Podcast: André Roitzsch talks leadership and peer groups on brand eins

This episode of the brand eins podcast, hosted by Christian Bollert, is about the brand eins peer groups. The guests are Patricia Döhle, who built the brand eins Academy eight years ago and has run the peer groups ever since, and André Roitzsch, CEO of Shopmacher, who joined one of these groups himself around 2020. For Patricia, the core value of the peer groups is that participants talk to each other without an agenda, unlike almost any other professional setting.

André went into his peer group with a clear assumption: his company lacked leadership. The peer group flipped that assumption. After a radical agile transformation, Shopmacher had barely any structures or processes left, so André had to make almost every decision himself and step in constantly. Framed through organizational sociology: leadership becomes necessary exactly when hierarchy and structure are missing. At Shopmacher, that meant too much leadership, not too little. André still calls that moment "mind-blowing".