Juergen Mohr

After spending a few years with things like the Schrödinger equation, the Hamiltonian operator, the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, photons, phonons and gluons, the London penetration depth, the Pauli exclusion principle, dark matter and dark energy, quasars, brown and white dwarfs, galaxies, super clusters, and many more funny topics of astrophysics, I started working quite mundane as a software developer in 1995. I developed dirty code, designed and discarded architectures, blessed other people with my ideas and knowledge as a coach and speaker, and ultimately, compelled other people to do what I planned for them as a project manager.

In 2011 my mood and my bad conscience were at a low point. Fortunately, however, at that time I discovered the panacea – Agile Software Development. In Scrum, the role of the manager no longer exists. From now on, I was sure, everything would be better. Away with the managers, freedom for everyone, anarchy and self-organization. What a bright future. But then Jurgen Appelo appeared and proclaimed that we still need managers in the agile context. So what? I decided to defer the topic "to manage or not to manage" for a moment and coach people and organizations on their way into the agile mindset as an Agile Coach, Scrum Master and Product Owner. Somewhere down the road I then started to conduct ScrumMaster courses. As a licensed Management 3.0 Facilitator and Co-Owner of Management 3.0 I now also conduct Management 3.0 Workshops. Inevitably the day approaches when I have to confront Jurgen Appelo with my understanding of future organizational structures and a manager-free world.

By the way, did I already mention that I was so crazy to attend an international Master of Business Administration (MBA) part-time study from 2006 to 2008? Two years no leisure, no social contacts, absolute social isolation. And I paid a lot of money for that. Isn’t that crazy? To my justification, I can make the point that I am a physicists and physicists are, according to the accepted opinion of many, a strange folk. Well, at least I graduated as best-of-class with distinction. And even that I cannot buy anything from it, to be honest, it still is a great feeling.

Just bad for my fellow men, I had discovered a new topic with my master thesis (which was even published as a book), that I am desperate to carry to the people – happiness research, or, in general terms, the societal change that is currently taking place. In the course of time, however, this topic rang a bell somehow. So I went to the search for the Holy Grail and soon discovered a very hot lead: the well-being of man is the focus. Happy, motivated and healthy employees are more productive. Companies have to rethink, managers have to do other tasks than before. And then the scales fell from my eyes. Agile software development and happiness research have the same effect. Suddenly it all adds up. Agility, Management 3.0, and Happiness Research are brothers and sisters who first had to find each other.

In 2015 then I took the step into professional independence. So now I am going my way self-employed with a far-reaching personal network of experts, working as ScrumMaster, Agile Coach and Trainer for Scrum and Management 3.0, spreading the agile mindset and 21st Century Management knowledge into the world.

In March 2019 I started a new experiment. I created my own comany Teal Thrives to run experiments with practices from Management 3.0 and all the other modern paradigms.