My name is Alexander Pinker and I am an innovation profiler and future strategist. My job is, normally at least, to help companies through the future and to shape the world of tomorrow together with them.
But: the world is upside down.
The future is more uncertain than ever.
You can’t leave your house, turn on the TV or pick up your smartphone without hearing something about Corona. There is currently no other topic that occupies people so much and makes reality as we know it unravel.
The economy is currently in a state of shock. The world is standing still.
But I do not want to talk here about exit restrictions or the closure of restaurants and shops. This is difficult and presents the economy with completely new challenges, but that is not the subject of this entry. In this diary, I would like to give a personal insight into my everyday life as an entrepreneur and perhaps inspire some of you.
Like me, many founders, directors, managers and self-employed people are facing the same problems. In one fell swoop everything was different.
We all certainly planned through our year, intensified our acquisition efforts last year and there were certainly some exciting new projects in the pipeline – and then they were gone.
In my area, as a future strategist, it’s the personal brand that counts. As a person, I was the expert for technologies, start-ups and innovation management. I was invited because I can take people into the future locally, because it is my mission to encourage them to take the necessary step into the future themselves. But it is precisely this proximity, which I have so valued in consultations, workshops and keynotes, that is now becoming my undoing. It is the end of March and I am sorry to say that everything I was looking forward to in the first quarter of 2020 did not happen.
I should have taken university hospitals on a journey into the future of medicine, worked out completely new innovation concepts and positioning together with companies and, in impulses, carried off corporations and SMEs into a world of technology.
But now I sit in my home office and brood.
Anyone who knows me knows that this is not my personality. Although I question the world day after day, really worrying brooding is usually far from my mind. In the last few weeks things have changed a bit. I don’t want to say that I am afraid or that I am too afraid that my company will go down the drain. But it worries me what I hear day after day.
I’ve talked to a lot of people: founders from the event industry, the hotel industry, from technology, AI and education. They are all feeling the change and they are worried.
They are looking for support, for orientation and for new solutions in their existing business model. I can understand what is going on in their heads and I use the free time that is now available to devote myself to projects that have not been used in everyday professional life. In doing so, I question every single service I have and think about new ways to use them. These are all new thoughts and considerations that you have to make as an entrepreneur. Post-its decorate my home office, scribbles and various canvas models decorate the table, the walls and the floor.
Currently, new offers for my customers are emerging: unique webinars and also a digital platform. The core of my work always in view: To empower people for the future.
In the next few days I would like to give you an insight into what moves me and what I am working on, in order to use the cancelled orders as an opportunity for new services. It should encourage you to see the challenge as an opportunity and I want to enable you to learn from my mistakes and pitfalls.
So come with me on a journey through the Corona crisis and accompany me in this “Diary of an entrepreneur”.
If you need help, want to evaluate your ideas or if I can help you, please contact me!
In the meantime I say goodbye until the next entry. Stay healthy!
Alex
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
