Business Quests in the Information Age: On attention and my next frontier

October 2008

Entrepreneurs On Business Quests

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Nicolas Martignole
Nicolas is a passionate technologist and an explorer of new ways and usages of technology. I like his no-nonsense way of approaching topics and definitely enjoyed learning and working with him at a scrum training.
sandrine Plasseraud
Great new marketing evangelist in the UK.
Hans Rosling
Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. I "discovered" him at a conference in Paris and found his quest for a fact-based understanding and analysis of the world most appealing.
Sylvain Zimmer
A young talented wiz kid who has been on a couple of business quests in the past five years... and he's in his early twenties!
Laurent Kratz
A serial entrepreneur currently very focused on the music industry.
Emmanuel Vivier
One of the top evangelists of new marketing methods in Europe: buzz, wom, viral & more.
Pascal Leurquin
Chef d'entreprise belge de 44 ans, marié, 3 enfants.

It's been a while since I last wrote a post on this blog. That's because I was away on training and I make it a priority to devote adequate attention to trainings I attend. Actually I think devoting adequate attention and being conscious of what is happening is a good way of doing things in general... Not always easy, but most of the time extremely beneficial especially if one is prepared to take the feedback any experience represents. I think that's a good path to achieving more of the human potential we all have.

Anyhow, I am extremely pleased and proud because a fantastic trip came to an equally pleasant close with my certification as master practitioner in neurolinguistic programming. Over the past two years I spent over 60 days of work learning and experimenting with the approach and that's only part of my investment in training every year. Every single second has been extremely beneficial because I learned a lot about myself and about my limitations of today that are my opportunities for tomorrow. Crucially, I understood that tools are worthless if used without an involvement of our souls as much as of our minds and I think that's exactly true for most disciplines. For all the skills I learned, for a profound change in key attitudes, for helping me evolve my vision, for showing me my limitations, for being tough on issues and kind to myself and for teaching with heart and mind, I thank wholeheartedly the beautiful team of Institut Ressources as well as all of my classmates who dared to share a path that is not always comfortable.

To a certain extent robotized management is one of the issues we have in the business world, where there's been a lot of work done to automate processes, more or less rigidly define methodologies and structure organisational pyramids that are characterized as "flat" these days (at least in corporate communications)... There is one facet of business that is probably the next frontier: people. What would the net present value of an investment in truly happy employees be? I think innovative companies like Google or companie that heavily depend on people like Ideo must have some sort of positive assessment of the investment's return...

Those of us who make a commitment to work on putting people at the heart of business may have to reinvent methods and processes. That's probably one of the biggest challenges of the decades to come and my intention is to contribute to that. Actually, the end of this cycle of training is also giving me an opportunity to reshape my personal R&D, and that is very exciting.