The Art of Parties

Good parties are important. Good company parties are very important. This is the place where the real (not the aspirational) company culture is celebrated. They are important for shared identity, community and meaning-creation.

Good company parties create lasting memories. Here is my top 10 of best company parties ever.

Note: there is a glaring hole in my list. I worked a lot with both Brits and Americans but did not party enough with them. So I still don’t know if all the lurid stories about UK Christmas Parties are true. Some anecdotal evidence hints in that direction, but not enough to be sure.

1.??????Christmas parties can be tame. Not the ‘Little Christmas’ parties of ROAL/ABE Enzymes Finland. They are exuberant and a bit wild. Colleagues only seen in white lab coats all year suddenly dress up splendidly. The rock music is performed live and loud and the dancefloor is full. People who don’t say that much over the year all of a sudden get eloquent after a number of drinks and will tell you in unsparing detail about managerial mistakes, especially those performed by ‘those from the UK', who were even worse than 'those from Germany’. I remember a factory manager embracing me on the dancefloor towards the end of the band set, shouting in my ear: ‘O Wim you will love this song too. It is also about suicide.’ ?

2.??????The Wolters Kluwer Hungary parties were memorable too. There was a summer karaoke tent on the parking lot of the Prielle Kornélia?utca office. I rember eloquent speeches by Willem van Zanten turned into clumsy Hungarian by yours truly. I remember a boat trip up and down the Danube on a warm summer night. I remember the ladies of the finance administration in a long row on the dancefloor. I remember a deep conversation very late at night with 2 MDs (you too Peter Janos Sos Dr. ) about the weirdness of getting older in body but not in mind. ?

3.??????Strictly speaking not a party, but the AB Enzymes Leadership Meeting about Matrix culture for which Nathan Sellen , Pieter Jan Heykoop and me played a couple of adapted scenes from The Matrix and all managers dressed up like Neo and Trinity possibly was the most fun work activity I ever participated in. It combined serious messaging with collective creativity.

4.??????The Dordrecht Christmas parties (Kluwer Academic) in the cellar of a bar close to the church evolved in three very distinct stages. First came the Christmas choir directed by production manager Ton van Lierop doing Rudolf the Red nosed Reindeer and other kitschy songs. That was not the bit I liked, although it was company tradition. The second phase erupted later with the Kluwer Band who played Smells Like Teen Spirit ‘espically for the guy from HR’. After the official party, there supposedly was an informal third phase around town overnight, including large amounts of drinks and supposedly unspeakable acts unbefitting this ?protestant town. I considered myself much too married and too HR to attend. Faces of participants next day in the office veered from green to grey.

5.??????In the year Kluwer Academic Publishers and Springer Verlag merged, the new management announced a major restructuring and staff reduction, affecting 1/3 of Dordrecht staff. That year, nobody was in the mood for partying and a party boycott was in the air. Together with Peter Hendriks , as local representative of management, we planned a walk on the North Sea beach with some drinks in a beach bar afterwards. It was a subdued affair with the few people who were in the mood to show up. The beach was a grey and wet as only a Dutch beach end of November can be. But I remember it well. It was fitting.

6.??????Fully fitting the prejudice that Sales people spend money for events, I remember the Springer Sales and Marketing conference in Bangkok, which ended with a karaoke party on the deck of a boat in the river, where I joined my Japanese colleagues in an abandon of Beatles-songs. Decadent fun.

7.??????The new-style Springer Heidelberg summer party was a very different beast from the slightly boring traditional summer party which had mainly involved a lot of good food and people sitting for long hours at long tables. The new party formalized a bottom-up employee initiative that had evolved between Dutch and German colleagues: the Springer soccer tournament. Over the years, more and more teams from other locations joined. The party ended with a band and dancing in the summer night of the Neuenheimer Feld, with the Heidelberg hills in the background. At that time, I was a bit too disenchanted with the autocratic and toxic management culture at Springer to fully enjoy the party, but as a party (and as bottom-up initiative) it was unrivaled. ?

8.??????In my first job at the Federation of Christian Trade Unions in the Netherlands, I was responsible for aid projects for Central and Eastern trade unions. One night, deep in the forests of the Veluwe, we ended up partying with the Rumanian trade unionist who had been trained through the day. There were lively conversations and singing in heavily accented Hungarian with (quite non-Hungarian) Romanians who had learned the language from grandparents or on the street. Every language can be an international language in the right setting.

9.??????Perhaps the best parties are farewell parties. The best ones are serious, ritual thresholds for all involved. They contain fun, joy, gratitude, melancholia, and sorrow.

I remember Willem van Zantens farewell party in Budapest, before he left for Australia, never to return. I remember speeching and dancing at Jan Bergman s farewell party in Budapest. I remember Jay Lippincott being celebrated at his Dordrecht farewell party, once more with the Kluwer band. I remember the black humor and wonderful anarchistic mood of my Springer Vienna colleagues when they said farewell to Sven Fund . Vienna is very much central Europe, after all.

I remember Aryan Moelker s personable farewell from AB Enzymes in the Darmstadt office conference room. And I remember a very small and informal farewell party for Michiel Verhaagen on his boat on a wet and cold Dutch lake, long after the official AirPlus parties in Neu Isenburg were over. In various stages of inebration, we held deep personal speeches in the bar of the ?small Alphen hotel where we were going to sleep. And I still remember what everybody said.?

The best presents were specially made farewell presents, often books with personal messages. Saying goodbye in the right way is crucial. Celebrating and mourning are different but not fundamentally so.

10.??I remember some of my own farewell parties, in Budapest, Dordrecht and Darmstadt. Perhaps best of all the farewell party from Springer Media in Houten, when Michel Veen affectionally called me ‘the worst-dressed HR-guy in history’. That is the stuff memories are made of. ?