Review – Leading from the Roots
Review / April 30, 2019

Review – Leading from the roots Ah, nature! A term that instantly generates positive emotions, ideas of wholesomeness and a feeling of belonging. And yet it is a thoroughly undefined expression that can mean anything you want, if you add some context. Some of its inferred meanings include literally everything in existence everything not explicitly created by humans everything that exists outside of human settlements everything that exists outside of human settlements but restricted to our planet earth the biosphere (all living things) the biosphere, plus viruses the biosphere, excluding humans the biosphere, plus rivers and mountains only static components of a habitat (trees and rivers and mountains and stuff) plants only The list goes on. The questions what is and what isn’t natural are actually quite interesting from a scientific and philosophical point of view. I spent five years in a lab to create bacteria that produce a protein containing a building block that is no other protein in the world has. All the components I used exist naturally, including the building block (it is just not used as a building block anywhere else). Does that make the resulting bacteria a part of nature? I say yes, but others…

Review – Unlock your Business Voice
Review / March 8, 2018

Review: Simon de Cintra wants to help you unlock your business voice. What does that mean? Something about communicating better and getting heard. Like, when you are a subject matter expert you could learn to appear more leadershippy to add some gravitas to your speech. Something like that. How do you unlock your business voice, whatever that means? By applying the My Business Voice Methodology®. How do you apply the My Business Voice Methodology®? By using VOICE. The acronym stands for Vocation, Observation, Intention, Casting, Experiment. Let me quote from Unlock your Business Voice for you to clear things up: “The  first part of the My Business Voice Methodology®, Vocation, is all about choosing your mindset and therefore your role in any piece of communication that you deliver. This will, and indeed should, vary depending on the situation, but absolutely not according to the personalities involved.” Got that? Did you understand, what the vocation part is all about?  Well, I did not, so let’s have a look at the full programme to see if we can deduce the meaning of unlocking your business voice: “VOCATION – my new role requires me to contribute to strategic and therefore potentially ambiguous conversations,…

Special Review – Kickstarter Roundup October 2017
Blogging , Special Review / October 30, 2017

It’s time for a special review, where I have a look at other media, and this time I want to talk about crowdfunding. I did support some projects in the past, so I wanted to look into Kickstarter.com,  the biggest crowdfunding website, to see if there are some interesting books to be found. For those of you who don’t know what crowdfunding is, here is a short introduction. A creator initiates a project by opening a project page on Kickstarter (or another crowdfunding platform). There, he or she presents a pitch and every information that they think will get people to fund (“back”) their project. The backers decide if they want to pledge some money, to receive rewards. These rewards usually come in tiers, where a higher pledge means a better reward. Typical reward tiers range from adding the backer to a mailing list (for a very low amount of money pledged) over the thing that the project is about (like a pair of shoes or a book or tickets for a performance) to special editions, meetings with the creators and other goodies at a higher price. The creator will get the backers money if, and only if, the specified…