Comedy night with Adrien

Adrien, who has a nice mention in Startical 1.0, reached out to me that he was in town for the week. So I joined him for an amateur comedy night in the neighbourhood where I completed my graduate studies and worked at my first startup. I don't often get out in the evenings, as generally I'll be on my computer working on something, so this was a nice escape. And it was great to catch up with Adrien who is no stranger to tech projects with the potential to scale big.

I tested out the question of what he'd do if he had an extra hour each day to do anything he wanted. He responded that he'd use the time to work on those sideline projects that could eventually spin off into a standalone business. Makes sense. Ten-years-younger Jeff would have responded to that effect too.

I like this question!

E-mail Autoresponder

Here's my e-mail autoresponder message similar to the one in Startical 1.0 . Curious to see if it garners interesting responses like the ones received during Startical 1.0: "I would love to do the same … !" "C'est une bonne décision. L'esprit est aussi important que le reste et j'espère que ce Startical te permettra de recharger les batteries comme tu le souhaites." "It’s what we all wish we could do!" "Take a good rest Jeff, you deserve it" "Awesome auto reply"

Borscht

Evolutionary Purpose

Will and I discussed finding the balance of progress and purpose in organisations (startups and otherwise) which reminded me of the book Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux which was recommended to me by one of my mentors. We found the clip above on YouTube (if you're not familiar with Laloux, it's a nice short summary of his work) and one element stood out for me: what he called Evolutionary Purpose . How I understand this concept is that the purpose (or soul) of an organisation evolves over time, rather than an individual or leadership team directing towards a specific outcome. It's very much in line with the sailboat analogy and the lunch discussion I had with the team. It is very reassuring to me that the people closest to me today all affirmed my feelings on leadership, and interesting that it often took very different paths/context for us to be able to truly connect on the subject.

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