Alef Arendsen

JTeam, that other company I still occasionally do some work for, although this has dropped to very-close-to-zero in the last 18 months, has recently hired somebody from Australia or New Zealand (now I’m not sure which one of those it is, but he surely is from somewhere down under ). Anyway, Tim (the Toolman) recently blogged about the 30% ruling and I just have link to his blog entry, because I still think the 30% ruling is one of the examples that the Dutch government is (despite what many people think) capable after all of designing laws that help.

The basic idea is that if you are an internationally sourced employee (as Tim also explains) in certain cases (for example if your skill is hard to come by), you are eligible for a tax cut of about 30% (well, this is not exactly how it works I can remember, but in any case, it’s a decent tax cut). Back in the dot-com days, with SmartHaven we hired numerous expats that could apply for this rule. Obviously Amsterdam was, and still is a attractive place to work so this was a way for SmartHaven to attract some good personnel, despite the difficult market back then.

I Amsterdam.com has a good article on the 30% ruling that should get you started.

In the meantime, I just heard I’m presenting at the JTeam Tech Meeting next June 5 at around dinner time. If you’re up for a good portion of Spring 2.5, don’t hesitate to join! I think pizza and beer are provided!

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.

Worth watching!