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Category: Cycling

Tour de Tolerance 2023

September 26, 2023
Tour de Tolerance 2023
After two years cycling in the Dolomites, I missed last years’ tour in the Pyrenees due to a bad fall in Goa. That had caused my family a lot of stress and me a lot of frustration of not being allowed to cycle by my doctor. The reason of my fall became never clear. I am still alive due to quick action by Sylvano, a friend of mine, as normally I always cycled into town on my own…

Read more about this ride in the Alps

Tour de Tolerance 2021

September 19, 2021
Tour de Tolerance 2021
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).

Read more about this wonderful ride

Tour de Tolerance 2020

September 8, 2020
Tour de Tolerance 2020
I had heard of Madonna but never of Madonna del Ghisallo. The little chapel in her honour sits atop a steep hill (532m elevation, 10.6km, avg 5.2%, max 11%) that climbs up from the shores of Lake Como. It had been such a stopping point for cyclists that the local priest had proposed that Madonna del Ghisallo be declared the patroness of cyclists. In 1949 Pope Pius XII, formerly known as Signor Pacelli, himself an Italian and therefore no doubt a keen cyclist, confirmed this.

Read more about this wonderful ride

A solo cycle ride in Portugal

January 25, 2020
A solo cycle ride in Portugal
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.

Read more about this fabulous ride

A pothole

September 29, 2015
A pothole
“May I make a phone call first?” I asked the doctor as he had just explained that I would need surgery. I had participated in the “Kankavli magic”, a 200km Brevets Randonneurs Mondiaux (BRM) ride. The short rest at the 100km control point had done me good. I realised on my way back that I had a pleasant tail wind. No wonder I had been pushing hard thus far. I did over 30km per hour when I hit a deep pothole.

Read more about this ride

Endurance

November 24, 2014
Endurance
My 13 year old son Daniel called me from school this morning. “Papa, I don’t feel well. I have thrown up already twice.” To which I queried “You mean to say can you pick me up now?” In a muttered tone he confessed “I know you are tired…” probably expecting me to be still in bed. Yesterday I completed a 300km endurance cycle ride called Daryacho Gaaj – Sounds of the Sea.

Read more about this ride

Category: Travel

Tour de Tolerance 2023

September 26, 2023
Tour de Tolerance 2023
After two years cycling in the Dolomites, I missed last years’ tour in the Pyrenees due to a bad fall in Goa. That had caused my family a lot of stress and me a lot of frustration of not being allowed to cycle by my doctor. The reason of my fall became never clear. I am still alive due to quick action by Sylvano, a friend of mine, as normally I always cycled into town on my own…

Read more about this ride in the Alps

Tour de Tolerance 2021

September 19, 2021
Tour de Tolerance 2021
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).

Read more about this wonderful ride

Tour de Tolerance 2020

September 8, 2020
Tour de Tolerance 2020
I had heard of Madonna but never of Madonna del Ghisallo. The little chapel in her honour sits atop a steep hill (532m elevation, 10.6km, avg 5.2%, max 11%) that climbs up from the shores of Lake Como. It had been such a stopping point for cyclists that the local priest had proposed that Madonna del Ghisallo be declared the patroness of cyclists. In 1949 Pope Pius XII, formerly known as Signor Pacelli, himself an Italian and therefore no doubt a keen cyclist, confirmed this.

Read more about this wonderful ride

A solo cycle ride in Portugal

January 25, 2020
A solo cycle ride in Portugal
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.

Read more about this fabulous ride

A pothole

September 29, 2015
A pothole
“May I make a phone call first?” I asked the doctor as he had just explained that I would need surgery. I had participated in the “Kankavli magic”, a 200km Brevets Randonneurs Mondiaux (BRM) ride. The short rest at the 100km control point had done me good. I realised on my way back that I had a pleasant tail wind. No wonder I had been pushing hard thus far. I did over 30km per hour when I hit a deep pothole.

Read more about this ride

Alitalia Customer Service: an oxymoron or tautology?

July 23, 2013
Alitalia Customer Service: an oxymoron or tautology?
You have received a customer complaint. Do you focus to minimise your financial loss or the loss of face your company may suffer? This thought crossed my mind when I lodged a claim with Alitalia for delayed delivery of our luggage on July 1. We had enjoyed a wonderful trip to Italy recently. For five days we stayed in a private apartment in Florence just round the corner of Piazza de Santa Croce.

Read more about my frustrations

Category: Open Source

Vanilla JavaScript, extremely good reasons you should use this to create a lean web!

July 30, 2023
Vanilla JavaScript, extremely good reasons you should use this to create a lean web!
Let me start with a bold statement: knowing HTML and CSS helps write much better JavaScript! Why you may ask. Well, you need to grasp the whole medium to appreciate the best approach. The what, where, how, issues etc. Vanilla JavaScript may appear daunting but it is not. Instead it is faster, more secure, and more manageable. For the novices, JavaScript is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS.

Read more about Vanilla JS

Vanilla JavaScript, best practices

July 24, 2023
You start to work on a new project and you are happily coding away and seeing results until the number of functions, event listeners etc become too many and you have to clean up your own mess in a much more organized manner. You scratch yourself behind the ear and wonder why you did not do that right at the start… The problem is that you only realise certain shortcomings after having done a certain number of web pages.

Read more about Vanilla JS

The future is highly distributed

October 6, 2020
The future is highly distributed
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.

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Static site generators

June 16, 2020

Delete @eaDIR folders

April 23, 2018

Is your nfs working

October 7, 2017

Open Source

November 2, 2016

cron errors only

April 5, 2016

Search for a text string within files

October 4, 2015

Minify files

October 4, 2015

Reduce the size of a pdf

September 9, 2015

Prepend and append example of a redirect file using awk and sed

August 28, 2015

Two git repositories on the same server for a single user

July 19, 2015

ODBC link with a database

June 10, 2015

Wireless not working in Ubuntu 14.04

October 7, 2014

File encryption with ccrypt

July 13, 2014

Moving mail to Google Apps

September 29, 2013

Public key without a password as a non root user

September 29, 2013

Error: Postfix/amavisd - connect to 127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10024: Connection refused

August 28, 2013

Error: unexpected RCODE REFUSED

August 28, 2013

500 error on uploading large images

August 15, 2013

Set up Perlbrew

April 11, 2013

How to use GIT

April 11, 2013

Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

March 17, 2013

Rename photo file names

March 16, 2013

Last reboot

March 16, 2013

prompt colour

March 16, 2013

Mailman

February 26, 2013

Change ownership among users

December 11, 2012

Samba logging

December 10, 2012

Adding a service permanently

November 15, 2012

Tape Backup

October 23, 2012

HandBrake

October 14, 2012

how to teach spamassassin

October 12, 2012

Concatenating pdfs

October 8, 2012

Postfix problems

September 24, 2012

Uploading a file in Mediawiki

September 18, 2012

Is it a 32 or 64 bit machine?

September 16, 2012

Changing date format in Thunderbird

August 15, 2012

HTTP not working

August 8, 2012

Backup script

August 8, 2012

MP3

August 8, 2012

Adding Java to your Firefox browser

August 8, 2012

Adding a GUI to your Ubuntu server

August 8, 2012

Virtualbox

August 8, 2012

Cron working but not executing?

August 8, 2012

Logging

August 8, 2012

Permission on main Samba folders

August 8, 2012

ntsysv in Ubuntu

August 8, 2012

Changing the main menu (sidebar)

August 7, 2012

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.

August 7, 2012

Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@'localhost’

August 7, 2012

Unable to start piped log program

August 7, 2012

Synology

August 7, 2012

HP printer and scanner

August 7, 2012

Flash in Firefox 14

August 7, 2012

Show my desktop

August 7, 2012

Show the date in the clock

August 7, 2012

MySQL backup and restore

August 7, 2012

Change permissions on files only

August 7, 2012

List all files starting with upper case

August 7, 2012

Update a Mediawiki

August 7, 2012

Enter password to unlock your login keyring

August 7, 2012

Change to Fedora 17

August 7, 2012

Strip HTML code

April 22, 2012

Selecting software for a greenfield

June 27, 2010
Selecting software for a greenfield
Centos Published in Dare magazine, August 2010 I am writing this using Open Office on a laptop with Ubuntu as it’s operating system, the Open Source equivalent from Oracle of Word and Windows respectively. My exposure to Open Source dates back to the 1990s. At that time I was a Director Finance & IT of Odyssey Tours, the famous travel company. Frustrated with continuous maintenance problems with Windows I was looking for ways to reduce this.

Read more about my article

Category: Music

Meat Loaf RIP

January 21, 2022
Meat Loaf RIP
It happens more often that some well known musician passes away and with that part of your own happy childhood too. Today I was extra depressed as Meat Loaf has passed away. He was such a lovely singer and my thoughts are with his wife Deborah and his two daughters. In my humble opinion, to die aged 74 is far too early but then he did have a rough medical history with Asthma, accidentally falling off the stage etc.

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Sic transit gloria mundi

April 22, 2012
Sic transit gloria mundi
I love Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a great fan of any Danse Macabre and prefer a Nullus Funus Sine Fidula (no funeral without a fiddle) anytime. However, death used to be very much part of daily life. As a teenager I lived in the Gothic St Bavo cathedral in Haarlem where people still literally walk all over the dead as the interior flooring of the church is entirely made up of tomb stones.

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Category: Information Technology

The future is highly distributed

October 6, 2020
The future is highly distributed
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.

Read more about this session

Window 8? Think again!

June 5, 2012
Planning to buy a computer with a Windows 8 sticker, think again! Microsoft has said that Windows 8 will ship with a so-called UEFI Secure Boot, a replacement of the old BIOS. This will hurt Linux distributions that don’t have the resources to sign everything to meet Microsoft’s unilaterally imposed security regime. Microsoft use this requirement to make it extremely difficult for users to install alternative operating systems. Mathew Garrett of Redhat has said that they will pay Verisign: “The $99 goes to Verisign, not Microsoft – once paid you can sign as many binaries as you want, but it’s cheaper than any realistic alternative would have been.

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Selecting software for a greenfield

June 27, 2010
Selecting software for a greenfield
Centos Published in Dare magazine, August 2010 I am writing this using Open Office on a laptop with Ubuntu as it’s operating system, the Open Source equivalent from Oracle of Word and Windows respectively. My exposure to Open Source dates back to the 1990s. At that time I was a Director Finance & IT of Odyssey Tours, the famous travel company. Frustrated with continuous maintenance problems with Windows I was looking for ways to reduce this.

Read more about my article

Category: Sustainability

Crisis : Danger + Opportunity!

June 16, 2020
Crisis : Danger + Opportunity!
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.

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Category: Management

Articles Posted

April 12, 2020
“I believe in life long learning and I hope these stories may assist towards that goal.”

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Support Net Neutrality

July 12, 2017
Support Net Neutrality
Internet neutrality is a big deal. It enables you, or anyone else, to complete at a true level playing field with large corporations. Support Net neutrality Early last year Mark Zuckerberg had pushed to break net neutrality in India. It failed! Read here more about Facebook’s biggest setback in the Guardian. Now the FCC has a plan to destroy net neutrality in the USA. It’s up to us to stop it.

Read more about my concern

Brilliant Out of the Box Thinking

July 30, 2014
Admittedly, your HSE or the Public Works Department may not approve but you have to give it to this guy, he thought about how to solve his problem and he did where many others would have failed.

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To quit or not to quit as a director

April 14, 2014
To quit or not to quit as a director
My company driver had collected me from the airport. It was a hot sunny afternoon and the air conditioner of the Toyota was blowing softly. I was on my way to my office and we were driving along the busy Airport Road. Suddenly my driver felt the need for some commentary as if pretending he was a tourist guide. “On the right you can see the jail which houses our Managing Director” he informed me with somewhat of a smile on his face.

Read more about my resignation

Algorithms and our world picture

November 11, 2013
Algorithms and our world picture
I have scraped data and created algorithms for our family travel website. It was therefore with more than an average interest that I listened to William Uricchio of MIT talk at THINK 2013 about algorithms and their effect on social conversion. Uricchio started with explaining that the media has seen a tremendous change in the last few years – a few companies own 80 percent of the media while on the other hand, there has also been a decentralisation as a result of the internet.

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2013 World Economic Forum Report on Global Risks

January 20, 2013
2013 World Economic Forum Report on Global Risks
For those of us dealing with risk management, and who doesn’t these days, here is a link to the 2013 World Economic Forum Report on Global Risks. This year’s findings show that the world is more at risk as persistent economic weakness saps our ability to tackle environmental challenges. The report highlights severe income disparity followed by unsustainable government debt (chronic fiscal imbalances) as the top two most prevalent global risks.

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Bob Geldof and Jonathan Fenby

November 4, 2012
Bob Geldof and Jonathan Fenby
Earlier in the day Bob Geldof had stated that China has uplifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Can this be sustained or not? Jonathan Fenby, founding partner of Trusted Sources, the emerging markets research and consultancy firm, spoke on this topic at THiNK 2012. Jonathan Fenby (Photo courtesy Thinkworks Pvt Ltd) Fenby started with saying that there is a large shift to domestic consumption but “water levels are dropping at catastrophic rates” and China has to make its agriculture work.

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Anatomy of a Pandemic

November 4, 2012
Anatomy of a Pandemic
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.

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KLM off-target

March 28, 2012
KLM off-target
The plane is cruising at some 560 miles per hour somewhere over Pakistan. I am flying back to India after a meeting at head office in the Netherlands. I wonder if there are any drones around and subconsciously look outside as if I would be able to spot one in the dark. It amuses me that the military call Unmanned Aerial Vehicles drones as male honey bees don’t sting. The MQ-1 Predator drone, used a lot in Pakistan, flies at a medium altitude of 30,000ft, something I am doing right now.

Read more about my journey

Eclectic thoughts

March 7, 2012
Eclectic thoughts
In the old days it was common for an anchor man to be referred to as ‘Our man in..‘. It became even more common with Graham Greene’s 1958 novel “Our man in Havana”. Longman’s dictionary also refers to the term as “a man who is the representative of a country or organization in a particular place.” I am trained as a zoologist (BSc) in Sydney, a Financial Controller (Masters) in Amsterdam, and an Information Security auditor (CISA) in cyberspace.

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Who said the world is flat?

June 15, 2011
As a former zoologist it is only natural that I back Galileo. The world is not flat. Alright, people travel in greater numbers, communication has become much cheaper and pervaisive, distances are more and more virtual and data more readily available and therefore often more transparent. An Indian software engineer can easily take over the work of his American collegue sitting in Bangalore. It is flawed to consider this argument as the world being flat when it comes to management.

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Leadership in the 21st Century

December 22, 2010
Leadership in the 21st Century
Pff isn’t it annoying if you cannot find a particular article or email? I just searched all over the place for a reference to the YouTube clip I had watched yesterday but to no avail. At least until eventually I stumbled upon the story. To my delight it was even a better version as this one showed the graphs. The talk had been on the emerging economies and whether they will overtake the western world.

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WikiLeaks, a superb case study

December 10, 2010
WikiLeaks, a superb case study
Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. There is no other word to describe how the world is scrambling to deal with the WikiLeaks information and in particular with its founder Julian Assange. There is no cohesive response as everybody is shooting from the hip, often totally ignorant about the legal issues at stake. The latter is even unclear to the legal community due to the novelty and the international character of the case. No surprise therefore that legal human rights heavy weight lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC is going to defend Mr Assange.

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Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine?

October 7, 2009
Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine?
This article in the HBR is an interesting one. In my opinion it is a matter of time before a country like India will shorten the gap with the West. Already major reforms are initiated in the education sector to make it more application driven. That, coupled with poor infrastructure, is the main reason why it’s lagging behind. (IT) Industries without (much) infrastructural demand are doing very well. What is killing innovation?

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High Level Meet at the European Parliament

November 19, 2007
I was invited to the Symposium on Ethics in Business­ Corporate Culture & Spirituality 2007, held at the Hotel Sheraton and the European Parliament in Brussels on 2nd and 3rd December 2007. This symposium was organized by the International Association for Human Values (IAHV) in cooperation with the Europe-India Chamber of Commerce of which I am a member. The aim of the symposium was to provide an opportunity for leaders in society to discuss evolving leadership styles that lend themselves to an ethically responsible corporate community.

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Diversity & Inclusion

August 26, 2007
On April 18 I did join the very interesting Diversity & Inclusion seminar courtesy the ABN-AMRO bank and the Free University (VU). Chaired by Charles Groenhuijsen, the presentation by Prof. Yvonne Benschop (Nijmegen Uni) was particularly interesting. Also noteworthy was Francoise Companjen’s (VU Uni) reference to Richard Florida ‘s findings that “people in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness, and that our measures potentially get at a broader concept of diversity and inclusiveness.

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Category: Business

Frontiers in Service 2019

July 18, 2019
Frontiers in Service 2019
A great academic conference In July 2019 I attended the Frontiers in Service conference at the National University of Singapore. At the time my role was Director Global Customer Services and I was keen to improve the quality delivered. There were several conferences but this one drew my interest as it was an academic conference and it would be attended by Ron Kaufman whose articles in the HBS Review and book UP Your Service!

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Assocham sets up European headquarters in Amsterdam

December 2, 2015
Assocham sets up European headquarters in Amsterdam
The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (known as Assocham India) has officially opened its first Dutch branch in Amsterdam. According to Vikas Chaturvedi, the founder of Assocham Netherlands, the launch of Assocham’s European base in Amsterdam “will give a substantial boost in business between India and Europe. This will further enhance the role of the Netherlands…

Read more about this news

Profit and Prejudice

November 3, 2012
Profit and Prejudice
Heavy industry minister Praful Patel, Rajan Mittal of Bharti Airtel fame, and Sajjan Jindal of JSW, spoke at the THiNK 2012 in Goa. Praful Patel joked that credibility of politicians is at an all time high referring to the many scams being uncovered. He admitted that business and politics have to coexist. I could not feel a touch of irony as the Comptroller and Auditor General has accused him of doubtful investment decisions when expanding the Air India fleet.

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SpotMe™ at the Strategic Growth Forum™ India

September 16, 2012
SpotMe™ at the Strategic Growth Forum™ India
It was an event for CEOs and by invitation only. That is more often said than done but EY, as in Ernst & Young, were true to their slogan *‘Quality in Everything We Do’*and had send me a polite invite to attend their Strategic Growth Forum India 2012 without irritating follow up phone calls. It was a very well organised three day action packed event.

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Leaders in India

October 17, 2009
Leaders in India
Leaders in India was the name of the business forum conference I attended in Mumbai last week. With some humility I could not help but think that most of us did not really qualify that title. Then again, the only criteria was that you had to be a CEO. In my humble opinion there were too many foreign speakers/panellists in the conference. There are so many excellent Leaders in India that I failed to understand why they had to be flown in from abroad.

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Gooooood Morning India!

February 12, 2008
As that is what I will be able to yell as of April 2008. I am delighted to announce that I have accepted the offer of a Dutch company to become their CFO for their newly to set up Indian operation near Manipal, Karnataka. Packers have been called and the family will be moving on March 13. Take note of our new Indian address!

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India Symposium, Amsterdam

September 21, 2007
Take this chance to register for a unique investment event bringing together Indian & Dutch Investment professionals. Even if you are not investing but an opinion leader in this field do not forget what this conference might add to your views. We are gathering both Indian as well as Dutch executives together to exchange their opinions and opportunities in order to create more value to all of us. Date: October 3, 2007 Location: beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam Please register on time (see attachments) and go to http://www.

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Economic and Political Dimension of the EU-India Strategic Partnership

August 27, 2007
Economic and Political Dimension of the EU-India Strategic Partnership
Kamal Nath Last week I attended the high level meeting organized by the Europe-India Chamber of Commerce. Held at the European Parliament in Brussels, it was an interesting conference. The thing that struck me most was the high calibre speeches made by the representatives of the Government of India. Kamal Nath, India’s minister of commerce and industry, compared India with Europe where many states with different languages strive to provide a single economic entity.

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Let's meet in Brussels!

August 26, 2007
The Europe India Chamber of Commerce (EICC), of which I am a member, in association with Indian Merchants’ Chamber (IMC) and Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) is organizing a High level Conference “Europe meets India: Economic and Political Dimension of the EU-India Strategic Partnership – Challenges and Opportunities” to be held in Brussels on 8-9 November 2006.

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Leading Innovation

February 8, 2007
####Workshop ‘Leading innovation: ensuring patient satisfaction in health care Tuesday afternoon (16.00 -20.00 hrs), 27 February 2007 Is this workshop intended for you? You would find this workshop useful if you are a senior manager of any healthcare related activities with a stakeholder role, for example, in Health Insurance Companies, Hospitals, Social Services, Hospitality Providers, Tour Operators, Airlines and Government. You are cordially invited to attend the workshop if you are interested in exploring various facets of emerging healthcare service.

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Category: Service

Frontiers in Service 2019

July 18, 2019
Frontiers in Service 2019
A great academic conference In July 2019 I attended the Frontiers in Service conference at the National University of Singapore. At the time my role was Director Global Customer Services and I was keen to improve the quality delivered. There were several conferences but this one drew my interest as it was an academic conference and it would be attended by Ron Kaufman whose articles in the HBS Review and book UP Your Service!

Read the full post

Category: India

Support Net Neutrality

July 12, 2017
Support Net Neutrality
Internet neutrality is a big deal. It enables you, or anyone else, to complete at a true level playing field with large corporations. Support Net neutrality Early last year Mark Zuckerberg had pushed to break net neutrality in India. It failed! Read here more about Facebook’s biggest setback in the Guardian. Now the FCC has a plan to destroy net neutrality in the USA. It’s up to us to stop it.

Read more about my concern

World Boutique Hotel award

November 9, 2016
World Boutique Hotel award
On behalf of Odyssey Tours I was pleased to collect the World Boutique Hotel award which this year was held at the Merchant Taylor’s Hall in London, November 9, 2016. Read more about it here. Yes! The first and probably not the last award It was an interesting night at a fascinating old building in Threadneedle St, Cornhill, which is in the heart of London. I had arrived on the Eurostar via Brussels so I did not have far to go.

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India's GDP accelerates to 7.4% in Q2 FY16

December 5, 2015
India's GDP accelerates to 7.4% in Q2 FY16
The optimism regarding passage of Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill in the ongoing winter session of the Parliament has increased, after top leaders from ruling and major Opposition Party met on Friday evening for negotiations. Q2 – FY: 2016 real GDP number improves on deflationary trends The economic growth for Q2 – FY: 2016 came in better than Q1 and was broadly in line with expectations. The Gross Value added (GVA) (basic price) clocked 7.

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Assocham sets up European headquarters in Amsterdam

December 2, 2015
Assocham sets up European headquarters in Amsterdam
The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (known as Assocham India) has officially opened its first Dutch branch in Amsterdam. According to Vikas Chaturvedi, the founder of Assocham Netherlands, the launch of Assocham’s European base in Amsterdam “will give a substantial boost in business between India and Europe. This will further enhance the role of the Netherlands…

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Travel in style in India, relax in luxury in Goa

November 16, 2015
Travel in style in India, relax in luxury in Goa
Goa’s Most Romantic Experience The Solita is our own classic luxury yacht, available for exclusive charter cruises. A completely different way of exploring Goa, the Solita will take you out to sea to spot dolphins and down Goa’s secret backwaters, past quaint villages. Available at a priority booking to guests at Summertime Villa, this is an experience not to be missed. Goa’s very first and till today, the most beautiful yacht for charter, the Solita is a 42-foot yacht in the classic Grand Banks style.

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New bankruptcy bill to speed up shutdown of failed businesses

November 4, 2015
by Economic Times of India NEW DELHI: A government panel has sought the overhaul of the bankruptcy framework to allow the speedy winding up of failed businesses to protect shareholders and lenders, aiming to modernise an outdated system that drags out closure proceedings. It has recommended new institutions and structures for a fresh regime that will encourage entrepreneurship and foster a startup culture, among the stated objectives of the Narendra Modi administration.

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Modi must implement structural change to minimize corruption

July 14, 2015
by Trusted Sources Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke too soon when he claimed in May that there was “not one scandal” in his government “even after a year”, compared with his predecessor’s record when “every day was a new bad day”. As my colleague Amitabh Dubey writes from New Delhi: Corruption allegations have swamped Modi’s government shortly after that. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje were accused of secretly aiding Lalit Modi, a controversial businessman and founder of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket franchise, who has moved to London to avoid questioning over alleged financial irregularities.

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Brilliant Out of the Box Thinking

July 30, 2014
Admittedly, your HSE or the Public Works Department may not approve but you have to give it to this guy, he thought about how to solve his problem and he did where many others would have failed.

Read the full post

Market Entry into India

April 25, 2014
Market Entry into India
India has inched recently from 142 to 130 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index but one still needs to realise the complexity and difficulty of doing business. One therefore needs to take a holistic and pragmatic approach to this. The Indian statutory and regulatory environment is constantly being transformed. The new Indian Companies Act of 2013 was a major milestone. In recent years Transfer Pricing related disputes has let to many court cases (e.

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To quit or not to quit as a director

April 14, 2014
To quit or not to quit as a director
My company driver had collected me from the airport. It was a hot sunny afternoon and the air conditioner of the Toyota was blowing softly. I was on my way to my office and we were driving along the busy Airport Road. Suddenly my driver felt the need for some commentary as if pretending he was a tourist guide. “On the right you can see the jail which houses our Managing Director” he informed me with somewhat of a smile on his face.

Read more about my resignation

The Lokpal bill

July 11, 2011
The Lokpal bill
The OECD is advocating to fight corruption. See this link for more. Also the people of India are sick of corruption. Anna Hazare’s Jantar Mantar fast, which got overwhelming public support, has not gone in vain. The latest government version of the proposed Lokpal Bill is certainly an improvement over the anaemic bill drafted by the law ministry in December 2010, but the government is still not ready to go the whole hog.

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Hans Rosling: Asia's Rise -- How and When

July 23, 2010
Hans Rosling: Asia's Rise -- How and When
Hans Rosling So often during my talks I have referred to India not as an emerging economy but as a re-emerging economy. Hans Rosling does an excellent job at the recent Ted conference in Mysore graphing global economic growth since 1858 and he predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US: July 27, 2048, just after my 88th birthday…

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Leaders in India

October 17, 2009
Leaders in India
Leaders in India was the name of the business forum conference I attended in Mumbai last week. With some humility I could not help but think that most of us did not really qualify that title. Then again, the only criteria was that you had to be a CEO. In my humble opinion there were too many foreign speakers/panellists in the conference. There are so many excellent Leaders in India that I failed to understand why they had to be flown in from abroad.

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India Symposium, Amsterdam

September 21, 2007
Take this chance to register for a unique investment event bringing together Indian & Dutch Investment professionals. Even if you are not investing but an opinion leader in this field do not forget what this conference might add to your views. We are gathering both Indian as well as Dutch executives together to exchange their opinions and opportunities in order to create more value to all of us. Date: October 3, 2007 Location: beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam Please register on time (see attachments) and go to http://www.

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Economic and Political Dimension of the EU-India Strategic Partnership

August 27, 2007
Economic and Political Dimension of the EU-India Strategic Partnership
Kamal Nath Last week I attended the high level meeting organized by the Europe-India Chamber of Commerce. Held at the European Parliament in Brussels, it was an interesting conference. The thing that struck me most was the high calibre speeches made by the representatives of the Government of India. Kamal Nath, India’s minister of commerce and industry, compared India with Europe where many states with different languages strive to provide a single economic entity.

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Let's meet in Brussels!

August 26, 2007
The Europe India Chamber of Commerce (EICC), of which I am a member, in association with Indian Merchants’ Chamber (IMC) and Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) is organizing a High level Conference “Europe meets India: Economic and Political Dimension of the EU-India Strategic Partnership – Challenges and Opportunities” to be held in Brussels on 8-9 November 2006.

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India, long-term sustainable growth?

October 24, 2005
Written by Alfred Tuinman, published in FM Corporate (Nr 1 Vol 1, Nov 2005) It was sometime after midnight that day in November 1982, that I experienced my first exposure to India. I was being driven through the dark streets of Bombay to my destination. I was to soon to recover from my long flight from Sydney. At various points I could see people huddled around little campfires on the side of the road.

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Category: Tourism

World Boutique Hotel award

November 9, 2016
World Boutique Hotel award
On behalf of Odyssey Tours I was pleased to collect the World Boutique Hotel award which this year was held at the Merchant Taylor’s Hall in London, November 9, 2016. Read more about it here. Yes! The first and probably not the last award It was an interesting night at a fascinating old building in Threadneedle St, Cornhill, which is in the heart of London. I had arrived on the Eurostar via Brussels so I did not have far to go.

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Travel in style in India, relax in luxury in Goa

November 16, 2015
Travel in style in India, relax in luxury in Goa
Goa’s Most Romantic Experience The Solita is our own classic luxury yacht, available for exclusive charter cruises. A completely different way of exploring Goa, the Solita will take you out to sea to spot dolphins and down Goa’s secret backwaters, past quaint villages. Available at a priority booking to guests at Summertime Villa, this is an experience not to be missed. Goa’s very first and till today, the most beautiful yacht for charter, the Solita is a 42-foot yacht in the classic Grand Banks style.

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Sic transit gloria mundi

April 22, 2012
Sic transit gloria mundi
I love Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a great fan of any Danse Macabre and prefer a Nullus Funus Sine Fidula (no funeral without a fiddle) anytime. However, death used to be very much part of daily life. As a teenager I lived in the Gothic St Bavo cathedral in Haarlem where people still literally walk all over the dead as the interior flooring of the church is entirely made up of tomb stones.

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Vietnam

March 22, 2011
Vietnam
Bon Apetite in Vietnam My thigh muscles were aching for days afterwards. I had been crawling for some 100 metres through the Viet Kong tunnels at Củ Chi, north of Saigon. These escape routes from the American soldiers during the Vietnam war had been a bit widened and heightened for the tourists. Even though I still had to come across the first tall or fat Vietnamese, it was difficult to comprehend any human being able to manoeuvre himself through these.

Read more about my journey

Category: Economy

India's GDP accelerates to 7.4% in Q2 FY16

December 5, 2015
India's GDP accelerates to 7.4% in Q2 FY16
The optimism regarding passage of Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill in the ongoing winter session of the Parliament has increased, after top leaders from ruling and major Opposition Party met on Friday evening for negotiations. Q2 – FY: 2016 real GDP number improves on deflationary trends The economic growth for Q2 – FY: 2016 came in better than Q1 and was broadly in line with expectations. The Gross Value added (GVA) (basic price) clocked 7.

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New bankruptcy bill to speed up shutdown of failed businesses

November 4, 2015
by Economic Times of India NEW DELHI: A government panel has sought the overhaul of the bankruptcy framework to allow the speedy winding up of failed businesses to protect shareholders and lenders, aiming to modernise an outdated system that drags out closure proceedings. It has recommended new institutions and structures for a fresh regime that will encourage entrepreneurship and foster a startup culture, among the stated objectives of the Narendra Modi administration.

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Modi must implement structural change to minimize corruption

July 14, 2015
by Trusted Sources Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke too soon when he claimed in May that there was “not one scandal” in his government “even after a year”, compared with his predecessor’s record when “every day was a new bad day”. As my colleague Amitabh Dubey writes from New Delhi: Corruption allegations have swamped Modi’s government shortly after that. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje were accused of secretly aiding Lalit Modi, a controversial businessman and founder of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket franchise, who has moved to London to avoid questioning over alleged financial irregularities.

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Market Entry into India

April 25, 2014
Market Entry into India
India has inched recently from 142 to 130 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index but one still needs to realise the complexity and difficulty of doing business. One therefore needs to take a holistic and pragmatic approach to this. The Indian statutory and regulatory environment is constantly being transformed. The new Indian Companies Act of 2013 was a major milestone. In recent years Transfer Pricing related disputes has let to many court cases (e.

Read the full post

The Lokpal bill

July 11, 2011
The Lokpal bill
The OECD is advocating to fight corruption. See this link for more. Also the people of India are sick of corruption. Anna Hazare’s Jantar Mantar fast, which got overwhelming public support, has not gone in vain. The latest government version of the proposed Lokpal Bill is certainly an improvement over the anaemic bill drafted by the law ministry in December 2010, but the government is still not ready to go the whole hog.

Read more about this news

Hans Rosling: Asia's Rise -- How and When

July 23, 2010
Hans Rosling: Asia's Rise -- How and When
Hans Rosling So often during my talks I have referred to India not as an emerging economy but as a re-emerging economy. Hans Rosling does an excellent job at the recent Ted conference in Mysore graphing global economic growth since 1858 and he predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US: July 27, 2048, just after my 88th birthday…

Read the full post

India, long-term sustainable growth?

October 24, 2005
Written by Alfred Tuinman, published in FM Corporate (Nr 1 Vol 1, Nov 2005) It was sometime after midnight that day in November 1982, that I experienced my first exposure to India. I was being driven through the dark streets of Bombay to my destination. I was to soon to recover from my long flight from Sydney. At various points I could see people huddled around little campfires on the side of the road.

Read the full post

Category: HR

Cultural Differences

November 17, 2015
Cultural Differences
Cultural differences Geert Hofstede once said Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster. Already an impressive 77% of the foreign companies are making a profit with a further 9% breaking even. The success lies in the ability to understand and adapt to the Indian work culture. Unfortunately Western entrepreneurs often display a misplaced arrogance. Their directness is uncomfortable in a culture where saying ‘no’ is impolite.

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What makes people successful

August 31, 2014
I can fully recommend you watch this Ted video talk

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Multicultural managers can make a huge difference

August 8, 2013
“Many multinational companies have hidden, unrecognised multicultural gems within their ranks. To find these and get the most from their unique skills means taking the time and trouble to carefully develop and deploy multicultural managers in critical positions.” Read more by my former INSEAD professor of Strategic Management, Yves Doz.

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The Republic of Technology

November 4, 2012
The Republic of Technology
At THiNK 2012 being held in Goa this weekend, Sherry Turkle spoke on the social network: why are robots are becoming human and men machines. As a psychologist, over the years she became more concerned with the change to a virtual reality in that we become social robots. I agree as one only has to see this happening at dinners and parties where often our friends are staring at their mobile rather than engaging in a more real social activity.

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Indian Management - Towards Cultural Congruence

June 5, 2006
Doing business in India: A Dutch perspective is the paper I presented at the Eurasian Management Education & Training Conference held at the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam (June 13, 2006). Humility forces me to admit that that my fellow speaker, Dr Bert Twaalfhoven and entrepreneur pur sang, presented a much more interesting glimpse of his colourful business career.

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Category: Customer Service

Alitalia Customer Service: an oxymoron or tautology?

July 23, 2013
Alitalia Customer Service: an oxymoron or tautology?
You have received a customer complaint. Do you focus to minimise your financial loss or the loss of face your company may suffer? This thought crossed my mind when I lodged a claim with Alitalia for delayed delivery of our luggage on July 1. We had enjoyed a wonderful trip to Italy recently. For five days we stayed in a private apartment in Florence just round the corner of Piazza de Santa Croce.

Read more about my frustrations

Microsoft: How can we help you?

February 8, 2013
Microsoft: How can we help you?
How can we help you? A friend of mine called this morning to say that, despite the spamassassin I had installed, he had received almost 2000 spam messages and whether I could help. Not certain how one could receive suddenly so much spam I was somewhat bewildered and took an eager look. The spam turned out to be legitimate system messages of servers stating that the user-id was wrong, did not accept mail from unknown sources etc.

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Category: Strategy

Overcoming the Global Innovation Trade-Off

January 20, 2013
Overcoming the Global Innovation Trade-Off
How to maintain creative complexity without the limitations of co-location is an article by Yves Doz, my former professor at INSEAD, and Keeley Wilson. Illustration by Heads of State “For their global innovation strategies, many companies have long relied on their ability to assemble people with key capabilities and critical knowledge. They typically do this through co-location: bringing together designers, engineers, technologists, and other creative thinkers in a few innovation centers at home and in lead markets.

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Not outsourcing to increase own skill sets?

December 21, 2010
Not outsourcing to increase own skill sets?
South of Negombo, Sri Lanka. I found myself walking in the rain along a totally unknown path along a small river which I hoped, and half expected, would lead me to the beach. The rain had been a bit of a light drizzle when I first set off but slowly it gathered the look and feel of a monsoon shower. Even my umbrella started to feel inadequate to deal with the steady moisture descending from the grey clouds above.

Read more about my journey

Selecting software for a greenfield

June 27, 2010
Selecting software for a greenfield
Centos Published in Dare magazine, August 2010 I am writing this using Open Office on a laptop with Ubuntu as it’s operating system, the Open Source equivalent from Oracle of Word and Windows respectively. My exposure to Open Source dates back to the 1990s. At that time I was a Director Finance & IT of Odyssey Tours, the famous travel company. Frustrated with continuous maintenance problems with Windows I was looking for ways to reduce this.

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High Level Meet at the European Parliament

November 19, 2007
I was invited to the Symposium on Ethics in Business­ Corporate Culture & Spirituality 2007, held at the Hotel Sheraton and the European Parliament in Brussels on 2nd and 3rd December 2007. This symposium was organized by the International Association for Human Values (IAHV) in cooperation with the Europe-India Chamber of Commerce of which I am a member. The aim of the symposium was to provide an opportunity for leaders in society to discuss evolving leadership styles that lend themselves to an ethically responsible corporate community.

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Category: China

Bob Geldof and Jonathan Fenby

November 4, 2012
Bob Geldof and Jonathan Fenby
Earlier in the day Bob Geldof had stated that China has uplifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Can this be sustained or not? Jonathan Fenby, founding partner of Trusted Sources, the emerging markets research and consultancy firm, spoke on this topic at THiNK 2012. Jonathan Fenby (Photo courtesy Thinkworks Pvt Ltd) Fenby started with saying that there is a large shift to domestic consumption but “water levels are dropping at catastrophic rates” and China has to make its agriculture work.

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Category: Energy

Modern Druids

November 3, 2012
Modern Druids
Steven Cowley, CEO of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and professor at Imperial College, spoke at THiNK 2012 about his area of expertise: fusion energy. This is a topic of immense economic interest as its success will have paramount repercussions. Cowley commenced his talk with the statement that there is a direct relationship between wealth and energy consumption. Unfortunately, most of the world is not getting its share.

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Category: Education

Big History

November 3, 2012
Big History
David Christian raised the interesting question at THiNK 2012 that many parents will have: what problems and issues will our children be faced with? He started to elaborate that the Russian economy prior to Brezhnev would have collapsed if people would have stopped drinking vodka as its economy depended for 40% on this. An interesting thought but not surprising really as in the USA and even in India it was not sustainable not to sell spirits.

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Category: History

The Green Thing

October 6, 2012
The following story has been published multiple times without me or anyone else for that matter being able to trace the source. It is a good story which struck a chord with me. Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days”.

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Category: Maritime

Face to Face, an interview with Indian Ports & Infrastructure

March 19, 2012
Face to Face, an interview with Indian Ports & Infrastructure
Sonali Chatterjee of the Indian Ports & Infrastructure magazine did a Q&A with me some time back which appeared in their February issue. I have created a pdf of the relevant article for you to read. This publication has appeared in the Indian Ports & Infrastructure magazine of February 2012.

Read more about this interview

Move to the role of a large scale integrator

September 16, 2011
Move to the role of a large scale integrator
Shipyards should move to the role of a large integrator and partner with innovative solution providers. Imitation and low pricing won’t last long and is based on volume. Innovation is what adds real value. In this forever faster changing global world we can achieve this through continuous search for excellence. Short production series, customisation as a general principle, and global competition force shipyards to permanently search for innovative solutions with regard to design and production technologies.

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Not outsourcing to increase own skill sets?

December 21, 2010
Not outsourcing to increase own skill sets?
South of Negombo, Sri Lanka. I found myself walking in the rain along a totally unknown path along a small river which I hoped, and half expected, would lead me to the beach. The rain had been a bit of a light drizzle when I first set off but slowly it gathered the look and feel of a monsoon shower. Even my umbrella started to feel inadequate to deal with the steady moisture descending from the grey clouds above.

Read more about my journey

Adding value in a low value market

July 23, 2010
Adding value in a low value market
If one can borrow, why build or buy? More than ever, in today’s climate where cash is king and credit is tight, alliances are a smarter, swifter, more reactive and economical way to pursue strategic opportunities and gain competitive advantages. These words of wisdom from INSEAD applied to the ING bank where I worked (increase the throughput in Change Management by means of outsourcing). It also applies to the shipbuilding industry, my current field of endeavour.

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Category: Alliances

Creating strategic alliances and partnerships

December 7, 2010
Creating strategic alliances and partnerships
I just boarded the flight to Goa and thought about the comments of Prof Yves Doz with his typical French accent: “try and note the most important lessons learned otherwise you will look back at this seminar as interesting and a place where you had fun but you cannot remember much about it“. How true. We carry so much tacit knowledge but are often unable to link it to a particular point in time.

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Adding value in a low value market

July 23, 2010
Adding value in a low value market
If one can borrow, why build or buy? More than ever, in today’s climate where cash is king and credit is tight, alliances are a smarter, swifter, more reactive and economical way to pursue strategic opportunities and gain competitive advantages. These words of wisdom from INSEAD applied to the ING bank where I worked (increase the throughput in Change Management by means of outsourcing). It also applies to the shipbuilding industry, my current field of endeavour.

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Category: Holidays

Happy Diwali

November 9, 2007
We wish you all a very happy Diwali and look forward to catch up soon again. The first venue where we will be speaking will be the pre-Trade Mission meeting hosted by the EVD in the Hague. This mission is organised by the Chambers of Commerce of the five largest cities in the Netherlands. After that there is the high level meeting of the Europe India Chamber of Commerce at the European Parliament on December 4.

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Category: Books

The book is out!

August 26, 2007
The book is out!
The book “Managing International Trade & Investment”, the new text book for the MBA course at Erasmus University to which I contributed a small, but I dare hope a valuable part, has been released by McGraw Hill. Scheltema has it in stock. It sells at €57,95. It is also available on Amazon.

Read more about this book