There is this person you don’t like. You don’t really know her but she behaves in a way which reminds you of your Latin teacher, she’s this tall, over-dressed, SUV-armed hectic housewife type of a woman and although you cross her paths quite often she does not even to have taken notice of you. We all have at least one or a few individuals we not only ignore but we actively dislike — because
When it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, there generally are two fractions: most of us make their resolutions on December, 31, and stick to them at least for a few days or weeks. Others deny any positive aspects of these resolutions since people don’t stick to them, anyway. There are numerous scientific approaches of setting goals — even data-driven ones — and some of them even suggest that making resolutions could
I’ve just started reading „The Hard Thing About Hard Things“, a book about personal experiences building startups by Ben Horowitz, well-known to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as a partner of Marc Andressen at a16z. It’s the best business-related book I’ve read for a long time. Although on a different level, I have experienced pretty much the same as Ben has: the ups and — even more often and more distinct — the downs of running
Getting-things-done tools, or goal-setting by breaking big goals into smaller, more achievable ones, have been very fashionable in the management field lately. A different perspective, but the same aspect of becoming more productive, is the “Lean” approach, as in Lean Management or Lean Startup. All those approaches are based on one fundamental principle: think small. The flip side of all goal setting techniques is the limited size of the belief someone has
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