Intro
Hello my dear readers,
I hope you had a great start of the year! It's been two months since I have sent you my newsletter. The root cause is my wonderful hiking trip in Himalayan mountains spotting the Annapurna peaks in Nepal. This trip was again a great eye-opener how much I love traveling outside Europe and getting to know completely different cultures.
As always here is a short list on my readings and writings over the last two months.
My Monthly Fail Story
Hiking too fast in Himalayan mountains
In 2021 I decided to commit to sharing more failure stories on social media and less of “Look, my dear network how well I am doing!”
In 2022 I will continue this challenge, so here is my 13th story.
Last month we embarked on a hiking trip in the Himalayan mountains to see the Annapurna peaks. While it’s common to feel altitude from ~2500m already, most slightly seasoned hikers start to feel it on a way higher level.
Well, this time was different for me. Strangely, I started to feel mild symptoms already at the 3200m. Initially, I couldn’t understand why because I felt very fit this time.
When we did our root cause analysis we realized that we were simply picking up a too fast of a pace for the mountains.
My key learning here: Sometimes going slower will make you faster later. It’s often not a sprint, but rather a marathon.
I would love to hear your failure stories too! Please share it by replying to this email.
Find Your Purpose
Online breakfast session - February 10th
In this world full of opportunities, it's easy for us to get lost. Shall I shift now or in a few years? Shall I accept this promotion or rather stay where I am now?
In this all connected world it's natural to think that data could help us to make our career choices too. But is it really so?
If you are interested to hear a very interesting, unexpected and different perspective from my amazing and super smart colleague Frank Buters from Schuberg Philis, please register to an online breakfast session organized by Benelux Baltics in Business.
The event will take place online on February 10th 08:00am CET.
Hurry up and book your spot by visiting the Benelux Baltics in Business website.
Are there KPIs for happiness?
What gets measured, gets managed! Said the famous management guru Peter Drucker.
In business this principle is on its full swing with KPI’s being put on almost every corner. It became so common to measure our employee success with predefined metrics.
In fact, KPI’s started to even enter our personal lives. I believe too often we define our happiness with success measures such as salary level, job grade or titles.
Well, so here is a short writing on this topic with the main message - work for a cause, not applause!
Personal Growth
5 lessons learnt during my self-reflection on 2021
The year 2021 just came to an end! For me this period is great for taking a pauze and doing a self-reflection on my past experiences.
It’s not about living in your past and allowing your mistakes to hamper you, but rather appreciating all the experiences you had and extracting important lessons for your future.
So, here it is a blog post with my key lessons learnt over 2021.
What were your biggest learnings?
How to write meaningful new year resolutions
It's January! The time for reflection on the previous year and setting-up new objectives.
While I like the concept of noting down your New Year's resolutions, too often I hear vaguely defined sentences, which I doubt help people to achieve more.
I believe that New Year's resolutions shouldn't be a long list of actions you want to do, but rather a few personal breakthroughs which will stretch you.
With my experience of using Hoshin Kanri model in business, I wrote a blog post on how to define meaningful New Year resolutions which I think could drive personal breakthroughs.
Do you write your New Year's resolutions? If yes, what are your experiences? Any tips?
Business
Environmental impact of Dutch 'Sinterklaas' celebration
December 5th is a BIG day in the Netherlands - "Sinterklaas" celebration! It is a tradition to give people the first letter of their names in chocolate.
While it's a cool tradition, the 26 alphabetical letters unfortunately bring a logistical challenge and create lots of waste. After 'Sinterklaas' lots of chocolate letters are thrown away together with its packaging.
During the Dutch Design Week 2021 I was impressed to see the 'out of the box' thinking and creativity from LocoLetter. They developed a product to address this problem - a chocolate puzzle box where everyone can create their own name letter thus no need to produce 25 different boxes!
I am happy to see more and more initiatives coming from different angles to help us live in more sustainable and enjoyable way!
By the way, besides the chocolate letters, 'Sinterklaas' has more traditions. My favorite one is that parents leave a glass of milk and a carrot near shoes to feed the horse of Sinterklaas when he arrives at night :)
Winter is coming everywhere!
Today probably every big corporate is looking and thinking how to survive disruption to not become 'the next Kodak'.
As a consultant myself I often ask a question - but how about the consulting business? Strangely, this industry still seems to be surviving and thriving on its old model - selling hours of consultants.
However, you can already see the first snowflakes coming in the consulting industry too. What used to be done by humans (e.g. number crunching, research, idea generation etc.), today can be done by algorithms.
For example, Beyond Spark AI driven solution is already being used in business strategy development. Think if you are a materials company trying to anticipate the next R&D investments. Beyond Spark’ solution can give you an answer by going through millions of research papers from different industries on the upcoming technologies.
In fact, when you think about it more, technology driven problem solving can give you answers faster and avoid the social side of the strategy formulation (i.e. human bias).
Books
Four thousand weeks by Oliver Burkeman
The new year has just started and probably many of us already wrote a long list of resolutions to do in 2022. Likely, many of those to-dos are moved from the last year. And again I wrote too many…
It was refreshing to read the “Four thousand weeks” book by Oliver Burkeman who provides many great arguments against increasing our productivity.
In the end, all of us have approximately four thousand weeks to live and it’s impossible to achieve everything we would like to. In fact, we always are too optimistic about our abilities.
It’s a liberating message encouraging to stop trying to cram an impossible amount of work in pursuit for accomplishments. Rather focus on pursuing activities which are enjoyable NOW instead of in the future.
New challenge for 2022 - unanswered question
Let's talk! This year I thought to share more posts with raised questions than provided answers.
Today I am questioning the Lean Startup methodology. Have you seen it working? What are your experiences?
I have always been a bit skeptical about this concept. And here are a couple of arguments:
'Lean startup' written by Eric Ries is considered almost like a Bible for building start-ups. However, ~90% of start-ups fail. Does Lean startup address the root causes?
MVP (minimal viable product) concept is very popular especially in technology companies. However, I often struggle to imagine it working in practice. You cannot always launch 🚀 a WIP product and iterate publicly. This might damage your company's reputation immensely.
Although 'Lean startup' has not much to do with LEAN thinking coming from Toyota, I often hear people mixing it up. Many assume that 'Lean startup' is an iteration whereas it's not.
This time I don't have an answer what works better than Lean startup, so I invite you to have a discussion and share your thoughts.
Here is the link to a heated discussion on Linkedin.
Make An Impact
Greetings from Nepal!
Nepal is a poor country - landlocked and surrounded by two big powerful countries - India and China. While staying in Nepal I was constantly thinking what poor really means? Compared to my experience while living in rural Uganda, Nepal didn't appear for me that 'poor'.
Almost everyone has electricity and eats nutritiously with its famous 'dal bhat' meal topping the ranks. So there were many thoughts again in my head why I support Uganda and not e.g. Nepal...
In the end, I decided to stop that thinking and staying on my path with "Bracelets with a story". If you like give me a short motivation boost and buying a piece, you are very welcome to visit my website.