Lessons learned - what skiing will teach you about life

Coming back from this winter's first week of skiing my mind is still working through all the recent events and impressions. A friend of mine, that I got to know through skiing, organizes an annual "boys weekend on skis" around a group of ever changing friends, friend's friends and acquiantances.

In that group he manages to gather a wide and quite diverse variety of people, all united through one main objective - skiing. People range from recent graduates and PHD Students to "regular" employees to experts in digital business process management, e-health managers, automotive industrie project managers and doctors. But neither "social status" nor "skills in skiing" are important in that group - team spirit it is.

There is no need to ask for help - help is offered, and people are looking out for one another. Tips and time - on piste as well as off piste - are shared for free and to help the other person, not to gain personal benefits from it. This ranges from car-pools in the organization of "how to get there" to sharing bunk beds with people you have just met to waxing each others skis at night in the light of a mobile phone screen.

What's most astonishing in that group is how respectfully people communicate and how well they cooperate without being close throughout the year. And this is what I take from skiing - not the action-laden backcountry-skiing experience to be shared on instagram, not the "who went highest, fastest, furthest" - but to trust people from the moment you meet them. To see good in people that you haven't yet met.

We need to adapt that position for business more often - to implicitly agree upon a common goal. To accept that all parties will benefit from good an positive attiduted to one another. I will - more than before - try to stick to that attititude.

All the best for your christmas holidays, happy skiing and a happy 2020 to all of you.

"Ab 1000 Meter wird geduzt"

Yours,

Alexander