(00:00-00:20) Daria Rudnik
Welcome. I'm happy to have this conversation with you as a global HR leader. And before we start, do you want to share something about you, like your story, your professional experience and professional journey? Oh, well, thank you, Daria, and I'm glad to be here. Well, what to share, I think if you look to my professional life...

(00:21-00:35) Simon Mulder
just slightly over 20 years of experience in the field of HR, which is actually kind of weird because I started off studying software engineering and then 180 degrees Stern went into HR.

(00:35-01:00) Simon Mulder
But I loved it ever since. I worked for a lot of large companies in the beginning of my career and then moved roughly around 10 years ago into hyper-growth organizations, helping them to scale faster. Amazing journey. Worked at companies like cybersecurity company, Palo Alto Networks, maybe known by people, but also medical device companies, Align Technology, and working in global and EMEA-wide roles. Interesting.

(01:01-01:19) Simon Mulder
And I'm really curious about this transition from software engineering to HR. How did it happen? Well, I have to tell you that when I was a really young kid, my parents were one of the first to have a computer at home. My dad was a teacher and so it happened that we got a computer at home.

(01:19-01:32) Simon Mulder
Which was kind of nice, the ones with the tape recorders. I'm not sure if you can still remember those, but I guess a lot of people won't remember those anymore. But you actually could tape software from the radio.

(01:32-01:59) Simon Mulder
Anyhow, that being said, I learned myself programming and I thought, well, that would be my future. Went eventually studying software engineering. But what I noticed in the first couple of months already is I was missing completely the social aspect of it. So all the communication was happening via the computer with my fellow students, et cetera. But I was also the kind of guy that I really liked to socialize, et cetera. And then I had a conversation with the dean back at the university.

(01:59-02:15) Simon Mulder
And he told me, he's like, Simon, you know what you got to do is to get away from the keyboard as fast as possible and become a manager. I was like, okay, that was not what I was expecting. So I asked him, I was like, okay, but management, isn't that a profession?

(02:15-02:36) Simon Mulder
And then he remained silent. And then I knew enough. I'm like, OK, so if this is my future, moving away from the keyboard and becoming a manager, that I better start studying something that is relevant to it. And so it happens to be that I started studying HR and business administration. So that's how that career transition happened, so to say.

(02:37-03:03) Simon Mulder
Well, that's the power of great advice at the right time. Yeah, I'm not so sure. A lot of people along my career so far said, why did you ever move away from tech? You know, it's booming business. We need software engineers. But I always think it's still a passion of mine, so to say. And so I always worked at high tech companies. So I guess it still comes back every now and then. And especially nowadays with the dawn of AI.

(03:03-03:15) Simon Mulder
I'm really interested in like, okay, what can I learn from this? And how can I crank up a little bit my coding skills as well? I mean, I'm a strong believer in like various T-shaped, M-shaped, W-shaped.

(03:16-03:34) Daria Rudnik
People who don't just follow one line and one function and one industry, but have diverse skills and diverse backgrounds. That's always beneficial for professional development, for organizations as well. I'm sure you understand tech teams much better than those who haven't learned software and understand how things work there.

(03:35-03:58) Simon Mulder
And I love it when you started calling out those different kind of shapes of meter. And I was thinking actually by myself, like, what kind of leader am I? It reminded me of this child drawing where you see lines going crisscross around the paper. And I was like, I guess I'm a little bit more of that kind of leader because in my last job at Sandclouds,

(03:58-04:25) Simon Mulder
One of the leaders asked me, he's like, why are you not in sales? Because I always like to learn the things that I'm dealing with and trying to understand the business, et cetera. Maybe one day it's tech, the other day it's sales, and for the rest, it's always HR. You mentioned that you worked in big companies and then you moved to scale-ups. What difference do you see in how those organizations are developing, in leadership style? What are your observations on that?

(04:26-04:55) Simon Mulder
Yeah, that's a fascinating experience, to be honest, because in the beginning, I thought it would be completely different. I was working at one of the largest energy companies in the world and doing a lot of reorganizations. And I was like, OK, I'm done with that. You know, let's go to the world of hyper growth. It's all nice and fluffy and it's all positive feelings, et cetera. I'm done with all this negativity of reorgs, et cetera.

(04:55-05:16) Simon Mulder
And then I realized quite quickly that there is a lot of parallels, right? Because you always deal with, whether you're in hyper growth or you're downsizing, you're always in a shortage of people. All the processes are not designed for the amount of people that you have. So basically they're broken. You have to deal with a lot of emotions, people trying to keep up with the pace of the organization and the dynamics.

(05:16-05:33) Simon Mulder
And at the same time, as a leader, you're continuously juggling everything that you want to do because you need not only to build for the future, but also maintain your organization for today, which is quite hard. So in all honesty, in my experience, there's a lot of parallels.

(05:34-06:01) Simon Mulder
Now, of course, there are differences, right? When you go outside and you go to a birthday party or something from a friend and they ask like what you're doing and you tell like you're working at this hyper growth organization, everyone is like, oh, that's so freaking awesome. If you tell, yeah, I'm working at this big corporate and we're downsizing all the time and my job is basically to be the butcher, then it's a less interesting conversation. But other than that, I think there is a lot of parallels that you can learn from both sides.

(06:01-06:16) Daria Rudnik
Yeah, I love that you mentioned it. Not enough people, messy processes. You need to constantly keep the speed going. Yeah, especially if you look at a lot of these scale-up and startup organizations, right?

(06:16-06:45) Simon Mulder
So in the beginning, everything is designed according to a couple of my favorite TV shows from the 80s and 90s. I would say the MacGyver way, where everything is put together with a little bit of duct tape. And it will hold for now, right? But at some point, you need to replace the duct tape with something that is more durable. You have to pull the team together like the A-Team, right? So we get everyone together and let's say I got some magic happening.

(06:45-07:00) Simon Mulder
which is super exciting, right? But at the same time, often a lot of people don't know how to design a process at scale. They haven't seen what good looks like. And I think that has been super beneficial for me working those first 10 years in the big corporates

(07:00-07:16) Simon Mulder
seeing how good processes could look like, because these companies have been refining them for over decades. Now, of course, you need to adapt that to the reality of your skill of a startup organization. But at the same time, you know what it could look like and you could leverage some of those best practices.

(07:17-07:35) Simon Mulder
And I think that is quite often missing in startup and scale-ups because a lot of people these days, and especially younger generations, go straight into the startup scale-up life and have never seen something else before. And then judge the book by its cover and say like, oh, I don't want to work for these big corporates because they're a little bit outdated, etc.

(07:35-07:57) Simon Mulder
But I think we forget that a lot of these corporates were the tech giants from the past, right? If you look to companies like Unilever, Shell, etc. If you compare them to the Googles and the Amazons, they were those kind of companies in the days. Now, of course, they're still large, but they're less appealing for a lot of people.

(07:58-08:26) Daria Rudnik
I've noticed like kind of two scales. Like the one scale is, well, let's bring the corporate people who know how to build the process and implement them like as they are, as they were in these big organizations. And now we will become like those big organizations. And then the other scale is something, okay, we are a startup. We don't need that stuff. We're kind of diverse. We are agile. We don't need processes. We'll just go as we go. And these kind of two scales, they rarely go to get in something. Okay, let's adapt more.

(08:26-08:56) Simon Mulder
good processes so that we can scale. Yeah, I fully agree with you. So it's always fascinating. And I've seen this over and over in my career. He's talking to whether they're founders or leaders that are in the scale of businesses. They often say this, like, we don't want to become corporate. We don't want to. And they talk about corporate like it's something dirty, right? But they often don't realize that is the next phase of evolution of their organizations.

(08:56-09:23) Simon Mulder
So when you're an entrepreneur and you build out your company, you want to be involved in everything. You have to be involved in everything because simply you don't have an HR department in the beginning. You don't have a finance department, et cetera, et cetera. And then you're building out your business and slowly but suddenly you will start adding more kind of these kind of functions into your organization as they serve a purpose. But what is interesting is when you then say like, hey, let's further professionalize this.

(09:23-09:37) Simon Mulder
It feels often for these entrepreneurs that you're taking away their freedom to operate, that they have to justify why they're doing certain things, that they have to think about the long-term consequences of their decisions, and

(09:38-10:01) Simon Mulder
In my perspective, that's often what they're afraid of, right? So think about the long-term consequences of the decision. And then you hear often, and you just use the word as well, agile. Now, I love the agile approach, but how often I've seen agile being misused not to put anything in writing, not to be able to take accountability for the decisions that you make.

(10:02-10:29) Simon Mulder
It's, I would say, terrifying to see how often that is misused in those startups and scale-ups. And I think it's more important for leaders than to accept like, hey, we're moving in this transition. And am I actually the kind of person that is able to bring this company to the next phase? And that is quite often a leadership conversation that never happens. I'm not sure if you have had that experience as well, but leaders always reflect on the rest of the organization not being ready to scale.

(10:29-10:54) Simon Mulder
And they say like, well, I'm not sure if they can keep up with the pace. Well, these people have been individual contributors now becoming managers, et cetera. But you hardly ever hear a leader of a skill up saying like, hey, maybe I'm obsolete. Hey, maybe I'm not able to keep up with the dynamics of the organization. Hey, maybe I'm a fantastic entrepreneur, but I'm not the one that is able to lead a board.

(10:55-11:22) Simon Mulder
And that's a completely different perspective as well. So if you bring it all together, I think often when scale-ups are talking about big corporates, they talk about something that they're a little bit scared of. And then they're magnifying all those negativity around it. So it becomes like this horrible show that nobody wants to become. Not realizing that some of these elements you actually need in order to be excellent in your operations.

(11:23-11:41) Daria Rudnik
I love that you bring that up, that you need a different skill set and you probably need different energies to be an entrepreneur and to be a business leader that aims for sustainable growth. And I use this, the GC index assessment. And when we look at the different energies leaders have,

(11:42-12:11) Daria Rudnik
What we can notice is like entrepreneurs, they're very much focused on innovation and creating new ideas and kind of breaking through and changing something. And while business leaders are mostly focused on strategy and how we can make it work and how we can make it happen. So these are different skill sets, different energies, different type of people that are required to build a business, start a business and then grow a business and make it sustainable.

(12:13-12:32) Simon Mulder
Yeah, I know. I fully agree with you. If you look at these entrepreneurs, they're really good at quick fixes. They see a trend happening in the market and they're able to act fast on it. And this is also why a lot of them, in my perspective, are struggling when their companies start to grow.

(12:34-12:48) Simon Mulder
Because those quick fixes, I've had this quite often that in particular founders say something like, oh, but in the old days, we were able to just pull a couple of people together in the room and we fix this overnight. Well, now it's taking weeks to solve this problem.

(12:49-13:11) Simon Mulder
And I said, I hear you, you know. And yes, sometimes we're making it too bureaucratic, et cetera, and we need to reduce that and we need to be able to be faster. But at the same time, you need to realize that you need to bring a whole organization on this journey. That the shortcuts that you made in the past maybe are not sustainable solutions, but quick patches.

(13:12-13:34) Simon Mulder
So do you want to become like this quick patches kind of company that runs from one problem into the next problem? Or do you want to create sustainable solutions, right? And that's often something difficult to comprehend because the rush that they're getting, and in particular these entrepreneurs, the rush that they're getting from quick fixes or making an impact that is directly visible

(13:34-13:55) Simon Mulder
is something completely different than the long-term incentive that you're getting when you build something out that is more sustainable and where you maybe see the results, not maybe in the next day, in the next week, but maybe in the next year. And that's what I think you highlighted properly is business leaders,

(13:55-14:25) Daria Rudnik
often need to work around strategies. Now, there are a lot of business leaders that struggle with crafting a strategy and executing against it. But honestly, they should, right? Because that's their job. You had experience with acquiring companies and merging them into the parent company. What are the most common mistakes or maybe tips you want to share? How to acquire companies? Because mergers and acquisitions are happening everywhere. There's lots going on. How do you make it in a good way?

(14:26-14:51) Simon Mulder
Well, yeah, if I would have that magic recipe, then I think I would be now competing with Elon Musk around becoming the most wealthiest person in the world. Because let's be honest, if you look at the research, the vast majority of M&A is a failure. Not getting the value out of the acquisition that you're making or the merger that you're making. Destroying a lot of value along the way.

(14:52-15:13) Simon Mulder
So you really need to think about like, why are you doing M&A? Is it to take out competition? Is it to extend your portfolio? And then you need to look at like, okay, what are the success factors that we define? And what is the trade-off that we're willing to make? Because there are always significant trade-offs.

(15:13-15:40) Simon Mulder
I'll give you a fantastic learning that I had in my time at Palo Alto Networks. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Nikesh Aurora. He's the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, but previously served as COO at SoftBank. And before that, was one of the leaders that was able to make Google Cloud big globally. So someone with an impressive track record, and he was known to be the dealmaker in Silicon Valley.

(15:41-16:03) Simon Mulder
Now, when he came on board in Palo Alto Networks, he said, okay, I'm going to help transform this company from a network security company, which is basically hardware, a lot of firewalls, to a cybersecurity company, which is security as a service or software as a service. And that's a huge transition because if you're going from hardware to software, your whole business model already starts to change.

(16:04-16:27) Simon Mulder
But in order to build up credibility fast around this new business focus, you need to acquire the right businesses and integrate them well. So we went on this massive M&A spree where we, I would say, approximately every quarter, and I worked there for four years, but every quarter we acquired a business and integrated them.

(16:28-16:51) Simon Mulder
Now, we did this. I'm not sure if it was a familiar name, but it's a thing that we often said amongst each other within the company when I was there. We do zero-day integrations. What does that mean? Basically, actually saying, well, we keep the company as much as is because you want to have the talent that comes with the company that developed the product.

(16:52-17:20) Simon Mulder
you want to leave them untouched more or less. Because why would you acquire a business and then fire all the leadership team, et cetera, and making some optimizations? Because otherwise you would have developed it yourself, right? So what we did is we acquired those businesses, integrated them in our businesses by only doing, making sure that all the basic, all the fundamentals of the operating process, so like finance, HR, et cetera, was fully integrated.

(17:20-17:50) Simon Mulder
But the way they were doing their work, we left almost untouched. Now, of course, we gave them full access to the rest of the organization. And what we did and what we said to the rest of the organization, you need to start selling this adjacent product right away. So as soon as the acquisition date is there, you need to start selling the product. That means that you need to ramp up the whole organization and educate about this new product. Now, I think a lot of organizations do this wrong.

(17:51-18:19) Simon Mulder
Because they talk about and then there is always upper hand in the M&A, right? So the company that is acquiring says, we're going to tell you how to do it. And they almost suffocate the talent in the company that they acquire. Or they're saying, okay, we know better how to scale this business. We're going to tell you exactly what to do. And we put a leader on top of that business that is coming from our own organization.

(18:20-18:36) Simon Mulder
Now, if you are acquiring a business for technology advancement or portfolio enhancement, I would never do that. At least that was my experience based on my time at Palo Alto. Now, if you would say, on the other hand, you're saying like, I'm going to put a competitor out of business.

(18:38-19:01) Simon Mulder
Okay, then you might have a different approach and you say like, okay, I want to eradicate everything that is reminding me of that business. Unless there are some advantages that I can take out of it. But that's a super expensive M&A if you would do that because you acquire a business, you pay a premium for it most likely. And then you say, basically, I toss everything overboard just because I want to eradicate them.

(19:02-19:13) Simon Mulder
Now, if you are truly convinced that you are the better organization, then why are you acquiring a business in the first place? Because you would push them out of the marketplace because you are the upper hand.

(19:14-19:40) Simon Mulder
If you look from that perspective, it becomes a whole different situation. So you really need to clearly think around why are we acquiring businesses? How is this helping us on a strategic roadmap? Because this is the other thing. And I recall that from my time at SendCloud, where we also were doing M&A. And we had a lot of conversations as a leadership team around opportunities that were there in the market. And sometimes these opportunities were too good to be true.

(19:40-20:08) Simon Mulder
But we were asking ourselves, is this helping us to accelerate on a strategy that we have? How is this fitting in our roadmap? And if we do this, this would mean acquiring a business always takes the eye of the other ball that you're playing. So if you're doing this, then will it add more value now on the short term or the long term? And if not, or if you're not convinced, don't do it.

(20:09-20:29) Simon Mulder
Because then you're basically saying, we have set out a really great strategy, but we are not convinced enough around it because now when this opportunity comes along, we think that it's a better play. Then you really need to go back to the drawing table as a leadership team and saying like, okay, we're not convinced about a strategy. So something is wrong there. Right? So...

(20:30-20:51) Simon Mulder
Coming back to your question like, what is my advice around M&A? Be super careful. Really think about if it's actually going to help. Realize that it often fails because it's our large skills, change management projects, et cetera. So it's a lot of value being destroyed. Question is, will it add to your strategy? Yes or no? If not, don't do it.

(20:52-21:20) Daria Rudnik
We're coming back to strategy again. You need to have a strategy first. It's not a quick fix. Have your strategy first. Be clear about what you want to achieve in the upcoming years and then decide how you want to deal with this M&A. Do you need that? And what do you want to get from it? Exactly. I saw you took a Harvard course. Tell us about it. What was it about? Why did you decide to go for it? And how did it help you? Yeah. Let me start with answering that last question first. Why did I win there?

(21:21-21:43) Simon Mulder
Now, I need to go back in time to my late grandmother. She taught me as a kid because she lived through the war, etc. And she said, in life, almost everything can be taken away from you. But not what you learned and not what you experienced. So always invest in yourself, in your experience and in your education.

(21:44-22:06) Simon Mulder
And when I was younger, of course, I thought it was just a way to force me to do my homework for school, etc. But later on in life, I really started to respect it. And there has been a little bit of a guiding principle throughout my career as well. I'm always looking like, okay, what can I learn? How can I grow here? How will this enhance me as a person?

(22:06-22:32) Simon Mulder
Not only from a wealth point of view, but more from a knowledge point of view, from an experience point of view. And that's also why I love to work internationally. Now, coming back to specific harvest, I was at a point again, I was like, hey, I want to learn. I feel like I can learn more. And I want to learn from some of the best and brilliant minds in the world. Now, of course, instantly you start thinking about those Ivy League courses, et cetera.

(22:33-23:01) Simon Mulder
But then I was like, I'm not sure, you know, if I'm interested in going back to class and listening to this prof telling me how everything works. Well, let's be honest, a lot of these professors hardly ever work in the real world, I would say, right? At least that was my experience back at university. So I learned a lot of things by doing them myself. But here I was like, hey, what I found interesting is Harvard is doing a lot of this business case-oriented learnings.

(23:01-23:24) Simon Mulder
So basically they use business case from real companies and they let you dissect it with a group. So you're talking with peers, et cetera, and you get different approach from people all over the world, which was another thing that I love about it because I enjoy working with people with completely different backgrounds because they give me complete different perspectives often around how the world works.

(23:25-23:54) Simon Mulder
Just as a small side step, if you turn on the news while you're traveling, whether for work or leisure, and you're in a different country, you get a completely different perspective around what's important in the world. And for me, this has always been eye-opening and refreshing because I'm like, okay, so maybe the way I look at the world, I might find certain things super important, while in some other parts of the world, people think like, well, I've never heard about it. Is it important?

(23:54-24:12) Simon Mulder
So it puts a different weight to things. Now, coming back to this Harvard learning that I had, we had these case studies. And I recall two case studies that I really enjoyed. One, and I cannot say too much details around it because I don't want to spoil like for people going into this kind of trainings.

(24:12-24:26) Simon Mulder
But one of the particular cases was related to the Challenger incident. I'm not sure if you recall, the Challenger exploded, unfortunately. What they did, they reframed it in a completely different way.

(24:27-24:56) Simon Mulder
So it was no longer recognizable as a challenger incident, but the whole circumstance around it and this decision-making process that you needed to do as leaders. And this is the other part that I love about Harvard. What they did is they're not approaching it as purely HR. They approach it as you're a board member. So we want you to think in the broad context of everything that plays a part in your organization. Yes, of course, you might have your HR background.

(24:56-25:26) Simon Mulder
But you also need to think about the financial implications. You also need to think about the go-to-market strategy and so on and so on. So we had this challenger case, and I can tell you, I think all of us went for the trap because we were under pressure. We needed to make fast decisions. And there was a lot of stakes involved. And you were like, okay, we need to move fast and we need to take this opportunity. Yes, it might fail, but we got to take this risk because it might be worthwhile. It might be really worthwhile.

(25:26-25:54) Simon Mulder
Well, we know what happened to the challenger case, right? Same risks. They took the risk and exploded, causing people's life. Fatal instance. Now, of course, in a lot of businesses, the fatality hopefully is not there, but you're taking high stakes and decisions there. Now, as soon as we learned that this was about the challenger case, we started to dissect the whole case again and looking like this is a red flag. This is something that we need to look at. This is what we need to double check, et cetera, et cetera.

(25:55-26:20) Simon Mulder
And then you realize from a border room conversation that you have similar kind of cases quite often. We're like, oh, we are in a hurry. We need to move fast, et cetera. Now, while that sometimes might be the case, nine out of 10 times, I don't think leaders at the executive level need to rush to decisions. Because if you have set clearly out a strategy,

(26:20-26:46) Simon Mulder
And you talked about what are market opportunities that might arise. You have done your proper SWOT, right? Then you know if the situation arises, like, is this really something major? Is this something really that puts everything upside down and it is a rushed decision that we need to take? But knowing what is at stake, or should we take a step back and think around it and reflect around it?

(26:46-27:15) Simon Mulder
Because what you will notice a lot of times, people, no matter what level you are in the organization, no matter what you do in life, you have the tendency to rush in decisions. There is, of course, a saying like, sleep a night over it, right? Before you take an important decision. Now, if you apply this to the rest of your life, most likely you will notice that a lot of these kind of things, you could easily sleep two nights over it, right?

(27:15-27:42) Simon Mulder
But so this is a really interesting experience to go through because you can talk about it. You can read all this popular quotes, et cetera. You're like, oh yeah, I got it. But then when you actually go to a case and you think like, we know we are with a lot of brilliant people in this room. We solved this case. And then you realize like, well, actually we didn't. Really put your mind at work and start to reflecting around everything that you do in business.

(27:43-28:13) Simon Mulder
Now, the other case that I would love to share with you is a case that we did around watches. And against all odds, there was this entrepreneur that decided to make luxury watches, Swiss luxury watches. All the odds in the market said, don't do it. You know, it doesn't make sense. And eventually he decided to do it. And he built out one of the most successful companies. But really built around his personal passion and beliefs around this. Against all odds.

(28:14-28:39) Simon Mulder
Now, what do we see a lot in businesses that all of a sudden emerge? There are people so convinced, so passionate about it that they do it and it thrives. And then I was relating for myself and I was like, well, one of my best friends, he started off a company a couple of years ago. And before he started, he came to me for a consultation. He said, Simon, so what do you think I should do?

(28:40-29:09) Simon Mulder
And he had a fantastic corporate career and everything was against his plan on what he wanted to do. And I went through it with him and I'm like, well, I love your passion and it's going to be a huge gamble. If you ask me honestly around like when I dissect everything that you tell me, you might not do it. But I said, if you truly believe that this is the thing, well, you know, you got to decide.

(29:10-29:29) Simon Mulder
But I said, again, warnings are there. So you got to take this decision. And he decided to go for it. He built out a super successful company. And of course, hard work and a lot of things that we couldn't foresee back then that helped him and provided tailwind, et cetera.

(29:29-29:46) Simon Mulder
But other than that, he was willing to take the risk. So here are two different stories. One telling you to slow down and not take the risk. And the other one is telling you maybe to go against all odds. Now, I think this is the reality of business, right?

(29:46-30:11) Simon Mulder
You ask me, like, if I can give you advice around how to do best M&A, for example, I gave you my stories. I gave you my experience. That might work for someone else, but not per se, right? It's always a matter of, like, looking at all the circumstances and take your best educated guess, I would say, because nobody has a crystal ball to tell you what the future will be. Too bad.

(30:12-30:42) Simon Mulder
Yeah, too bad. Sorry. But I love the stories. I mean, yeah, there's no clear way and like a one-way solution to all the problems. No, there isn't, right? And sometimes you need to take unpopular decisions. Sometimes you need to refrain from making a decision. And this is, by the way, something that is kind of tricky because a lot of leaders realize like the difficulty of the decision making. So whatever you choose, you can choose wrong.

(30:43-30:58) Simon Mulder
So some of them avoid to choose. So either they delegate it to the rest of the organization, pardon me, or leave it in limbo. Basically not making a decision and seeing what will serve us.

(30:59-31:28) Simon Mulder
right? And then they shout out really loud, like, yeah, that's the direction that we're going. Well, yeah, because it emerged, not because you took a decision, right? The tricky thing is that might work sometimes, but it's not building confidence in the organization. If I looked at, for example, in my family life, when I'm with my kids and my kids ask me, can we, when we go skiing, should we go left or right? And I'm like,

(31:28-31:58) Simon Mulder
We'll see what happens. And then I shout out really loud, like, yeah, we go right because everyone is already on the right slow. And then it turns out wrongly. I said, like, wow, I haven't decided it. You already went there. Yeah. There's not building confidence and trust, right? So when people are relying on you and in business, a lot of people are relying on you. At least that is my perspective. If you're a leader, you are taking on responsibility for not only a company, but all the families tied to it.

(31:59-32:26) Simon Mulder
So you've got to make decisions and you've got to be able to live with it. Now, yes, you will make wrong decisions because nobody has that crystal ball, but that's a learning and that's an opportunity also to be transparent around it and saying like, maybe I didn't take the right decision, but base it on my best educated guess there. And since you've made this transition, like leadership to families, like tell me about your perspective on leader as a parent, parent as a leader. How do you see that?

(32:27-32:47) Simon Mulder
Yeah. Well, I'll be honest with you. If you go back in time, one of my earlier jobs in my career, when I was doing a reorganization and I went into one of our regional offices and I saw all the clutter in the office related to child drawings, family photos, et cetera.

(32:47-33:07) Simon Mulder
And I recall saying to one of my colleagues, and I feel really bad around it nowadays, but hey, you know, you got to learn somewhere. I said, no wonder that this company is not performing well. Look at all this clutter. Look at all the distraction that is here. What has a child drawing to do with business, right? It should be focused, et cetera.

(33:09-33:32) Simon Mulder
Well, it took me a couple of years to catch up with everyone. Eventually, I became a father myself. And then I started to realize, like, what is that adding for me, right? Now, that being said, if you look to leadership and parenting, for me, there's a lot of parallels. You always have to practice or try to do your utmost best without expecting to be rewarded for it.

(33:33-33:57) Simon Mulder
Because if I look to when I'm raising my kids, I try to act in their best interest. I want to raise them to become proper adults with a proper value system, etc. And sometimes I have to be giving them a little bit more rope so they're able to explore. Sometimes I have to pull a little bit tighter to make sure that they're not making too big of a mistakes.

(33:58-34:10) Simon Mulder
But in the end of the day, they're human beings. So I cannot tell them what to do. I can help them navigate the world. And I think as a leader, that's often what you need to do as well.

(34:10-34:34) Simon Mulder
You know, you cannot always make the popular decisions. Like going back to my kids, if I tell them that they cannot eat candy all day, that is in their best interest. Now, if you would ask my kids if it's in their best interest that they cannot eat candy every day, I think they will judge me differently around that in this moment in time. Later on in life, I hope that they're a little bit more grateful for it. All right.

(34:35-34:58) Simon Mulder
And I think there's a lot of these kind of things that you will see in work life as well. Whereas a leader, you don't know exactly what is the best interest. But as I said earlier, to your best knowledge and your capacity, you're trying to help them to become the best versions of themselves. You try to help someone, to educate them, to support them.

(34:59-35:24) Simon Mulder
But if you're providing support doesn't mean that they always will accept your support or will acknowledge your support. And I think that often goes slightly wrong, both in parenting and in leadership is that we're expecting instant rewards, right? It's like, why is my kid not being grateful for everything that I do for them, right? Especially when you're tired late in the evening and sitting on the couch and you're like,

(35:24-35:51) Simon Mulder
That's been a rough day, right? But the same in work. How often are leaders like waiting for, oh, I want to have this perfect scores on the engagement server. I want to have people saying, hallelujah, this is the best leader I ever had, et cetera. Quite often people realize that later in time on what is worth. Now, so I think that's the first part. If you think about parenting at the same time, it's also about adapting every time to the individual.

(35:52-36:08) Simon Mulder
Because if I look at how I raised my son and my daughter, of course, trying to do that in similar practices, yet at the same time, there are different individuals with different needs, with different responses. Whilst it might work for my daughter to cuddle every now and then,

(36:08-36:24) Simon Mulder
My son wants to become a little bit more rougher and want to play around with me, etc. And I don't want to stereotype with that, but that's just the way they both are. And now I need to adapt my style to them.

(36:25-36:54) Simon Mulder
Continuously. And I'm like, oh, I finally found out how it works with my daughter. And then I'm looking to my son and like, oh, shoot, I have to start all over again. I need to find different ways. And also acknowledge every now and then that I make mistakes. But one of the things that for me has been really eye-opening in the last couple of years is the value of transparency. Is are you, and I think a lot of adults will say this, is shield the world for your kids, right? Or shield your kids from the world. And it depends on how you look at it.

(36:54-37:20) Simon Mulder
Don't share everything with them. Now, here is the thing. My experience, kids have six senses, you know, they will see what's happening. They will sense what happening, maybe without fully understanding what is happening, but you can tell them lies to sugarcoat things. It won't work and it doesn't build trust. But if you open up and saying like, well, this is actually what is happening.

(37:20-37:50) Simon Mulder
do you want to talk about it? Then quite often you see that it's less interesting to them because if they feel you're keeping secrets from them, they're really curious. They want to find out and they're looking at your text messages or whatever, you know. And the same with employees. If you're trying to cover things up, to hide it, to sugarcoat it, they will feel that there is something off and they will start looking like, oh, what is the conspiracy theory here, et cetera, et cetera. There might be something going on. But if you say like, hey,

(37:50-38:16) Simon Mulder
I don't know everything. This is what I think, and this is how it can help. You sometimes have surprising conversations, both with your employees and with your kids. So long story short, I think there are a lot of these kind of dynamics that are similar, but it really comes back into your willingness as a leader, as a parent, to be humble and to understand that you're not always the teacher, but you're also the person being educated.

(38:17-38:42) Daria Rudnik
I mean I love this perspective so what I hear is kind of parents as leaders leaders as parents they have kind of sometimes they have broader perspective and see because they have connections with broad organization and they kind of probably have more strategic thinking process along the way and they sometimes need to make unpopular decisions and on the other side they need to adapt because you have junior employees you have senior employees you have

(38:42-39:08) Daria Rudnik
Like babies, you have teenagers, which is a completely different story. And you need to adapt your style and how you can play your conversations with them. And then being transparent. I mean, maybe not in every detail, but to the level they want to hear and they're able to understand, be transparent with your kids and with your employees. Yeah. And I would like to add another thing to it. And that is something that started to dawn on me lately is...

(39:09-39:37) Simon Mulder
As parents, we are quite judgmental about other parents on how they raise their kids. As leaders, we do the same. We're quite judgmental around other leaders and telling them how to do their job. All right. Now, if we are really introspective, we should know that every situation requires different leadership. Every team dynamic is different. So what works for you and your kids is

(39:38-39:55) Simon Mulder
might not work for the other parent. Now, of course, there are things that are completely not done. And of course, you should be able to say something around that. Call out bad behavior, et cetera. But other than that, you know, here in the Netherlands, we have this typical saying,

(39:56-40:17) Simon Mulder
around when we see kids nicely behaving, etc. It's the French style. It's like real kids sitting at the table, having dinner, not having too much discussion, etc. If you then look to Dutch kids, they're complete chaos, uncontrolled demons running around doing their own thing. Now,

(40:17-40:35) Simon Mulder
And with that perspective in mind, what you will see is eventually they all turn up fine, but in different cultures, different circumstances, different environments, they will be able to flourish. Now you could judge, okay, so that whole parenting thing, let's toss it overboard because kids will be fine, right?

(40:35-40:59) Simon Mulder
I wouldn't say that because we can help them, right? We can help along that journey. But we shouldn't expect that we're able to shape the world in such a way that we shape human beings to our own likings. Because I think then we would not be anything different than what was this called again, the Borg. We assimilate people and we want to become them clones of ourselves.

(40:59-41:16) Simon Mulder
Nobody wants that. At least I don't want to have a clone of myself. So it's just a perspective where I think we need to be a little bit more kinder as leaders amongst ourselves to be less judgmental, more supporting, and I think more willing to

(41:16-41:44) Simon Mulder
to understand. So if you look to someone and trying to understand, like, hey, why is this happening? Why is this person operating? Do I understand the full context? And then coming back to those Harvard cases, right? Do I fully understand the full dynamics? And often we don't. Well, thanks. That's, I mean, that's an end of conversation. Leadership. The final question that I have and I usually ask is,

(41:45-42:15) Simon Mulder
Again, what advice would you give to organizations to become ready for the future work? Well, let me start first with saying that organizations is such a wide term, right? Let's accept that organizations are just a gathering of people. So I think what people need to understand is that they need to continuously learn and adapt. We need to adapt to the world changing around us.

(42:15-42:42) Simon Mulder
Whether that is sometimes due to fearsome activities around the world in the geopolitical arena. Whether that is because AI is here and quantum computing is coming up and we might have humanoids walking around us if we have to believe Elon Musk in the next few years. You could go with fear. Now fear is often the wrong advisor. I would recommend is try to understand.

(42:43-43:03) Simon Mulder
Explore the world like a child would do. And I would give the example, and you might find it online as well, where they had some toddlers playing around and then they had some snakes crawling around those kids. Every parent would freak out most likely.

(43:04-43:23) Simon Mulder
But here they did this experiment and saying kids have not been taught to be of fear about snakes. That's what we teach them, right? And some of these snakes are harmless. So, and the kids play around with the snakes and nothing happens, right? No panic whatsoever.

(43:24-43:54) Simon Mulder
So what we all need to think about as organizations, as individuals, is how do we approach the world around us? If we project fear to people, if we tell them like, be mindful around all the scary things at the horizon, we will project fear on other people and they will start acting on fear. Again, most likely not taking the smartest decision. Well, if we say like, look at all these opportunities,

(43:54-44:23) Simon Mulder
look at what is possible, and what can we do to integrate it? What can we do to leverage those? You will see a different world starts to emerge. And so my advice is keep learning, keep adapting, and keep an open mind and try to give things a little bit more positive spin. Because eventually, I think, especially in this time of the year, it should be a story of hope, not of doom and gloom.

(44:23-44:53) Daria Rudnik
Yeah, I love the shift from fear to curiosity and learning. Well, thank you so much, Simon. It was great having this conversation. I really enjoy talking about AIDS and cases, Harvard cases and parenting and snakes. Yeah, it was a really great conversation. Thank you for joining me today. Yeah, well, pleasure was all mine. I love to talk about this kind of things and I hope it's helpful and that people find it interesting to hear these stories. And if anyone has questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me.

(44:53-45:21) Simon Mulder
How they can reach out to you? Well, I would say the easiest way is go to my LinkedIn page and connect with me. Send me a message. I will respond. This is also the way you and I got connected eventually and started to have a conversation. I think that's the easiest way to do it. And I'm looking forward to it. Okay. So the link to your LinkedIn profile is in the comments to this, in the description to this video. All right. Take care. Perfect. Thank you, Daria.