Why do you show up even when it’s hard? That was the title of a recent Strava post trying to explain the atlete in you. Reflecting on challenging events is important to moving forward. On the border... A couple of weeks ago, I had again joined the Tour de Tolerance, a group of cyclists eager to climb mountains. The destination this year: the mighty Dolomites in Italy. As a kind of a prologue, five of us commenced in Innsbruck and cycled across the Brenner and the Jaufenpass to Bolzano (137km, 1964m).

In any business environment these days you almost invariably have all your data in different systems. A single ERP may be the driving force behind your organisation but having a monolithic system also limits you. This is the reason I am very enthusiastic about Jamstack, a new standard architecture for the web. It relies on microservices, APIs to various sites to get the data from plain text files. So often you have data available but it is a pain to link it.

The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters representing danger and opportunity respectively. Symbols of wisdom and extremely relevant with the current Covid-19 raging the world. On 1 January 2016, the 17 sustainability Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development officially came into force. I had seen these goals and frankly thought of them as somewhat idealistic. I was cynical as to how companies would be persuaded to adopt these goals.

Like so often it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was more than fed up with cycling in the Dutch cold and grey wintry conditions and needed to de-stress from work related issues. My son Daniel was meant to join but he needed his time to study. Or so he said, perhaps suspect of my intentions. The completed route Browsing Skyscanner in my search for a last minute flight to the sun I found a good flight to Lisbon, Portugal.

I was born in the sixties. No surprise perhaps I enjoyed reading Kerouc’s ‘On the Road’, Steinbeck’s ‘Travels with Charlie’, Michener’s ‘The Drifters’, and for that matter most of Hemingway’s books. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. I relate to that quite a bit though instead of a Dharma Bum, I am much more a Happy Warrior.

Dr Ian Lipkin #split# As a CEO one has to be prepared for any wild card event, an event which rarely happens but one which could affect your business in a major way. Prof. Ian Lipkin of Colombia University started day 3 of the THiNK 2012 talking about just this. The risk of a viral pandemic is real and increasing. Most of the diseases are zoonotic i.e. they originate in animals.