Nikolaus Stiefel

A holiday memory from childhood is putting my boots in the entrance the night of December 5th before bed, and waking up to (hopefully) find chocolates, cookies and citrus fruits in them the next morning. This is a celebration of Nikolaustag (Saint Nicholas Day) which has many interesting regional traditions.

I decided to surprise my startup colleagues with cookies in their boots which were conveniently located, according to tradition, in an entrance before we headed out together for lunch. Had they been naughty rather than nice, Krampus or Knecht Ruprecht may have instead placed a stick in their boots for their parents (or boss?) to beat them with. Yes, that really was the darker side of the tradition although I only know of anecdotal accounts from the previous generation of this actually being carried out!

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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