I’m relatively young. Yesterday, I turned 45, and that’s one year younger than the average German in the year 2014. Statistics say that my life expectancy is 90 years; most probably I’ll die on the 13th of April, 2059 — another 45 years to go. And yet, game could be over tomorrow. Who knows? A Meaningful Life However, my personal plan is to say good-bye much later — I love life, I want to
Today is the last day of our very interesting SMILE! program. Over a period of 5 days, participants receive tasks in the explore app. The tasks are simple, but not easy: each day I have to make five people smile. On the first day, it was easy: I could “choose” five people I would meet during the day and try to bring a smile on their facec by simply smiling at them first. That worked. Easy. Tuesday,
In our daily work, we are regularly confronted with privacy issues: since our company Datarella provides data analytics based on external third party data and internal behavioral data gathered via our app explore, we know what it means to comply with national data protection regulations. And since we are based in Munich and most of our projects are executed in Germany, we naturally comply with Germany’s Datenschutzbestimmungen. However, the basic
This is a guest post by Janine Pfahl, a communications and learning expert. Janine replies to my earlier post., which you might read first. While pausing for a moment in the spring sunshine to read Michael’s text „You can learn something from everybody and everything from all“, our dog positions his snout on my keyboard and starts to communicate in his own way. It’s absolutely clear what he wants to tell me. Not only
I hear gossip about colleagues everyday — in the subway, during lunch, etc. . I don’t really listen to people chitchatting but interestingly those people around me seem to always be the ones being in the right to complain about others. Until today I have never overheard a conversation in which somebody told her peer that she herself was unfair, illoyal or focusing on her individual success instead of the team’s. Isn’t that funny? It
Isn’t that fantastic? 50,000 women have — voluntarily — got pregnant in the last 18 months with the help of an app! At least this is what fertility startup Ovuline’s CEO Paris Wallace said this week. The Ovia fertility app has been downloaded 300,000 times and users are adding 1 million data points every two and a half days. This makes Ovuline’s fertility panel the largest in the world. In the big data world,
If you are a parent of school kids like me you’re most probably wondering whether this kind of schooling is the best possible way of education. Most of us would agree that there’s a lot of improvement potential in nowadays western school systems. Ok, there are private schools — but, in most cases they are expensive and — at least in Germany — the educated contents have to be exactly the ones
What are you as an entrepreneur focusing on in your daily struggle to success? Are you looking for a victory or are you making sure not to be defeated? Be aware of this simple recipe: Success is the absence of defeats, not a victory. A victory is the inevitable result of preventing defeats. This is my central statement. What does that mean for your startup? Let’s have a look at a critical aspect in the
I really like that infographic. These recommendations could describe a winegrower — and hey — wouldn’t it be nice to actually be a winegrower?
Having been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, I did not have to think twice to agree becoming a mentor of Founder Institute’s Munich chapter in 2013. When FI director Jan Kennedy discussed the first semester with me, I had a flashback to the times of my first startup: a travel agency which morphed into one of Germany’s first online travel agencies ever in 1995. In those days, my co-founder and I did not have any clue
Today, I stumbled upon an article by Tom and David Kelley, from IDEO. It’s an excerpt from their book ‘Creative Confidence’ in which they describe the effects of positive language not only in corporate environments, but on human beings in general: Language is the crystallization of thought. But the words we choose do more than just reflect our thought patterns—they shape them. What we say—and how we say it—can deeply affect