It unfolds its full effect in combination with live music, good conversation and cool drinks.

Peter Kreuz was manager of an American management consultancy and marketing professor at the University of Vienna. He has been running his own company since 2001 and is co-founder of REBELS AT WORK. This is a community of courageous designers who promote new thinking with their brains rather than their hammers.

Peter Kreuz also writes books that have been translated into many languages and can be found on the bestseller lists of Spiegel, Manager Magazin and Handelsblatt.

Manager Magazin wrote the following about Peter Kreuz: “Richly illustrated and cheeky, he makes the case for thinking differently and bringing courage, fun and passion back into everyday business life.”