Mike Hohnen
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard Jul 2024
Mike Hohnen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to see you again.
Well, I have an impression that I'm going to be the odd fish out here, but that's fine. Why is that?
Well, I'll tell you. I'll try and illustrate this for you with a little anecdote, which would get us going in that sense. A couple of weeks ago, I got a... a request for a Zoom meeting over my calendar system, somebody who'd found me on LinkedIn. And then I sort of, as we all do, went down and checked out. So who is this person? I wonder why they want to talk to me.
And it turned out to be the CEO of a rather large software development company with a very sort of high profile background and top management team, high profile background. And so I was thinking, well, why on earth have they found out to me? It's a world I don't understand.
I took the meeting, of course, and I wanted to be polite, but I prepared a sort of little speech, you know, it's very kind of you to contact me. Thank you very much. I don't want to waste your time. Once I got going on that, he stopped me and said, you know, I've researched you and I understand what it is you're doing. Do you realize that I'm a humanist?
I'm not actually madly interested in the business side of things. It's the people side. I'm a people side person. And that's the only thing that really drives me. The rest, I don't give a toss. He says, I want you to come and talk to our people. And so I explained that there is another perspective on the world, which is not the one that we sort of generally normally have.
And you have a different perspective on the world. And I'd really like you to elaborate on that. So I ended up spending an afternoon with them over in Nice. And that was great fun. We had a really good time.
No, it's just a classic story. I mean, there are so many examples like that out there in the world. It's unbelievable. What really gets me is, you know, it's not rocket science. We know exactly what it takes. It's not a big mystery. It's a lot of hard work, but there is a way to solve that, you know?
Yeah, as you can see with my gray hairs, it's a long story. We'll try and keep it short. I just want to inject something there, because it gets me every time I hear it. How is it we've come to get to this spot where we talk about work-life balance? I mean, it's rubbish. From my perspective, it's rubbish, because it implies that work is not life. And for...
I don't think any of us three would sign up for that. I think we all three probably work bloody hard and we love what we do. And it's a very important part of our life. It's a different kind of balance. And it's a funny way of reinforcing something that I think is completely skewed in this thing. And we all do. I know that. I hear it the whole time. Every time I hear it, I try and shoot it down.
Well, you know, I mean, everything is a question of how we use words and how we frame things at the end. That's the first step. And so when we frame it that way, we've already sort of built a an image around it is. But what we're looking at is polarity between work and leisure. And what constitutes a really nice life is to maximize both. That's a good life if you see what I mean.
It's not doing more of one and less of the other. It's maximizing both. If we can maximize both of those two, then we actually thrive. And so we have to find out what that is for us and in what way we do it. But it's not like that work-life balance for me. That's the short version.
That's a hopeless question in a sense, Matt, because that is exactly what you started out saying. It becomes a very individual choice. It's finding one's own sweet, as you said, your own sweet spot. What is it that actually stimulates me? And I think the three of us would probably... not enjoy not working or having a completely, we wouldn't thrive with that.
And so each of us has to find out that. But with all polarities, the polarities are fascinating subject, but all polarities have this thing. They're always driven. There's something we want to achieve. We want to achieve the good life, which is trying to balance this polarity. But there's always a fear of something going wrong that will drive us to overemphasize one polarity over the other.
So before we get down there, but the other classic polarity is leadership versus management. And so we have this fear that we're not in control, that we're not going to be successful, that we're not going to manage the business, that we're not going to all the rest of it.
And so we push our foot down on the pedal called management and we push it hard because we think that as long as I keep pushing that pedal, then I'm sure to be doing right. And the reality is that it comes at the cost of the leadership aspect. And then that deteriorates. And then you get the downside of both polarities. And it's a little bit the same thing.
So in consulting businesses and what we do, we all wake up in the morning and think, oh, when are we going to get the next client? And are we being successful enough? Are we working hard enough? And so we push the bloody pedal, which is called work. And we forget to balance it the other pedal, which is the leisure part.
And in that sense, we do ourselves a disfavor because that means at the end of the day that we're not at our best anymore. So one has to find out. So one has to try and identify and actually be really conscious of the fact that you said the running. So what are the things that I could actually see on a to-do list or put in my calendar or say, when I do these things, I'm on the other polarity.
I'm actually reinforcing that polarity and not working on the other one. And then you need to sort of think a little bit about what are the warning signs? When do I know that I'm actually only focused on my work side? My wife doesn't speak to me anymore.
You said the word mental health. I think this is something we don't like to talk about. It's a little bit taboo. It's incredibly important. Years ago, I was also working like crazy, and I was actually really enjoying myself, but I was on an airplane three times a week going somewhere, and it just went on and on and on in that sense. And one morning, I was preparing to walk into a client workshop,
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