#WeLeadComms: Maximilian Miguletz

Today’s #WeLeadComms honors go to German communication leader Maximilian Miguletz.

A ten-year-old boy sits at a typewriter, pecking out a front-page opinion piece against paving over his favourite meadow, typos and all. This will be the centerpiece of his first publication, a self-made newspaper, alongside football scores copied off the radio, a joke or two, and hand-drawn costume tips for the local carnival. Print run: one copy.

That was me, in 1994. My first communications project, technically. Silly as it sounds, I meant every word of it. I wanted that meadow saved, and I was convinced a strongly worded opinion piece could do it.

Well, it didn’t. But it planted something I’ve been chasing ever since.

Radio came first: the better part of a decade on air, from breakfast shows to hard news, at a small station in northern Bavaria, more craft than gloss. A communications and film degree pulled me deeper into journalism, theory on one side, practice and a growing network on the other, through sports desks in Mainz and Darmstadt, and a content agency in Munich. At Sport1, I ended up running the newsroom, crossmedia by necessity, deciding what an app, a website, social media channels, and daily TV shows would cover each day.

That job quietly turned into managing volume: more content, more speed, more scale. Somewhere in there I came across the idea of user needs (what people actually turn to communication for, rather than what they happen to click on) and realised most newsrooms, mine included, were solving the wrong problem. Reach is mighty. But reach without resonance is meaningless, and nobody was accountable for whether any of the output actually landed.

That thinking stayed with me. Scompler, where I work today as Director Strategic Communications, was built around exactly that: making communication more coordinated and more focused, judged by whether it works and supports strategic goals rather than by its volume. It feels less like a job than a continuation of the same instinct, chasing impact over volume, just at a very different scale than one photocopied page.

These days, connecting goes beyond publishing: speaking at industry gatherings, moderating conversations between people who don’t usually share a stage, and hosting FORWARD, a closed-door format I created for communications leaders to think out loud without an audience watching.

Some things haven’t changed since that campaign for the meadow. The reach has grown well beyond that first print run, but the bar is the one I set back then without knowing it: whether anyone was actually moved to think, decide, or act differently.

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