Personal Practice

This framework has not emerged from academic study and theory alone. It has been shaped by more than forty years of working, entrepreneurship, governance and reflection in complex and international environments.

My professional background lies at the intersection of media & communication (Wolters Kluwer, Audax, Sanoma, Young & Rubicam), consultancy, international entrepreneurship and governance. As a managing owner and entrepreneur, I have worked with international value chains since 1995, including production in China and global distribution. This experience has taught me that value creation is never purely an economic or financial matter.

Behind every value chain are relationships, dependencies, institutions, cultural differences, logistics systems, risks and ecological conditions. What may appear to be an efficient chain on paper can prove vulnerable in practice when one of these relationships or conditions changes.

As a supervisory board member and non-executive director, I have further connected this experience with questions of continuity, strategy, governance, risk management and societal legitimacy.

Over time, I have increasingly come to see organisations as living systems. Not as machines that can be managed solely through structures, procedures and financial incentives, but as systems whose functioning depends on the quality of the relationships that sustain them.

My guiding principle is therefore:

Systems function only as well as the quality of the relationships that sustain them.

From this perspective, I connect my practical experience with insights from systems thinking, ecological economics, sociology, philosophy, institutional economics and strategic management.

From Value Creation to Relational Value

My experience with international value chains has deepened my interest in what value actually means.

Financial performance matters, but it never emerges in a vacuum. It is sustained by human relationships, trust, knowledge, institutions, infrastructure, natural resources and societal legitimacy.

When considering value creation, I therefore look not only at the outcome, but also at the conditions that make that outcome possible and enable it to be sustained over time.

This leads to questions such as:

• Which relationships sustain value creation?
• What dependencies and vulnerabilities lie beneath the system?
• Which forms of value become visible in financial figures, and which remain hidden?
• Which ecological and social conditions make value creation possible?
• When does efficiency begin to undermine the resilience of a system?
• How do continuity, return and societal legitimacy relate to one another?

Governance & Strategic Clarity

In my work as a supervisory board member and strategic sparring partner, I therefore focus not only on what is visible, but also on the underlying dynamics.

I look at:

• continuity and long-term value
• governance and institutional resilience
• risks and dependencies
• geopolitical and international vulnerabilities
• strategy and market development
• reputation, trust and societal positioning
• decision-making under uncertainty

My role is primarily to ask questions that go beyond the immediate solution:

What is really happening here?

Which patterns keep the system in place?

What assumptions underlie our decisions?

Where does the real vulnerability lie?

Which value do we want to preserve or create over the longer term?

From Entrepreneurship to Societal Questions

Over time, my interests have broadened from entrepreneurship and value creation to wider societal questions.

In particular, I explore the impact of digitalisation on social capital, public space and social cohesion.

Digitalisation does not merely change technology and business models. It also changes how people encounter one another, how information circulates, how attention is distributed, and how trust and meaning are formed.

Technological developments therefore directly affect the quality of social relationships.

Practice as a Test of Thought

My transdisciplinary approach is not an attempt to merge different academic disciplines into a single theory.

Rather, it is a way of bringing practical experience and different traditions of knowledge into dialogue.

Theory helps me recognise patterns. Practice forces me to test those patterns against reality.

This is what reflective practice means to me:

observe > understand > connect > judge > act > learn

The framework therefore remains deliberately open and evolving.

Theory is not the end in itself. What matters is the quality of judgement with which we seek to create value, make systems more future-ready and understand societal change.

My Way of Seeing

My way of seeing has not been shaped by my professional practice alone.

Since childhood, I have had a strong interest in birds and nature. Birdwatching has taught me to observe, to wait, to recognise patterns and to pay attention to what does not immediately reveal itself.

I also collect international contemporary art. Art has taught me to slow down, to look longer and to allow space for multiple interpretations. Not everything needs to be immediately explained or resolved in order to be meaningful.

I carry this way of seeing into my work.

First observe. Then make meaning. Connect perspectives. And only then judge and act.