My younger years

The year 2006

In 2006, I had the opportunity to start my career at IKEA. As ‘Potential’ (1yr) and finally as Team Manager (4yrs) I gained experience in leading a team. The most important thing I learned during these years was the importance of trust in a team. When trust is around, the most beautiful things (can) happen, and ‘anything’ can be done. It made me curious to see what else was there.

A team is not a group of people who work together, a team is a group of people who trust each other.

Simon Sinek

The year 2011

But what else was there? What did I want? After leading a team for several years, I felt that I needed to broaden my scope. My father, as a good example, had worked at Philips all his life. So I took the opportunity to take a look there. I was educated at Bachelor level in Logistics & Economics, so in 2011 I started working as a Supply Planner at the Lighting branch, which later turned into Signify.

In the first few years I optimized the Supply Chain of my Asian luminaire portfolio to such an extent that I again started thinking: ‘And now what? Am I having fun?’ In hindsight, this is where my road to discovery began. My most important discovery up to this point? Process optimization: everything can be done so much more efficiently than you think when you start with simplicity. 

The secret to success is 2 words, ‘right decisions’. How to make right decisions is only by experience and experience will be retrieved by making ‘wrong decisions’.

Omdenken.nl

The year 2014

In your career, you sometimes get the question, “Where do you see yourself in 3-5 years?”. I always made something up, but really I had no idea. One day in 2014 I said to my wife, “Honey, what should I do now?”.

She told me: “You have always been good at organizing and structuring.”. And I recognized that: I was always neat, everything was always tidy, and when I organized something it was always a piece of cake for me. And so, with that in mind, my discovery continued.

You often need someone else to discover your own blind spots.

Kaizen Institute

The year 2015

In 2015 I came across a Professional Organizing course by Organizing works. Could I become a Professional Organizer? Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained so I started  the course. Fun fact: I was the only man in a group of about 12 women. Could it be that men are usually the ones who make a mess? It certainly looked like that. 

The course opened my eyes and made me conscious of my skills in organizing and creating structure again. 

With this renewed insight, I went back to my employer Philips to see if there were any internal opportunities to do something with it. I soon came across 5S, and then LEAN. But more importantly, I had found what I was really good at.

In the years that followed, I trained myself in LEAN. This also meant gaining a lot of knowledge and experience in practice. At the beginning of 2018, I officially became a LEAN Expert, Blackbelt level. In a way it was the end of my road to discovery, but it was also the start of a new road. I began to discover why many people do not love their job. And that made me want to use my talents to help people as, in my opinion, everybody should love their job. I started to define my Why, How & What.

The year 2018

From 2018 until mid-2020, I led the Continuous Improvement implementation at KMWE in Eindhoven, as Continuous Improvement Leader. This period turned out to be an awesome experience. Not only did I get to implement different behavior, I also learned very much about how to do so: through Leadership. We are never too old to learn! My Why became more clear, and this site is proof of it. 

Continue to My profile.

*Experiential Learning

When I look at my growth throughout my career, it is best described a Experiential Learning. According to David Kolb, Experiential Learning can be defined as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combinations of grasping and transforming the experience.” See the inspiring video below to have a clear explanation (approx. ~4m) and know that you, like me, are constantly on a experiential learning journey.