A Dutch Winter Break in the Office

Just returned back to Shanghai after my Winter time in the Netherlands. The last three weeks I’ve been rather busy, as always when I am back in the Netherlands. It is like living under a constant deadline, because you cannot delay things that much. I must say I like to be back, but it is exhausting and my work in Shanghai gets also delayed, which means from tomorrow onwards I will start again here to gets things ready in time. My most important jobs for the coming period are another New-Manager trip in March and the Dutch Entrepreneurship Week from 8-15 of May. For the first job I can relay on my previous experience, the latter one is more excited and difficult, because it is new. However during my days in the Netherlands I found time to work on this, and met up with a few potential Dutch participants for the program, I am still busy with the marketing and need to continue this to come to the sufficient number of ten companies. However a good development in this is that I've convinced the TU Delft to join the Dutch Chinese Entrepreneurship Week in May and they will come with a group of incubators and students. If everything works out the way I hope it will it be a very special legendry program at the start of the Shanghai EXPO. Since we’re in the 2010, the EXPO-year.

My time at the Baak was well spend and I was especially happy to attend two very great events in which I personally played an nice role. Firstly the international conference “Meet the World” at the Baak in Noordwijk. A nice event followed by a energising New Year reception. I gave a workshop during the conference on “Leading in China”. It was totally interactive, without using a PowerPoint-presentation. And new way for me, and it went surprisingly well.

The second event was the Big Improvement Day (http://www.bigimprovementday.nl/) for which I was the Project coordinator of the Baak, since we were one of the organising partners. It was a day full of inspiring speeches, people and ideas. I can recommend all people next year to come. The speaker who made most impact on my was Miles Hilton Barber (http://www.mileshilton-barber.com/). He is a blind man, that became an adventurer (flying, mountain climbing, ocean diving, etc). His message, start to Dream, commit to these dreams, make a plan to realize them, and keep on going. It sounds so simple, and actually it is than simply. At least that how I experienced it myself, when I wanted to move to China. But it is great to hear it so clearly in such an inspirational speech. Next to this I was inspired by Leen Zevenberg talking about ‘Survival of the happiest’ (http://www.leenzevenberg.nl/), Yesim Candan, that launched a new political party called “1” (http://www.yesimcandan.com/) and some young entrepreneurs with booming businesses at an age when I was still at university. Harry Starren was the ‘host’ of the day, he did a very good job, impressive again!

Back I Shanghai I have mostly slept. Exhausted and jet-legged. However this afternoon I went to the JZ-School. I made it to become the ‘Student of the Month’ and an online interview was posted in the New Letter of January (www.jz-school.com/schoolpost/201001.htm). Tonight I will have a party and tomorrow we will really get started, there is a lot on the To-do list, as always.