Sunday 23 December 2012

My secret revealed...

It’s Christmas time. It’s time for miracles. Or not.
It should not be harmful for us to believe in miracles, at least for a day, or minute, or a second.
With all your good Christmas spirit, I would like to ask a second of your time to help me create a miracle.
In return I will share my secret with you:

Sunday 9 December 2012

My Big Loss; Or How Women Can Save the World.

Recently I experienced a big loss, only because a company - let’s name it XXX – had server issues. The result was that I lost my online creative project, which I had been working on until 2 AM for multiple nights. I evaluated that I had invested about 100 hours of my time, over-exhausted the creative part of the brain and lost effectiveness at my work as a result of sleepless nights. This project was supposed to be a Christmas gift to my lovely 3-year old girl. And one day it just disappeared. My dear friend, who just happened to be around at that moment, helped me go through the crisis and assured me that the company probably had backup of their servers and that the problem could be fixed. We wrote a letter to them, explaining how important it was for me to recover the project. At least, I kept hope up until one evening (which I will probably never forget) where I was informed that my project was irrecoverable. In order to comfort my frustrations, they compensated with a gift certificate, on which, of course, again, I would have to invest another 100 hours and lots of sleepless nights.

I was outrageously angry. I didn’t need another headache. What I needed was just a little understanding of my feelings, moral support and motivation to start again from scratch. The company XXX had chosen a strategy of solving the issue by giving me a gift certificate, a rational choice, I would say. However, neither did they succeed in restoring my project/frustration, nor in returning my customer satisfaction.

So was this gift certificate what I really needed? If they had just showed their understanding of my feelings, I would most likely have been more motivated to start over again from the beginning. But their apathy towards my feelings was overwhelming. So for now, I will never go back to them. 

“Soft” vs. “Hard” Leadership