Progress is a better guiding principle than perfection or growth — Where did the first half of the year go? If you’re anything like me, you started the year with big ideas and ambitious goals. But, 7 months after, you haven’t seen as much progress as you’d like. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work, and to delay those long-term projects until "later”. Last week I…

A quest to find the world’s wildest creative companies. — “The vast majority of what the advertising industry produces isn’t brilliant or even good. Most of what we put out into the world is banal, mediocre, unremarkable. Some of it is much, much worse — patronizing, insulting, hectoring, polluting, stupid, intrusive, toxic. Perhaps this is not surprising at all.” —…

A brief summary of Ashlee Vance’s book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” — In January I read “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”, written simply and well by Ashlee Vance. This biography took me on a journey into the brilliant and difficult character of one of today’s most successful and innovative business leaders. Musk is often compared to…

In 2018 I’m only reading 12 books — In January I made a list of 12 life-changing books to read in 2018. Only one book a month might sound like a modest goal, even for a slow reader like me, but my real challenge is to go deeper on each one of these 12 books. Why read less books? It feels like…

Between strategy projects at comOn, a 3-week trip to the US and launching a newsletter called MADvice, I tried to spend a little more time reading, listening and thinking. This is a list of the 17 most surprising things I learned last year, in chronological order. …

We rarely want to be led, but we’ll gladly follow. — I’ve come across many people who are leaders just by title. They are “the boss”, and we do what they say because they have authority over us. But I bet nobody would follow them willingly. There are also many people, sometimes even at the lower levels of an organization, who…

I’m a firm believer that you’re never still. If you’re not growing, you’re already dying. That’s why my 26th MADweeks celebration was all about my need for constant growth, my willingness to learn. I asked 60 friends for their opinion and advice. Those friends included family, childhood buddies, but also…

9 things I learned after 30 MAD weeks — My 30th birthday is in two days! It’s my golden birthday, I’m turning 30 on the 30th of April, and I have no idea how to celebrate it. My friends keep asking if there will be a party or a dinner. After dodging the question for days, I finally come…

Me and RJ Bush are starting a collection of stories about empathy and human understanding. It’s called EmpaFit, a gym to exercise our empathy muscles. Without Empathy Our World Would End “We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tell us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin…