Matthias serves as an advisor and executive coach for clients around the world. He works with startups, VC and private equity firms, family businesses, leading business schools, and global corporations (Microsoft, Daimler, KPMG, etc.). Matthias has also served as a professor and facilitator for talent development, communication skills, and entrepreneurship at various business schools and universities for 20+ years. Matthias has extensive experience in building up, investing in, restructuring, and growing companies in diverse industries such as media, training, manufacturing, and high-tech. He started his career as a journalist and went on to found various start-ups, mainly in the areas of media and talent development. When the first dot-com bubble burst, he and his companies faced tough times. After an eventual turnaround, he started restructuring other firms and began investing in distressed companies. Today, he combines his entrepreneurial background with his academic interests and his passion for teaching and talent development and is engaged in various businesses that focus on learning and performance. Much of his entrepreneurial work deals with the question of how talent development can be customized, applied, and made sustainable through new technologies. Matthias has authored several books and multiple articles for well-known newspapers and journals. One of his specific interests is the role of stories and images for talent development. His recent publications include “The Ugly Duckling is a Swan. On Turnaround Stories” (2015), “Stories are Bridges From One Mind To Another” (Columbia Coaching Conference 2016) and the "ABC of narrative" (2017), a model for the use of narrative theory for executive coaching which he presented at the CoachX series by the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.