ALTITUDE · The personal invitation

Why I do this

I know it from the inside.

Fifteen years in brand consulting, partner, three books, the first one at twenty-seven. Before that, on the executive committee at Consors at twenty-nine, public in 1999 with my colleagues.

And high blood pressure in my late thirties. A calendar that belonged to me the way a rental car does. A brand strategist who spent fifteen years building brands and forgot his own.

I did what clever people do. Delegated more. Prioritised better. One seminar, then a second, a book, an app, deleted again in week two.

The nights stayed.

It took eleven years to understand why. Everything I had tried was running as a new app on the same overloaded operating system.

I will show you what works instead. And I walk the eight weeks next to you.

What I suspect

If you have read this far.

I do not know you. But I have had this conversation often enough to risk a guess.

Someone asks where the company will be in five years, and you hear yourself give an answer you do not believe.

Head full. Heart closed. The body no longer quite playing along. And all three currently working against each other.

You announced the change. Four months later everything runs the way it always did, only with new slides.

There is a question you cannot ask anyone without consequences. Not the board, not the bank, not at home.

You know exactly what you would have to change. You even know when. The appointment has not been in your calendar for eight weeks.

The best deal in years. You walk out that evening and feel nothing.

I do not have to hit all of them. If two lines land, keep reading.

And one of these patterns is yours.

The high performer on the wheel

Excellent execution, high speed, no inner upgrade. Leads on adrenaline instead of coherence. The typical sentence: “I should slow down, but not right now.”

The lone strategist

Clear vision, high reflection, almost no real connection. The team follows out of duty. The typical sentence: “I pull the cart alone.”

The fire chief

Holds everything together, well liked, loyal, and avoids his own development. The typical sentence: “My team needs me. I cannot work on myself right now.”

The visionary without ground

Big ideas, high complexity, and a body that cannot keep up. The typical sentence: “I never get to execution.”

Self-diagnosis is wrong surprisingly often, because whatever is steering you is by definition hard to see.

The fork in the road

Three roads. One of them is new.

You can carry on the way you have. It works, and it has worked for years. It only costs you a little more each year, and the bill does not arrive as a bill. It arrives as a night, as your back, as a tone of voice you would never use at home.

Or you push harder. More structure, more discipline, another system. Except that more discipline inside the wrong system only raises your cortisol throughput.

There is a third road. Not stepping back, and not gritting your teeth. Becoming the person who can lead a company through this era. And do it so that your grandchildren could still carry it.

That is ALTITUDE.

Why reading changes nothing

“Emotions come over me. I do not have them.”A managing director, in a briefing call

Insight changes nothing while the state stays the same.

Amy Arnsten measured at Yale what fails first under sustained cortisol load: the regulatory capacity of the prefrontal cortex. Which is precisely the part that would have to push a new decision through against an old pattern.

Stephen Porges describes the layer beneath. Your nervous system decides about safety before you think. Neuroception. This is why the smartest intention gets you nowhere while the body sits in alarm.

You know it on Sunday evening. And on Tuesday you do it again anyway. That is not a question of character, it is physiology.

Which is exactly why that sentence above is so precise. As long as a feeling has you, it steers you. The moment you can look at it, it stops. What becomes visible stops steering.

So we work in this order: first the state, then the patterns, then commitment with others, then performance out of flow, and at the end, direction.

Your bottleneck in ten minutes

Free, seventeen questions with no grey zones. Honest data, no pitch.

A tool, right now

The Decision Inventory. Fifteen minutes, today.

Before you read on, you can test this on yourself. Fifteen minutes, today, from the ALTITUDE toolkit. Free, no sign-up, and you do not leave your email address anywhere.

Who is blocking this decision right now?

Write down three decisions you keep postponing.
For each one, ask: what feeling would I have to tolerate if I decided today?
Take the one with the strongest physical reaction and free-write for seven minutes without stopping, starting with: “What I do not want to feel here is …”

Do not make the decision today. Just see who is blocking it. That is the subject-object shift in miniature. And be kind to yourself while you do it: self-attack makes the exercise useless, warmth makes it precise.

What surfaces is usually not a business question. ALTITUDE trains exactly this shift, for eight weeks, with measurement. What it costs when the shift does not happen comes next.

The arithmetic

What does another quarter of this cost?

Anyone who avoids conflict lives in permanent conflict, just on the inside. You have the conversation you are avoiding anyway. Every day, in your head, with no outcome.

What is avoided does not disappear. It takes over: your agenda, your nights, and the three worst decisions of the quarter, made from depletion.

At the end of almost every postponed decision there is an emotion your system does not want to feel. The hardness of the conversation. The guilt of being wrong. The loss of control afterwards. Being businesslike in a meeting is often just the lid on the cellar, and that lid is what holds development back.

Your growth edge sits where avoidance and greatest leverage meet. Whatever you do not want to feel there is costing you the most speed right now.

And there is a number you can run yourself. Participants who train recover an average of one day per week. Over a year that is roughly forty working days. Put in your own hourly rate. Or use the value of a decision that lands six weeks late.

These costs are already in your P&L. They just do not have a line of their own.

Cracking down harder will not help. A different system will.

Leading through disruption

You are meant to rebuild while shipping.

AI is changing your business faster than you can decide what it means for your people. Your team works from anywhere, across three generations, with tools that did not exist two years ago. You learned to lead for something else.

And the numbers here are uncomfortably clear. Bain surveyed more than four hundred executives about their transformations in 2024: twelve percent achieve what they set out to do. The strongest success factor is not in any strategy paper. It is whether the right people are kept, developed and not overloaded. You know that. And you have one running right now.

What actually blocks it rarely shows up in the project plan. The leadership team agrees and then carries on as before. The change is announced, and four months later everything runs the way it did, only with new slides. That is not resistance to the substance. That is a room reading your state and drawing its own conclusion about how serious you are.

A company does not transform faster than the people at the top of it. Which is where we start.

The programme

Eight weeks. 24 places. Groups of five to eight.

A note on language: the autumn 2026 cohort runs in German. If you would need the programme in English, the application puts you on the list for the first English cohort.

Training under load, while your company keeps running. Groups of five to eight, no more, because depth happens in the small group and not in the cohort.

Altitude Session

90 minutes live, once a week. The core.

The Triad

Your resonance group. Two people who know your path and ask about it.

BOAT Team

Five to eight. The room where you do not have to perform.

Daily practice

20 minutes. The part that carries the other three.

Time budget

Around three and a half to four hours live, plus one to two hours alone. About 5 percent of your waking time.

Measurement

Sleep, heart rate variability, stress and your 5B Pentagon. Before and after. The delta is the result, not the feeling.

Why this is not a course.

Knowledge
10 to 25 %

The teaching is the smallest part. A model, a talk, a book: you already know all of that, and it got you this far. It will not get you further.

Experience and practice
the large remainder

You practise it on your own week, on your own decisions, under your real load. Which is why this is training and not therapy: we do not dig through your past, we build your capacity for what lands on Monday.

With others
the reason it holds

Your Triad and your BOAT Team notice when you drop out. That is the difference between an intention and a commitment. And it is the reason I can give the Impact Guarantee at all.

The arc

Eight weeks. Eight shifts.

Every week has one focus and one shift: away from the state that is currently running you, towards the one you lead from. The weekly rhythm above stays the same throughout. What changes is what you work on.

Calibration

Assumption→Finding

We measure before we train. Sleep, heart rate variability, stress, plus your 5B Pentagon and the self-authorship index. By the end of the week your bottleneck is on the table: the lowest value, not the loudest one. The weakest point limits the throughput.

Physiological coherence

Fragmentation→Alignment

The hardware first, because everything else sits on top of it. Head full, heart closed, body somewhere else: this week the three point in the same direction for the first time in years. And presence is not a feeling here, it is an effect. The room notices before you do.

BECOME

Self-authorship

The old winning formula→Your best version

The formula that got you here will not carry you further. This week you put it down without losing yourself. This is not repairing a weakness. It is the next version of you, written by you.

BELONG

Team and relationship

Closed and hard→Leading in resonance

The quality of the channel between you and the people who follow you. Whoever tightens makes the room tight, and the room answers with caution. This week you learn to lead without closing, and to let others grow beside you instead of managing them.

BOUNDLESS

Flow and capacity

Pressure→Flow

Access to your best states under load, not on holiday. Your week gets rebuilt: two decision windows, protected depth, and recovery as a precondition of performance rather than a reward for it.

BEYOND

Direction and meaning

Quarterly noise→Seventh generation

Direction measured in years instead of quarters. What is all of this meant to have stood for when you hand it over? The week your calendar stops deciding your decade.

Masterpiece

Projects→A body of work

Five dimensions turn into one decision. You settle what actually counts over the next twelve months, what follows from it, and what you deliberately stop doing.

Re-calibration

Feeling→Measurement

The same measurement as in week 1, the same instruments. The delta is your result, not how you feel about it. And it is the number the Impact Guarantee hangs on.

From the work

Then the decision took twenty minutes.

A personnel decision had been sitting on the pile for six weeks. All the numbers in, all the conversations had, a second opinion collected. Everyone on the leadership team knew what was coming. So did the CEO.

What resolved it was a room where honesty was safe. When he said out loud what was underneath the decision, guilt towards a companion from the early days, the room changed noticeably. The subject came out of the cellar and into the living room. It could be looked at together, without anyone falling.

The decision that had not been a business question for six weeks took twenty minutes.

Afterwards he only said: “Not as bad as I thought.”

That is the shift this is about. What becomes visible stops steering.

What the system is built from

Everything that works, in one system.

Neuroscience. Adult development after Kegan and Cook-Greuter. German Bildung in the sense of Humboldt, Schiller and Goethe. Flow and peak performance research. Systems thinking. Micro-practice that fits inside a working day. Breath, embodiment and meditation protocols from high performance training, including Navy SEALs and elite sport. Consciousness practices, cross-checked against older wisdom traditions.

Assembled into one system and translated for people who lead today.

What changes

How you notice before the numbers do.

At least one day a week back

It appears where time used to go into reacting. You see it after four weeks in your own calendar, before any analysis confirms it.

Focus on what actually counts

Fewer decisions, and the ones that remain are the right ones. The shift from “how much did I get done?” to “what did my time actually move?”

Leading from your own north star

Other people's expectations start sorting themselves around it instead of setting the pace. A clear north star is a filter: it separates what deserves attention from what is merely loud.

Markedly higher productivity

At shorter working hours. The lever is no longer discipline, it is your state at the same time invested. The number for it is further down.

What is still in use a year later.

In the August 2026 client survey we did not ask whether people had enjoyed it. We asked what still runs in their daily life. This came back:

Calm under load

More balanced, no longer driven, more ease inside heavy topics.

Sleep

From the mental carousel to sleeping well and relaxed almost every night.

Focus

Concentration on what matters instead of busyness. The one thing instead of the list.

Self-determination

Shaping the day instead of reacting to it. The circle of influence as an everyday tool.

Structure that gives time back

Weekly planning, professional and personal. Time for the important instead of the urgent.

Leading without the mask

Being more approachable, able to show weakness, and getting more mature teams because of it.

The shift

Week 1 and week 8, side by side.

Week 1

Week 8

Someone asks about five years out, and you do not believe your own answer.

→

You know what all of this is meant to have stood for when you hand it over. And your team knows too.

Head full, heart closed, the body no longer playing along.

→

Head, heart and body point in the same direction for the first time in years.

The change is announced, four months later there are new slides.

→

Your leadership team brings tensions into the light instead of discussing them in the corridor.

A question you cannot ask anyone.

→

Two people know your path and follow up when you drop out.

You know what to do. The appointment has not been in the calendar for eight weeks.

→

The appointment is set. And it holds, even in the week everything is on fire.

The best deal in years, and you feel nothing.

→

You walk for an hour on a Tuesday and think clearly for the first time in months.

Emotions come over you. You do not have them.

→

A slight occupies you for twenty minutes, not three weeks.

Before and after is a feeling.

→

Before and after is an index, measured in your own data.

For those who train. The condition is the work.

Find out in a few questions whether it fits

A few questions, then I get back to you. If it does not fit, I will tell you.

What is measurable

We measure what we train.

90 %still use at least one practice

1 / 3use three or more

59 %less stress

75 %more productivity, at shorter hours

67 %more self-efficacy

58Net Promoter Score

4.7out of 5, across five bootcamps

16+countries, over 100 organisations

Measured among those who trained. Sleep, heart rate variability and stress values before and after. Adoption and recommendation from the client survey of August 2026. Zero detractors. Where the numbers come from: mostly company and team programmes, because that is where most of the 1,600 trained. ALTITUDE trains the same method, in a small group instead of inside one company.

Voices

From the cohorts so far.

Verbatim from the August 2026 client survey and the closing calls. Unabridged, translated from the original German.

Fifteen out of more than 1,600 leaders trained.

“I used to think high performance meant getting from A to B as fast as possible. Now I know you do not have to wreck your nervous system to perform at that level.”

Andres Gevert

Private Equity Vice President

“My biggest realisation: that I open my own channel even further, and that this is a real strength for the transformation. My defined superpower is with me daily.”

Petra Wolle

Director People & Culture, Wünsche Group

“I hand out tasks more clearly, I set deadlines, and I say something when one is missed. And I separate the personal from the business level far better.”

Sven Weitz

Partner, Campana & Schott

“It was a push towards more clarity, and with it the freedom in my life to do what I actually want.”

Fritz Peters

Managing Director, Gebrüder Peters

“I have found my flow moments during the day. The work on music helped, and all of that awareness around sleep.”

Ann-Kathrin de Moy

Managing Director, WelikeU

“What I found here is not just insight. It is a room in which I could develop as a person. Not functionally. Inwardly.”

Steffen van Glahn

COO, Crespel & Deiters Group

“Self-confidence. Sleep. Body awareness. Time for the important instead of the urgent. The key realisation: that only I can change anything.”

Jens Berger

CEO Globus, formerly CHRO Fressnapf

“The circle of influence has become my mantra. Life has been lighter since. It also gives you a clear guideline for leading.”

Alexander Raubal

Head of Development E-Commerce, Fressnapf

“I will miss the Monday evenings. For me that was a genuinely good start into the week, a moment to come down.”

Eva Degener

Chief Commercial & People Officer, Ada

Go to the application

The English cohort opens once enough English-speaking founders are on the list. The form is the fastest way onto it.

The measurement

Before and after is not a feeling. It is an index.

Week 1 measures your system. The 5B Pentagon and the self-authorship index show where you lead and where the system leads you. Week 8 measures again. You do not have to believe anything. You can check it.

The Impact Guarantee

Anyone who goes through all eight weeks in full, sessions, practice and triad, and sees no measurable shift in the index, gets the full amount back.

The condition is the work. Transformation works, if you do the work.

Fit

Who this is for. And who it is not for.

For you, if

you carry real P&L responsibility as a CEO, managing director, founder or top leader
or you are a partner in a consultancy, law firm or practice where your name carries the business
you are successful and still sense that you are becoming the bottleneck
you have tried a lot already and know that knowledge is not your problem
you are ready to train 5 percent of your waking time, for eight weeks
you want substance: measurement instead of motivation

Not for you, if

you want to be entertained, meaning content to consume rather than work on yourself
you collect toolkits that then sit unused
you want to work on others, on the team, the co-founder, the market, on anyone but yourself
you do not lead yet, because without real responsibility there is no room for the work to land in
you are looking for the quick fix or the motivational event
an acute crisis is taking all your capacity right now, in which case later is the better moment

I would rather say this beforehand than afterwards. A full cohort with the wrong person in it is a worse deal for everyone in the room.

Check the fit, a few questions

If I think it does not fit, I will tell you. I prefer that to a full cohort.

Achim Feige, founder of VERTICAL Development

Who leads this

Achim Feige

You know the career from the opening. What is missing there is the part that came after.

I understood it at fifty-two. In between were ten years of Zen with Genpo Roshi, Big Mind, a combination of Zen, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt therapy. That is where I learned to enable breakthroughs in fifteen to thirty minutes where others need months. Six months of training in the United States on flow and neuroscience. Since 2024, training with Thomas Hübl as a certified trauma-informed coach.

Over 1,600 leaders in more than 16 countries have trained with this work.

I am not a coach. I am a guide. I walk beside you, not ahead of you. But I will not walk with you if you only want to watch.

The full career, as a PDF (German)

What clients say

Not about themselves. About us.

Most of the 1,600 leaders did not come to us alone. They came with their team. Executive Inner Work has been running inside leadership circles and executive boards for years, in the middle of everyday operations, usually while a transformation is already applying pressure.

What changes there is not one person. It is a culture, live and under full load. These four CEOs brought VERTICAL in for their entire organisation. A different voice from the one above, and a different question: not what changes inside a person, but what that does to a company.

ALTITUDE is the accessible door into that same system. For one person instead of a whole house.

“VERTICAL was not a consultant but a real partner to our executive board. The journey was far more than a structural change. It is a cultural evolution that begins with each individual.”

Holger Blecker

CEO, E. Breuninger

“VERTICAL developed our top management from cautious, reserved executives into self-effective, purpose-driven personalities.”

Matthias Mey

CEO, Mey

“A strong partner who supports every single leader on their individual path, and so enables the whole organisation to perform at its peak.”

Paul Horlacher

CEO, The Pioneer

“Not an option, but a necessity in the middle of hypergrowth and extreme pressure. We built real self-leadership and presence, not as a performance, but as an operating system.”

Bastian Behrens

Founder & CEO, Blackwave

Want this for your leadership team rather than for yourself alone? Send me a line, that is a different conversation from the briefing call. achim@vertical-development.de

Investment

“I need a room and a stretch of time where I can develop.”A client, in a first conversation

That is exactly it. And here is where the number lands.

The investment

on the call

Deciding earlier

lower tier

Payment on request

in two instalments

Included

Leadership OS Deep Dive. 90 minutes one to one before the kickoff, including the read-out of your 5B Pentagon. For the first ten registrations only.

Altitude Circle. A monthly live session with your cohort for six months after the programme ends.

5B Team Lens. A 60 minute debrief in week 7 or 8 where we transfer your profile onto your leadership team.

The frame

Cohort language

English, from spring 2027

Format

8 weeks, groups of five to eight

Live per week

3.5 to 4 hours

Places

24 per cohort

The Golden Cut. You test it for two weeks. After two weeks you know whether you actually want this. If not, you leave, and you get the full amount back up to day 14.

The Impact Guarantee. And anyone who goes through all eight weeks in full and sees no measurable shift in the index gets the full amount back. The condition is the work.

One honest note about timing. The October 2026 cohort runs in German. The English cohort starts as soon as enough English-speaking leaders are on the list, and the briefing call is how you get on it. If your German is good enough to work in, you are welcome in October, and we can settle that on the call in two minutes.

What ALTITUDE costs, we discuss in the briefing. Not as a tactic: the number belongs next to your data, not on a page that does not know you yet. Deciding earlier costs less.

Ask about a place

Not a sales call. By the end you will know whether this is your next step.

Fair questions

The questions that come up first on a call.

Is this esoteric?

The industry has earned that suspicion. Which is why we measure: sleep, heart rate variability, stress, before and after, across more than 1,600 trained leaders. The foundations are called Kegan, Porges, Kotler. You see it in your own data, or you do not.

I do not have the time.

The training takes 5 percent of your waking time, built into the week you already have. Five minutes in the morning, three breaths before the hardest meeting. Anyone who cannot find 5 percent does not have a time problem. They have exactly the bottleneck this is about.

I have tried coaching before.

I understand, and it was predictable. All of it ran as a new app on the same overloaded operating system. We train the system itself.

Does this work in my industry?

Your situation is different. Your nervous system is not. Pharma, biotech, retail, engineering, family businesses: the bottleneck looked the same everywhere.

What if I drop out again?

That is exactly what the triad is for. You do not train alone, and two people notice when you stop. That is the difference between an intention and a commitment.

Is this therapy?

No. ALTITUDE is work on leadership infrastructure: nervous system, decision architecture, identity capacity, with measurement before and after. Where therapeutic material comes up, we name it and refer on cleanly.

Does Achim work with me personally?

Yes. Achim runs every Altitude Session himself. For the first ten registrations there is also the 90 minute Deep Dive before the kickoff, one to one.

Does it hold once the programme is over?

What is still running a year later is further up the page. Here is why: the two practices that stay most often take under two minutes and need no preparation. Anything longer does not survive the first full calendar. The design follows from that.

Will it run in English?

The October 2026 cohort runs in German. The English cohort starts as soon as enough English-speaking leaders are on the list, and the briefing call is the fastest way onto it. Everything else stays identical: same system, same measurement, same guarantees.

What does ALTITUDE cost?

I give you the number on the briefing call, in thirty seconds, including the tier that applies to you. Then run it against your own hourly rate. The cost of not solving this is already in your P&L: in projects left sitting, in the backlog on your desk, and in decisions made from depletion.

What if I am sceptical?

Good. Scepticism is the right stance towards anything that promises transformation. That is exactly why the measurement and the Impact Guarantee exist. Both are above, with the condition attached.

The path

Three steps into the cohort.

Step 1 · 10 minutes

Diagnostic

The CEO Bottleneck Diagnostic shows you your bottleneck. Seventeen questions with no grey zones. Honest data, no pitch.

Step 2 · a few questions

Application and briefing

A short form, then I get back to you. If it fits, we talk for 25 minutes. Not a sales call, and you get an honest answer, including no.

Step 3

Commitment and kickoff

Deep Dive for the first ten, then the kickoff. From there the cohort carries you.

Apply and ask for a call

If I think it does not fit, I will tell you. · Not there yet? Start with the Diagnostic.