Month: september 2022

Two years ago, I founded the Embryo to People Heart Business. Few things have had such an impact on my life as this decision. The decision to leave everything I had in the middle of the pandemic and go after an undefined dream: my dream to build a great company radically but also enjoy life and continue building my family with a second child.

Many companies are founded and strongly impacted by people with engineering and business backgrounds. They have built amazing organizations. Most companies say people are the most important asset of the company. At the same time, many organizations lack deep knowledge about this topic, and the knowledge is often limited to something within HR. However, this knowledge about people is central to all aspects of a company.

As a psychologist and former elite athlete, I look at the business world and see so many dedicated people working hard to achieve outstanding accomplishments. I am amazed both by what they succeed with, but also that they do it despite this knowledge or focus on human functioning. I fear that today’s performance-oriented organizations have become the norm, and we look at these companies to learn. We should look at them to learn the right things. People often perceive me when talking about this as soft and lowering ambition, but no. This is the way of outperforming top performance as we know it today and doing so by being crazily ambitious but also by being crazily sound.

I ask myself why it is ok in most companies to have back-to-back meetings when we know our brain doesn’t function fully – (look at the correlation between people and decisions critical to the success of your org and their schedule). Why is it ok not to give an overweight of positive feedback in most organizations when we know that the impact is huge? Why is professionalism most often referred to as not showing emotions? We are humans with emotions, and leading with emotions gets increasingly important (according to World Economic Forum – if you need a credible source for the business world) in less hierarchical org and more challenging situations. I guess, however, that it’s obvious that it’s not ok to steal money from your company! So, what’s the difference?

The world desperately needs to broaden this view on top performance to handle the challenges we face. Therefore, I dared to start People Heart Business. We are determined to make other aspects of top performance evident so that we can create healthy organizations delivering sustainable, great results to all stakeholders – not only shareholders (but definitely shareholders).

I believe People Heart Business needs to prove our concept not only by advising our customers but by building a wow-company ourselves. Two years since the start, we have been a team of seven great people. We are privileged to work with customers that we adore and with whom we share values in big projects aimed to have a true impact on the business world.

I am incredibly proud of what our team has achieved – but perhaps most proud that we dare to build our company based on the principles we preach. It’s crazy how well these things work when you apply them, but also incredibly scary to do things very differently. It was, to say the least, also challenging to get a pregnancy depression as a CEO during this hypergrowth period. Considering all this, I am grateful to have a team with psychologists, engineers, and business backgrounds on this journey as a CEO and human.

However, I assume we are approximately 993 people, too few to be counted on and to be one of the companies CEOs turn to, not only for support but as a role model of top performance. Well, we continue to dream big and go after our dreams, yet we are humble in that this is a crazy ambition. We just want to start a revolution based on really basic knowledge about human functioning.

It’s scary to take this action – but I‘d rather fail while doing this than give up on my dream about what top performance could be – for me, Julie, and for you!