I spent today at an entrepreneurial seminar, hosted by Star here at the Rotterdam School of Management. A number of speakers gave lectures, including Bernard van Oranje (co-founder of Levi9), Marc Cornelissen (adventurer), Annemarie van Gaal (founder of AM Media & panel-member at the Dutch Dragon’s Den), Henk Keilman (founder of RIG Investments & also at Dragon’s Den), and Dirk Scheringa (founder of DSB Bank).

As readers of this blog are mostly non-Dutch, most of these names will mean very little to you, and I won’t go into their individual companies here. Rather, I’ll focus on individual points that came forth.

The most interesting speaker to me was Marc Cornelissen, who spoke mainly of his expeditions into the Antarctic and the North Pole and is also active in combating global warming.

3 main points:

• Terrain: When you’re operating on ice, there are different kinds of terrain and they also change dynamically. Sometimes everything is stable, sometimes you can walk on it, but can’t stand still, and sometimes you should avoid it. Traversing such terrain requires attention to detail, improvisation, teamwork, and speedy reactions.
• People: people’s motivation can change during the journey. Sometimes you find that you have to turn back at the beginning because for some reality was different than expected. It’s affected by the management-style certainly—sometimes putting too much pressure on someone can produce favourable results in the short-term, but cause burn-outs after a while—and it’s affected by what Marc called the iceberg: you see two parts of a person. The tip, which is the human resource with a certain skill-set, and the much larger part underneath, which is the personality, the motivation, the passion, the ownership of an idea. Getting to know that bottom-part requires interacting in an environment where it becomes visible.
• Choices: There are macro- and micro-choices. Macro-choices are the big ones you make, e.g. start a business, relocate your operations, etc. Micro-choices are the ones you make within each macro-choice and can affect your motivation. If you’re in hell and you have a choice to turn back, you will more often than not turn back. If you have no choice, you finish or die. Creating “no-option choices” may be scary, but they are sometimes what is needed to succeed.

These points resonated with me throughout the whole day, and hopefully for longer.

Annemarie van Gaal also mentioned three success-factors that were critical for starting her media-business in Russia.

• Have a flat organisation with no HQ to speed up decision-making and minimise overhead.
• Unlearn past behaviours, especially if the reality of where you are requires out of the box thinking.
• And immerse yourself in an environment and give yourself little choice to pull out. Find motivation in what you do and don’t give up.

Again the points of preparing for uncertain terrain, managing people well, and no-option choices was present in all of these.

Dirk Scheringa of DSB Bank was probably the best way to end the day. DSB Bank is a bank that has managed to avoid most of the pitfalls undermining current financial institutions. It focussed on simplicity, transparent & solid decision making, and growing stably, rather than explosively. Well, I can’t pretend to know enough about banking to give a good explanation.

His key-lesson for me: surrounding yourself with smart people, means that you grow with them. It seems like a simple thing, but it often requires reducing your ego to work with people that are (as) smarter than you.

That’s all folks!
Vincent

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