Paul Engel

A curious and driven soul, I've been working as a project manager and consultant for more than 20 years now, in all sorts of businesses, ranging from industry, retail, wholesale, ICT, public administration and education. At the moment I'm really enjoying 'multi stakeholder issues'. It's all about getting myself and others to work "at the edge", so to say. I just love the challenge, the complexity and the slowing down. Not a day goes by without having learned something - or someone - new.

With some 20 colleagues, we're running a middle sized consultancy firm here in the Netherlands called Kern Konsult ("core consulting"). The firm's been around for more than 25 years and is still an exciting social and economic experiment. We try to invent as we go along, working on whatever it takes to create and maintain a value driven, vitalized community of professionals. Made plenty of mistakes, learned loads of lessons and are still having lots of fun.

My wife Nanda and I are both divorced. Her kids are hitting their twenties, mine are just cruising into their teens. We live a hectic life. Sometimes there's just the two of us, then we're with four, then we're with six and when Nanda's kids bring their boy- and girlfriend we've really got a "full house". Coming from different backgrounds, we have a lot of conflicting (family) values to deal with. In the beginning that was quite rough. Two months after we blissfully got married, we nearly split up again. The tipping point in the relationship came when we decided to reframe it all. The one-big-happy-family-thing just wasn't the right mindset. So we decided on a new focus. We decided our dynamic little family was just a microcosm of society, reflecting in a small way all the big challenges of the world at large. With that said, we got discovered what we were really dealing with a multicultural society, constantly changing majority and minority positions, depending on who's children were present at dinner. It's what we now call the "pizza conversion". Instead of it going "Wah, why aren't we eating pizza? It's Thursday, we ALWAYS eat pizza on Thursday. We've been eating pizza on Thursday since like the day we could walk...", the conversion has become more open mind: "Gosh, you eat pizza on Monday do you? Wow, pizza on Monday tastes quite nice actually".

Being part of this Plaxo community helps a lot. It reminds me how my little bits and pieces fit into a much bigger picture. It also allows me to stay (and feel) connected. The thinking is historically big, the acting is humanly small.