Alef Arendsen

Last Friday, Eckart Wintzen died in his house in France. Eckart was one Holland’s top entrepreneur, and can safely be mention along the likes of Paul Fenter van Vlissingen (although I doubt he would have liked them himself) and Hans Breukhoven.

Eckart stated BSO, literally translated as Bureau for Systems Development. It was one of Holland’s biggest system integrators, which he sold to Philips in the nineties. Wintzen instigated a special management policy in the firm. Whenever a department (or office, whatever you call it) grow to more than 50 employees, the department had to split. Each department had its own P/L and balance sheet and there was fierce competition between various departments (although there was a certain degree of geographical separation between all of them, meaning they couldn’t simply go after accounts in other parts of the country). The was no corporate head office to speak of, meaning all departments took care of their own administration and only certain guidelines with respect to marketing, logos, letter heads and reporting were centrally defined.

This management style is referred to cell philosophy with each department representing one cell. Wintzen wrote a book about his time at BSO (highly recommended by the way) called Eckart’s Notes.

Eckart Wintzen died last Friday, at the age of 68.

Eckart early departure is covered in a lot of blog entries all over the world.

Back in August last year, I had an entry about Freakonomics, a book by Steven D. Levitt.

Near the end I said the next book I was about to read was Good to Great, by Jim Collins and I promised you that I’d update you once I finished the book. Well, I have to apoligize for breaking that promise, because I did finish the book, but didn’t blog about it.

I’m not going to do an entire review here, because there are plenty of raving reviews out there. One thing I can say is that it really helped me shaping my business and although it’s not a really easy read (it’s kind of boring actually), the conclusions Jim and his team draw are really inspiring.

I have also just finished Barbarians at the Gate about the (in)famous take-over of RJR Nabisco by KKR in the late-eighties. It’s a fantastic book that covers the take-over really well and feels like a fiction thriller, but is in fact based on a real story. Especially with all the discussions around hedge funds lately, it’s an interesting read, especially if you (like me) are not really into these kinds of things but still want to keep up-to-date.

Once every now and then I drop by at the bookstore to get some books. I usually end up reading a couple of books the next two or three weeks after that and then don’t read anything anymore until I drop by at the bookstore again. It was one of those weekends…

Anyway, I recently heard about this book called Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner and accidentally stumbled upon it in the local bookstore yesterday. Somewhat more than 24 hours later I finished reading the book and I must say, it’s an excellent easy to read piece.

I have always been intrigued by economics. It’s fascinating what moves the world at a larger scale. Why do oil prices rise, what would happen to welfare in China if the government let go its one-child-only policy. This book however, sheds entire different light on things.

It’s amazing how Steven asks bizar questions and backs digs up piles of data to draw a conclusion from. After reading cause and effects statements such as ‘Crime rates in the 90s dropped because of legalized abortion’ and ‘Being a good parent doesn’t matter all that much’ you really start to realize that looking at things a bit differently is not only fun, but can prove to quite useful as well.

One comment: I was a bit dissapointed that Steven and Stephen didn’t go deeper into methodologies and techniques they used to come to their conclusions. There is a small bit on causality and correlation and another bit on regression analysis but that’s all.

But all-in-all, if, during a rainy weekend, you don’t feel like doing anything, this is definitely a good read.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levity and Stephen J. Dubner (0-06-073132-x, William Morrow, May 1, 2005)

Next up is Good to Great by Jim Collins, subtitled ‘Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t’. I’ll update you once I’ve finished it.