In only invited close family and friends to come to my birthday party on June, 20th. Consequently, it was only a small party in nice surroundings and with a wonderful musical background. I had also prepared a speech, which I presented later in the evening, after all guests had eaten and before we started dancing. Here is what I had prepared:
Today, Barbara and I celebrate a birthday – and we invited only a few people. All those who are here today are very special to us, or else we shared a very special experience with them.
Let me start by introducing to you some persons who are extremely important for this day. Here are our hosts Rita and Same Afsali, who provided the venue for this party. Next, I would like to introduce our musicians around George Greene, who will entertain us with beautiful melodies. And then there is Charly Ritzer, who will serve us food and drinks.
Same and I go back a long way. We first met at Siemens when he was rather green there. Later, he had his own career and was very important for many people. Today, he sponsors us with his pavilion.
George Greene and his friends play for us today. I first met George in the 1960ies in Augsburg. In those days, he was still impresario in the US Army and sometimes played his Blues in dark hovels in Augsburg in the evenings, for instance at Hanks Night Club.
And in those days, we as senior class students were more than fascinated by this totally different world. Next to him today, you see Rocky, Thilo and Willy; the sound director is Mike. Our musicians are good friends of mine and played quite often for me in the past.
Charly and his young team will serve our meals. He is also one of those I have known for a long time. He used to be the landlord at TS, a great Unterhaching bar. For me, it had special meaning because our young programming experts in the 1980ies would go and spend the last hours of the night after having finished work around midnight fairly regularly. However, the quality of our products did not suffer from this. It might even have been important for our success.
Now about me. I am constantly asked what I am doing all day long these days. After all, I stopped being an operational part of the managing board at InterFace AG on January, 1st and will now soon be old enough to collect my pension.
Being an ex-programmer, I structured my spheres of activity in different columns.
The first column is my private life.
First and foremost, there is the family. After all, in 2015, the second grandchild was born into our family. It is a boy and he was named Naveen Daniel. Since currently Naveen Daniel and his parents move from Mumbai to Peking, visiting him is rather costly and time consuming. But we are just as happy to have our 2014 grandchild, Carolina, daughter of Patrick and Anna, visiting us. It is a little easier, because Carolina lives only two kilometres from our home.
An important part of my private life are our bike tours. Mostly, there is only the two of us – Barbara and I. This year, we already had a wonderful experience – two weeks through the west of Cuba on our bikes
Our two “small” children (those born last), Franz Rupert Simon and Lisa Maresa Marie reached important milestones in their lives. Rupert finished his Master diploma and Maresa did a small final spurt towards graduating from high school that turned out quite brilliant, after all.
I gain more and more freedom and treat myself to many small joys, such as visits to the theatre, not just in Munich. For example, a short time ago, we went to the Sommerhausen “Torturmtheater” with our hosts of today, Rita and Same. The three weeks of family vacation spent in a tent in the southernmost end of the Peloponnesus have become a cherished and important tradition. This year, Carolina will also come along. Whenever at all possible, I will go swimming every day in summer. The only occupation in my private life that does not get enough time these days is playing chess, which was always important in my life.
But there are three more columns:
I would name the second column “sharing knowledge and experience”.
For instance, I am supervising a series of start-ups and mentees. I meet them through UnternehmerTUM or the TUM alumni network. Once in a while, they will also be friends or people I met by chance through my network.
In my life, there has been only one direction for fifty years: up. I have a lot to thank other persons for, and I would like to give something back. I believe it is my sacred duty to help young (and sometimes also some not quite so young) persons find their place in life.
My partners often ask me what my support costs. As a general rule, it costs nothing, because, after all, I do it primarily for myself. I learned that you need to practice a lot if you aim at perfection. Consequently, every single discussion is a practice in knowledge sharing for me. Practicing like this helps me to improve; that is: to better understand people and their anxieties and fears, as well as their values, expectations, interests and needs and help them to autonomously find their way through undistorted mirroring and prudent comments. In this process, “autonomous” is the central word.
Incidentally, “start ups” sometimes really turn out to become hard work. For instance, I received five business plans yesterday and will take a closer look at all of them tomorrow, before sending them back with my feedback. I am truly excited and looking forward to the work ahead, even though sometimes this kind of work is a little dry and formal.
The third column is “learning”.
Regardless of the fact that I find schools and the educational system in Germany and Bavaria rather sub-optimal and inadequate – or perhaps because that is what I feel about them – “learning” is and always has been very important for me. What I mean is learning outside school, learning in innovation, learning from people. That is what this is all about.
In my life, I was taught a lot of technological and human wisdom by various persons. There were master programmers whose art I was permitted to learn. Mentors such as Rupert Lay taught me much that had been alien to and unexplored by me. Friends helped me to better understand what leadership and management might mean. I hugely benefitted from my regular participation at the St. Gallen RISE workshops as far as my entrepreneurial life is concerned. And again and again, meeting people helped me to find my own way in life.
In recent years, I learned most in PM-Camps. The topics on these barcamps are project management, management as such, entrepreneurship and leadership. To a large extent, these anti-conferences are about social and systemic change.
I initiated the PM Camp movement together with Stefan Hagen – incidentally, today is his birthday, too – and other friends. Thus, I find the PM Camp a humorous example for the “old bootstrapping” we know from computer science. After all, I myself was among those who founded the very institution where, for the last four years, I learned most.
By now, there are regular PM Camps in many cities in the geographical zones of D-A-CH: in Bad Homburg (Rhein-Main), Berlin, Dornbirn (this is where everything began), Karlsruhe, München, Stuttgart, Wien, Zürich and perhaps soon in Hamburg, as well. And the repercussions start showing even in the non-German-speaking part of Europe. For instance, I was made godfather for the Barcelona PM Camp this autumn (which, for me, means around one weekly hour of skype sessions).
And then there is a little philosophy, for instance this autumn on the “Grashof” behind Kassel and, if possible, meeting my friend Klaus-Jürgen Grün once a month in his wonderful Munich day symposium.
My fourth column is “change”.
Encouraged by the success of the PM Camp, I, along with friends, am currently starting a movement that will institute barcamps for “active mobility in everyday life”. It will start on January, 4th and 5th in Unterhaching. Preparations are well under way and you can register online from July, 1st.
Let me elucidate: Our mostly used way of transport is the individual mobility based on combustion motors. As I see it, this is something that is going to lead us astray, both socially and individually, not to mention the planet. This mode of transport lowers the quality of life for the individual person and for society, kills lives in traffic accidents (according to the UNO, 1.4 million persons were killed worldwide in 2013) and, in particular, kills the environment.
What is more, the “individualized motorised traffic” has become a metaphor for the grotesque development on our planet that destroys our habitat and harms us all. In order to get rid of this, we will have to forego many habits we have come to love, but which are still evil. However, changing habits is always hard – just think of smoking or watching TV. You are all on your own and have to start at your own front door.
I think there is no better alternative for us than changing from the car to active mobility – no matter if you walk or use the bike or some other way of moving under your own steam. Because it does not hurt at all. In fact, you will soon experience how much better you feel. This is the only way for us to become happier again.
So what else am I up to?
I am trying to “de-crust” the world a little bit – from too many morals and too much bureaucracy. I play lobbyist for “good” IT projects für Bavaria, I inspire persons – not only in my IT environment – and meddle in all varieties of things.
I am in favour of participation, change, watchfulness, appreciation and acknowledgement of the social systems of our times. I want to help towards people being made greater, instead of smaller, by their environment. I want to see to it that the quality of life for the persons near me will increase, rather than decrease. And that we humans will not be enslaved and destroyed for irrational reasons by non-personalized systems.
And I also want to continue voicing my opinions in the IF Blog. As you see, there is enough left to do. But today, let us party and then let us work tomorrow!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
The pictures taken at the party have just now been sent to me by my friend Same. Thanks a lot!
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