Companies rarely fail because of their strategy.
They fail because their culture doesn’t support the strategy.
Corporate culture is not a soft factor. It is the DNA of an organization — its architecture.
Culture shapes how decisions are made, how leadership is practiced, and how people work together. It determines whether change is embraced or resisted, whether people take ownership or pass responsibility on, and whether good strategies translate into sustainable results.
Successful transformation starts with an organization’s cultural architecture, not with a new strategy. I call this approach Culture Architecture.
From complexity to clarity.
The question that matters:
Which decision will truly move your company forward?
The greater the responsibility, the more complex the questions — and often, the smaller the circle of people you can discuss them with openly.
As a former CEO, I work with entrepreneurs and senior executives as a sparring partner on equal footing.
Not with ready-made answers, but with experience, challenging questions, and different perspectives. Always with one goal: to create clarity. Depending on the situation, I step in as an sparring partner, advisor or coach.
Culture Assessment:
From assumptions to insight.
The question that matters: What culture do we actually live — and what culture do we need for the future?
Every company has a culture. Few can describe it. Even fewer shape it intentionally.
With the Culture Assessment, we make your organization’s cultural architecture visible. This gives you and your leadership team a clear foundation to examine your values, mindsets, and patterns of behavior — and to build a shared understanding of the cultural shifts needed to support your strategy.
Only what is visible can be shaped intentionally.
Leadership Development:
From insight to action.
The question that matters: How do we turn the culture we want into the way we lead?
Culture doesn’t change through mission statements. It changes through leadership.
Together we design a tailored leadership development program built around your organization’s cultural architecture. The goal is to develop leaders who don’t just understand the culture you want to create, but bring it to life through their behavior every day.
The approach is different: moving away from one-off training events towards the continuous development of your leaders.
Culture isn’t created in presentations. It is created through decisions. Through feedback. Through conflict. Through collaboration. Every single day. Leadershipdevelopment as a process.
Born in 1971 and raised on the small German island of Langeoog, I grew up in a guesthouse surrounded by people from all walks of life. Hospitality, respect and curiosity were simply part of everyday life. So was nature. With no cars on the island and the sea always close by, I learned early on to appreciate freedom, independence and a little adventure.
At 16, I left the island to finish school on the mainland. After graduating, I packed a backpack and travelled through the US, New Zealand and England. It was a great way to leave my comfort zone, meet people from very different backgrounds and learned how much I enjoy cross-culture environments.
Back in Germany, I trained as an industrial management assistant and quickly took on responsibility, including temporarily leading a logistics team, still being an apprentice. One lesson from that time has stayed with me ever since: respect has little to do with titles and everything to do with how you treat people on eye-level.
I went on to study Business Administration, graduating with distinction in 1998. Internships at BMW and Tchibo helped me realize that I feel most at home in entrepreneurial environments where there is room to shape things rather than simply manage them.
After absolving a trainee programme at Tchibo, I joined the early world of the internet at AOL. It was four years of experimentation, rapid learning and constant change – an environment that taught me to stay curious and comfortable with uncertainty.
My next chapter took me to Brown-Forman, home to brands such as Jack Daniel’s. As Finance Director, I learned how closely culture, strong brands, motivated teams and commercial success are connected.
In 2006, my life changed dramatically when my wife passed away and I became a single father. Shortly afterwards, my three-year-old son and I moved to the US, where I joined Brown-Forman’s corporate office. Those years taught me a lot about resilience, leadership and the importance of both asking for and accepting help.
Alongside my work, I completed a two-year MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, graduating in 2011. It remains one of the most valuable experiences of my professional life.
That same year, I returned to Germany to build Brown-Forman’s own marketing and distribution organization. From 2011 to 2017, I led Brown-Forman Germany and later the Czech Republic as Managing Director, overseeing leading more than 180 employees. Together, we achieved strong commercial growth while developing a workplace culture that was recognized three times among Germany’s Top 100 Great Places to Work.
In 2017, I joined fritz-kola as Co-CEO. Over the following years, we developed the Hamburg indie brand from a start-up into an established, highly profitable European business. For me, it was a defining chapter combining cultural transformation, organizational development and strong commercial growth. At the end of 2022, I handed the company over to a successor I had helped select.
In 2022, I founded Ruebesam Consulting GmbH – something I had wanted to do for a long time. Today, I work with companies, leaders and teams navigating transformation, growth and change. My focus is on building strong organizations, developing leadership and creating lasting commercial success – grounded in a culture people understand, embrace and bring to life.Bringing people, culture and results together – that’s what has driven me throughout my career. And it’s still what gets me up every morning.”
Companies worked with:
From the people I've worked with: