I just arrived back from a mind-blowing week in Berlin at Palomar 5. I have known Mathias and Hans for quite some time now and Sandbox wouldn’t be what it is today without their inputs and contributions on the way.

I wanted to thank everyone at P5 for the amazing days and write down a few thoughts, learnings and ideas from the last 5 days in Berlin. There is much more that would deserve to be told, like stories about mexican-human-mini-golf courses at 4 am, midnight Omelette cooking with Saga or Eddie’s theory of focus vs. broadness on a napkin. Please post your personal stories / ideas / comments below, I would love to hear what you guys thought.

From the presented projects on the overall theme “the future of work”, there were a few things that I had expected: telco-, new technology and large data projects (check this blog post for details). The Data DJ project addresses visualization of data and has huge potential in my opinion! However, there were a few things that inspired me more and that you usually don’t get at conferences: the “human” stuff, the stuff that really matters in my opinion.

“Emotional innovation” is the keyword that stuck with me. Maryanna and Axelle presented a project called Love Lab where they pointed out a true issue: corporate cultures that desperately need innovation and have gigantic potential to improve. While we keep improving the technical solutions and efficiency within corporates it seems to me that many larger companies have grown into de-humanized monsters. Nobody really wants to work there. But they pay well. And it’s just what you’re supposed to do if you want to have a career. However, many people feel that the underlying value system is wrong. Internal politics, hierarchical thinking, fear of change and enormous work hours are just a few aspects of it. In my opinion, this is one of the hottest topics in the next couple of years and will become a true differentiator of companies. The war for talent is on and as soon as the economy picks up it will intensify again. Companies need to create positive, value driven, human environments, where people actually like to work. And it will pay off. People will prefer to work there, they will create better results and customers will be more likely to buy there. That’s at least my opinion. Positive examples for innovative corporate cultures can be found with Zappos (check out blog post about their corporate culture), Holstee (check out their manifesto), and of course Google. Check the website of the Love Lab.

De-Connect: this point is kind of connected to the last point. Life has become more and more complex in the last century, speed has picked up and thanks to technology we have constant access to knowledge, communication, entertainment … and work. Several projects at P5 implicitly talked about de-connecting and “the egg” talked about it specifically; their idea is to build a big Egg in which people can find peace of mind, meditate and just relax. I believe this corresponds to a large need of people to find a positive balance again, a balance between work, life, relationships, communication, technology, nature and personal development.

Random ideas / thoughts that came up regarding “the future of work” during the camp:

1) Sponsor startups / office space for startups: One project called “Startups for Startups” is going to provide tools and mentors to young startups, to help them to become successful. I really like their project and will try to support them with Sandbox. During the dinner I thought: what about if companies would sponsor startups (vs. invest in them), for example by providing office space / internet access / a structured environment / access to experts. In my opinion, the structured environment of a company can be great for a young team that is just about to get started. For me, an office makes a huge difference to structure work at the beginning. It gives you the feeling that you’re really taking it seriously, it allows you to hire intern early on, etc. And the corporate would in turn get a positive young spirit into their offices. I’m aware that there are manly legal and security issues to be overcome, however it can be done. With our startup Holstee we were lucky enough to have Arnold provide us with free office space … at Fifth Avenue in New York City (probably some of the most expensive space possible . We give them feedback and fresh ideas in return.

2) We fail to fail: I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and it became more obvious to me at the camp in various similar discussions I had with different people. In short, I believe that all of the people at the camp represent our very fortunate young generation of the middle / upper class (mainly western world with exceptions) that in my opinion, whatever they will do in their lives, can’t fail and therefore have a responsibility (not just possibility) to do what they’re passionate about and to have positive impact. I honestly believe that with the education, upbringing and tools that we have, it will be hard to completely fail. Very very few of us will ever be in the situation where they can’t afford food, shelter, even a normal lifestyle. In other words, there is no reason for people to take jobs just for monetary reasons. The only way of failing is, as Saga put it, being mediocre. Let me know what you think, I’m aware that there is a huge personal, ethnocentric bias on that

3) Some ideas how we can leverage social media to create positive impact were posted here already.

What might help the Palomarsters to realize all their ideas:

The guys at Palomar had lots and lots of great ideas. But now comes the most interesting part: making them happen. Here a few thoughts that might help them:

• Create feasible milestones and get a source of pain: most projects have milestones how to move forward. However, from personal experience I would recommend to make them as measurable as possible (not “talk to partners” but rather “having talked to 3 partners”) and set them in such a way that they are really realistic to achieve. Furthermore I would recommend to introduce a source of pain. A process that kicks in if you don’t live up to the goals that you set now. Everyone is very very motivated at this point, but as people go back to “their normal lives”, it seems important that the projects stay high up on the priority list. I think it helps to have someone yell at you if you don’t do what you expected yourself to do. Sources of pain could be: advisory board (see below), someone else at P5, a contract that everyone signs and where you commit to pay 50$ every time you miss a deadline, booking plane tickets to meet.
• Make meetings impossible to postpone. I believe a great source of motivation comes from meeting / speaking on a regular basis. As most teams are split across the globe, they will speak regularly to move their projects forward. However, I have experienced that if people start postponing meetings (“I have so much stuff going on at work, can we do it some point tomorrow?”), the regularity disappears and the motivation goes down as many postponed meetings never happen or happen to late etc. I suggest: make meetings impossible to reschedule and put a fine of 50$ when someone does (and put the money into flight tickets to meet in person
• Build an advisory board: these are great ideas by great young people. I’m convinced that you can find very experienced senior people who would love to support it. I believe that every young project can greatly profit from having senior supporters, for more credibility, more pressure, more contacts, more motivation, more everything Let me know if you want intros.
• Use the Sandbox Network At Sandbox we want to help you guys make your ideas reality. Use our network and let us introduce you to extraordinary people across the globe who make stuff happen. Plus Sandbox allows you to stay in an inspiring environment even outside of P5 and hangout with like-minded people who want to make things happen.

Once again, many thanks to all the P5 people, first of all Hans and Mathias, for the amazing days and till soon.

More photos can be found on the Sandbox page on Facebook.

What differentiates one company from the other when talents consider their job alternatives? How can there be created challenges and opportunities for the high potentials of generation y?

As Sandbox’ representative in London, I had the great pleasure to give a speech and to join a panel discussion about these hot issues on the annual CWC Conference “Future Talent in Oil and Gas 2008”.

At this conference, the HR directors of the major oil and gas companies discussed about the sector’s talent shortage and how to counter it. Closer and more interactive partnerships with universities, as well as the “brushing up” of technical careers were among the suggested answers.

To the pleasure of Sandbox, one major need had come up which has not been fulfilled in the market place so far and which Sandbox aims to facilitate: “behavioural innovation”. The problem of most organizations today, it seems, is that their leadership programs include around 10% highly ambitious future leaders which have the actual capabilities needed to lead; and around 90% which might have the ambition but not necessarily the capabilities to go ahead.

How can you get these 10% to share their capabilities with their “worse-performing” peers? Well, they have to learn it, they have to be trained to do it. However, probably not only by the old-paradigmers from generation x, but also by the best gen y-peers of other industries, other areas, other professions.

If you take a look at the thoughts of Christopher Lomas at the gen y consultancy naked generations (who facilitated a great workshop about gen y at this conference), you will see why this shift is necessary: the old management paradigms under which generation x have operated are outdated; new leadership models are emerging around generation y. And who could teach or rather share these insights and models better than those who have already employed them in practice?

And who do you think is more probable to show and share those new capabilities (such as “collaborative leadership”): is it a line manager who is operating within the old paradigms of their organization (and whom you might meet in your “company network”), or, let’s say, rather a politician, who always had to establish coalitions, who always had to convince people to vote for him, and who always had to build up a valuable political network?

What makes us so convinced about our network is not only that a diversity of great people comes together and shares ideas about projects, leadership, and so forth; above all, we are convinced that many of these ideas and their implementation would not have been evolved or facilitated within the “traditional paradigms” of most institutions.