Precisely 10 years ago, on June 7, 2010, I published my first blog post (available only in German). I started blogging at that time with a mixture of curiosity and fascination, but also with the hope to make myself and our newly founded consulting company, esc Solutions GmbH, known through good content. That was my very lean strategic plan, but planning replaces coincidence by error anyway (something which I also wrote about in the first month). Besides, I like it anyhow better when things and chances arise in the flow of life (much later I found the concept of Wu Wei for this and realized that for me it’s about life paths not career paths).
This first step has resulted in 540 posts to date, since 2018 bilingual in German and English. The focus shifted from project management at the beginning (a main focus of esc Solutions’ consulting services at that time) to leadership, agility and new work. Always remained the focus on my current situation and the experiences at hand. I always wrote and still write about the topics that were close to my heart or that occupied me at that time. That also explains the subtitle, borrowed from a book by Heinrich von Kleist and slightly modified: Gradual fabrication of thoughts while writing.
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
Francis of Assisi
Writing helps me to think and digest. Having to get to the heart of something in writing helps me to penetrate topics better, to understand connections better and finally to sort my thoughts. In the course of the last 10 years, the weekly blog post has become a ritual of mental hygiene that I would not want to miss anymore.
The fascination with coincidental encounters that occur here on the blog or in social media on the basis of the articles has also remained throughout the years. Among other things, these encounters led to such exciting initiatives as the PM Camp movement or openPM. It took me several years to understand that this generous sharing is therefore also a core concept of Working Out Loud. And then it took a few more years and the move to the corporate world to understand why it takes Working Out Loud in such structures to promote this behavior, but that’s another story full of pain of adaptation.
In retrospect, I have to say that the approach of generating reach and awareness through content works well, but took much longer than I had hoped back then. Now, after ten years, with more than 1,100 recipients in the newsletter and 12,000 visits with 17,000 page views per month, it is working quite well, which manifested itself in many requests for keynotes and workshops.
The success of the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership as a book certainly played a significant role in this. This showed me that blog and book complement and mutually stimulate each other very well. Maybe this will not be my last book. After all, it would certainly be worthwhile to systematically work through the experiences of four years of agile transformation (working title: Persistent in effort, modest in expectation of success). And the novel fragment about everyday corporate life (working title: On the handrail into the decision-making circle) is far from complete. It will come to pass, just like many other things in recent years. But one thing is certain: This was not the last post here in the blog!
I would like to thank my many loyal readers and especially those who regularly support my work here via Steady (by doing so you help to keep this site free of ads as it has been for the last 10 years).
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