Barouche’s Post

Day 100 of 366: A Turning Point for Strategic Focus 🔄🧭 Reaching the 100th day of this year prompts a moment of introspection and realignment. The journey so far has felt akin to being on a hamster wheel - constantly moving, juggling responsibilities across four businesses, but not making the meaningful progress I yearn for. Much of my time has been consumed by putting out fires and tackling tasks - essential, yet not leveraging my true potential. As someone whose greatest strength lies in strategy, I recognize the need to pivot towards what I do best. Consequently, I've decided to carve out every Monday for the next four months, dedicating these days exclusively to strategic planning for CROFTI, Pivot Sports, RUN WITH, and Tribu, leading up to our trip to Europe. Focus Areas for Strategy Days: - Vision and Long-term Goals: Revisiting and refining the vision for each business, ensuring alignment with long-term goals and industry trends 🌟. -Innovation and Growth Opportunities: Identifying new markets, technologies, and products that can drive growth and set us apart from the competition 🔍. - Operational Efficiency: Streamlining processes, embracing automation, and enhancing team productivity to support our strategic objectives 🛠️. - Culture and Leadership: Cultivating a culture that inspires innovation, excellence, and a shared commitment to our strategic goals, while developing leadership that can guide each team towards these visions 🌱. This strategic recalibration is not just about shifting how I spend my Mondays; it's about affirming my commitment to leading with vision and purpose. It's about ensuring that my actions and decisions across all ventures are guided by a coherent strategy that harnesses my true skills and brings out the best in our teams. As we mark Day 100, let's embrace this shift towards strategic focus as a crucial step towards realizing our ambitions. Here's to the transformative power of strategy and the journey ahead. 🚀📈 #StrategicFocus #Leadership #Innovation #OperationalEfficiency #CROFTI #Tribu #PivotSports #RUNWITH #Day100of366

Back in Action: Igniting Team Spirit for a Thriving 2024! 🚀 After a restful break, we're recharged and ready to kick off an incredible 2024 together. 💪 This year, we're celebrating the unbeatable spirit of collaboration, commitment, and dedication that defines our extraordinary team. Get ready for exciting projects, shared successes, and impactful partnerships! Share your thoughts - Let us know the topics you're most curious about in 2024. 💬 #creebuildings #greenbuildings #futureofbuilding #teamcree

After a year where you fell short, how do you balance the need to examine what went wrong—while also looking forward to what you can solve? Last week Woden held our annual retreat. As frustrating as big pieces of 2023 were, the last 16 weeks were incredible: Q4 was our best quarter ever (props Andrew McWilliams and David Grimaldi for incredible work). As a leader, I have a tendency to want to interrogate and understand everything that went wrong, and ensure everyone else sees it too. Rachel Fox wisely counseled me that what our team needed was to build on what's working. We decided to just accept where we were for 2023, and look forward. We re-anchored our team in our mission and values, and decided to look at what we need to do in 2024 to advance those towards our vision. Some key things I learned from our team this past week: 1. Broaden the circle: Most of the retreat content was delivered by other people on the team, so the buy-in was higher than if I had just done it. 2. Clear objectives: I took the approach of laying out 7 objectives for 2024, and leaving it to the team to find a way to reach them. 3. Look forward: You can't do anything about what's already happened, so focus the team on what it can do tomorrow—not what it didn't do yesterday. 4. Invite others in: I shy away from asking people to make the commitment to Woden that I have, but people want to be asked to build something new. 5. Lead as a peer: By handing over the reigns to others, I was able to participate in conversations, not lead them. It was refreshing to work alongside the team, and motivating for 2024. I'm proud of the work everyone has done to think about how the #StoryKernel helps build #essentialbrands. We've got an exciting year planned of revamping our StoryAccelerator offering, expanding our team, and ramping up two new hires I'm excited to announce next week.

In my role as a Managing Director, I like to start the year by reflecting on the global economy outlook and define within this context my personal commitments regarding Air Liquide Benelux. First of all, more than ever, the 2024 political agenda (US and European elections, but also elections in Belgium) and geopolitics (Hamas-Israël war, Ukraine-Russia war) will surely have a strong influence on the economy with  some decisions that will be delayed after elections, a possible acceleration of some relocations because of tensions (at the cost of some inflation) and some potential peaks in energy prices depending on conflicts. That is the reason why the risk of recession remains. Finally, inflation dynamic will also have important implications in 2024 given the energy transition costs and geopolitical risks, but should be limited because of the low demand. All in all, even though global uncertainty will persist, I am confident that Benelux and Air Liquide with it, are ready to seize the opportunities that these events will offer. In that context, I want to state loud and clear some values that are at the core of my management: I care about the "who" is delivering the work: leaders like me are still leading people, therefore my priority is to continue inspiring, motivating, and enabling a greater sense of belonging in the next year by meeting people in all sites of Air Liquide Benelux. I care about developing people for the future: even if the impact of digital on productivity has been disappointing lately in the industry, AI is coming fast and the digitisation will not stop there, which means that we need tech-oriented people and also to focus the employees on added-value tasks where creativity, emotional intelligence, judgement and contextual understanding are making the difference. Secondly, people work differently, on-site, fully remote or part-time. Helping dispersed teams collaborate in the most effective and efficient ways possible is not a short-term project but a ongoing puzzle for me that I want to tackle; I care about the "why" we are working together: our goal at Air Liquide Benelux is to continue enabling the local industry to stay local by helping to reach the right level of competitiveness and CO2 footprint. This definition of the role of business is incomplete and needs to be defined all together with Air Liquide Benelux employees. At Air Liquide Benelux we are proud of the results already achieved and we are clear on the direction we are taking. We are also aware that no one can predict with certainty when and where the next crisis will arise, nor whether it will be triggered by technology, war, climate, or social unrest. Regardless, we want to own our path, act on what we can influence by recognising our role in this complex system, and write the future together with our employees as the solution is collective to face uncertainty. For all of that, I am looking for 2024 with Air Liquide Benelux employees. Best wishes to all.

Reflecting on the journey so far and gearing up for new heights in 2024! 🚀 Grateful for the lessons learned, connections made, and challenges conquered. Here's to embracing growth, seizing opportunities, and making each day count. Let's make 2024 our year of achievements! 💼🌟 #PersonalGrowth #CareerJourney #NewBeginnings #ProfessionalDevelopment #2024Goals #linkedincommunity

🎄 As the year comes to a close, we reflect on the milestones achieved and the lessons learned. It's been a journey of growth and collaboration, and we're excited about what the future holds. 🌟 We're thrilled to announce new projects and continued partnerships. Your support has been invaluable, and we look forward to achieving even greater heights together in 2024 Wishing you joy, success, and endless possibilities in the coming year! 🎉 #AdastraBusinessConsulting #Adastra #ADASTRAczech #Banking #Risk #Collections #DataManagement #Digitalization #FinanceInnovation

Exciting News! 🚀 Thrilled to embark on a new venture with Top Troove Foundation, aiming for impactful collaboration and positive change. Together, we'll reach new heights and make a difference! Stay tuned for the journey ahead. 🌟💙 #NewBeginnings #Collaboration #TopTrooveFoundation"

Exciting News! 🚀 Thrilled to embark on a new venture with Top Troove Foundation, aiming for impactful collaboration and positive change. Together, we'll reach new heights and make a difference! Stay tuned for the journey ahead. 🌟💙 #NewBeginnings #Collaboration #TopTrooveFoundation"

At the beginning of this year, we made the decision at Helloprint to restructure our team setup and operations to create a future-proof and independent company that would allow us to accelerate working on our vision. While this was not the first time we’ve gone through change, this was undoubtedly one of the most impactful and large ones. But as in every challenge we’ve faced during our 10-year existence, there was always one thing that guided us: Our powerful #culture that is the basis for everything. The past months gave us full focus on working on the actual fundament of every aspect of our company. We’ve changed systems, changed processes, accelerated automation, worked on all unit economics, accelerated the use of #AI, launched our API and Enterprise models, introduced new VIP and loyalty programs for our most loyal customers, accelerated our sustainability efforts, made next steps in on #Bcorp application, got our #ISO certifications, installed a new Culture Committee and worked on literally every customer-facing aspect and every customer process to build our future infrastructure and ensure the best basis for future growth. In all those months, we took our entire team along with us in the process. We kicked off our new “Season” last week with our entire team, and as a last step, we’ve gathered all leaders within Helloprint together for a two-day offsite this week, talking #vision, #mission and #strategy, but most and foremost: The 5 Aspects of our Culture. We’ve discussed what it takes to build #HighPerformance Teams, how we deal with Responsibility first and Freedom afterwards, how to increase our Context to avoid Control and how we can accelerate personal development via our #DesignYourself principle. This time, not a session with not only top management but with 23 diverse leaders from all offices and backgrounds to discuss and debate our impact on building towards our vision: Why? Because we firmly believe that there’s only one thing that can’t be copied in a company, and that’s the DNA and its culture, and that culture should be lived and breathed by the whole company. Big shout out to all great current and future leaders at Helloprint and of course all other Helloprinters, and special thanks to Merijn Zeeman of Team Jumbo-Visma for mirroring our vision with the winning vision of the #1 sports team in the world. Mayasa Quacqess Oksana Pozhydaieva Andres Gonzalez Caseira Esther Zwart Ivan Jovanovikj Hidde Boerma Freek van der Voort Rick Molenaar Daphne de Jager Marlous Spaven Andres Gonzalez Caseira Lennaert Koch Koch Michael Heerkens Lenneke Persons Lizzy van der Vlegel Sebastiaan Ram Erwin Paaij Simone Langerhorst Maarten Lelijveld Oksana Pozhydaieva Maria Balyakina Rick Molenaar Rinke Raven Isabelle de Wolf Harm Tersteeg Ready for the next steps!

🚀 Here's a snapshot of INVERTO's 2023 highlights 🔎 #YearInNumbers #yearwrapup