[~the one about my father, my mentor, my guide~]

In the recent past, when I sometimes mused about this, I thought I had completely figured out what I wanted to talk about and how I wanted to do that. Because if there was one thing clear, it was that I would deliver a eulogy for my father. I am what I am because of him, my look at people and at life is a result of his (and my mother’s) attitude, positivity and confidence.

I wanted to use this old tile-wisdom, which dads get for Father’s Day on ties and coffee mugs, and eliminate all of the lines I have never gone through, because of the special man my father was. Basically to state that I moved immediately from age 4 to 30 or 35…

But then, completely unexpected, the moment has come and I didn’t know where to start and where to end. And like any speaker knows, any decent story has a bit of a red thread, is personal, generates a smile and a tear. Obviously, I was least concerned about the tear…

So I just decided to tweak my original thought. The basic theme from the tile was: “my father is the best and knows everything”. And I realized I implicitly was talking about ultimate leadership. So I wanted to mark most parts of the leadership of my father…

Any good leader has an unbreakable positivity and endless confidence in growth and achievements.

Just shortly after my father started his own company in 1981, our house became to small as it was piling up with office materials, readers and work stuff. An opportunity occurred to buy a plot of land in the town we lived in, so our house needed to be sold. Coincidentally, the beginning of the 1980’s marked a most severe economic recession, so selling a house was next to impossible. Almost simultaneously, friends of ours lived in Los Angeles and invited us to come visit, which was an amazingly expensive challenge in those days. And just because the opportunity arose, my father fell in love with a green Saab 99 Turbo, which he just had tom have, 2 weeks before we went on out trip to the US…

Only with a truckload of confidence and unbridled positivity and optimism anyone would go head-to-head with these challenges!

My father’s mantra: Go big or Go home!

Many of the things mentioned before are a result of creativity and a thinking-outside-the-box mentality; characteristic for my father.

And this revealed it self in all kinds of ways.

Since I can remember, Guus used to paint and draw, big paintings, small drawings, objects, landscapes, anything that provoked his imagination.

My brother and I both have inherited the musical passion. My father, like us, taught himself how to play the guitar, acoustic, electric, 12-string, anything he could lay his hands on. His guitar playing and singing around the campfire has become legendary, at least with family and friends…

And there was a continuous flow of business ideas and ventures of which the business cards and other stationary are the silent witnesses.

My father’s creativity and ability to think outside of the box was the foundation of his visionary thinking.

On too many occasions way ahead of his time, but to me the basis of his inspiration. His creativity went hand-in-hand with the drive to make things better. “Can’t” didn’t exist; it’s just a matter of thinking differently…

Guus was about new things and broad lines and that resonated in all of these things:

• He led one of the first national communication campaigns for organ-donor campaigns
• He tried to implement smaller public transportation buses in small towns, particularly aimed at the elderly
• Around 20 years ago, he already proposed the idea of a base income, calculating and arguing why this was so much cheaper and more effective than our social security system
• Something like 10 years before COVID, he saw the potential of online courses, which was too soon for the market

And I can go on and on with examples of his crazy ideas. Not rarely, he was way ahead of his time, but as long as he got to promote his ideas, that didn’t bother him…

Leadership is so much more effective with humor.

Maybe I will miss my father’s humor most. Even on the last day I saw him, we made silly jokes and he used to make funny faces and try to make verbal jokes of which he was the master.

I remember something (we in our family found) hilarious and which was symbolic for the speed at which his mind used to work. My brother was in his last year of high school and I had just started uni. We were together at my parent’s house and my brother had a friend stay over. Coincidentally, it was in a weekend, when, in the middle of the night, we’d switch to daylight saving time.

So at the dinner table, where we as usual had nice, deep and happy discussions, my father, out of the blue asks: “So who will get up tonight?”

As we were used to this kind of surprise jokes, my brother replied: “Not me, I did it last time.” I proceeded with: “I did it the time before that!” My mother said: “Well, obviously I don’t have to do this chore, as I do the laundry and the cooking…”

So we all turned to my brother’s friend Marco and my father said: “Don’t worry, I will make you a map of where all the clocks are, so you can turn them all back. No need for the ones in our bedroom!”

While we kept our straight faces, we saw Marco struggling with the ‘request’ my father made and it took him at least 10 minutes to understand that it was a joke…

His humor was one way of inspiring people to become better and helping them to improve.

As a teenager, I always saw my father coming home from work tired but satisfied, sharing stories about the people he had met, the projects he was doing and cooperation with continuously changing groups of people. I wanted that too…

So after I had joined his company, he always used to emphasize to have an open mind and view towards people and make them do what they love. He promoted the concept of ikigai before it was even known. He used to say: “If someone is bad at communication, better discover what you are good at and what you love, because even with training you will maximally become mediocre…”

And to achieve this and finding out who in a team does what best and with the most excitement, he was a coaching leader, even before this concept existed.

Shortly after I joined working with him, in April 1997, I facilitated my first leadership session. With full excitement and enthusiasm, I started a two-day course with around 20 maritime captains of 55 and over, who, basically had to be there and didn’t necessarily wanted to. They looked at me with an attitude of “what are you going to tell us, that we already haven’t done our way for the past 30 years”… Something which one of them actually said on the first afternoon. There I was, with all my positivity and energy, basically being bullied by a bunch of motionless, negative dinosaurs!

I came back in the office after these two days, which I had finished with pain and suffering and to my father I exclaimed: “I will never do this again!”, obviously with maximum frustration. And instead of telling me that it wasn’t so bad, or “you will do better next time”, or even “of course you will do this again!” he asked me to sit down and just started asking questions. About what they said, what I felt, if I had an idea what was wrong with their statement and attitude, etc etc… And after this, I naturally did it again and had become so much better at facilitating and training a group of participants.

After preparing this speech, the evening before the ceremony, I realized something that struck me like lightning… We design readers for our courses ourselves and I suddenly thought of the quote on the cover of our “The Art of Leading”-book:

But something that will stuck most to my mind is the leadership trait of achieving harmony.

Together with my mother, Guus was responsible for an utterly carefree childhood in which anything was possible, as long as you wanted it…

We were, are, and will be a harmonious family with unlimited curiosity and possibilities.

And I remember those particular moments that made me realize this like thunder in a clear sky: it must have been fall 1989, when my parents, my brother and I had visited a theater show in Amsterdam. It was nice, the show from Youp van ’t Hek was very funny and we had had an amazing family evening, after which I returned to my student dorm in Rotterdam. And as I was mesmerizing over the fun we had had, I realized how fortunate and lucky we were to have each other.

And as music was one of the inspirations he had already shared with us, I wrote a song about it called “Tears of Joy”, which we have recorded many times in the past. My mother always said that when anyone of them would pass away, she would want to hear it played.

I already told her that I would probably not be able to perform that task in that state and as I have passed on the torch to my daughters, I asked my daughter Daya to sing it on my behalf…