​

The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #64

​

Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• Why I Am Hiring Military Guys
• How to Achieve ISO 9001 Certification Without Paper Folders and Excel Lists
• Capital vs. Carbon: Investing in a Warmer World

Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon 👋
Tom

KickKerK

LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Why I Am Hiring Military Guys

“We’re time-on-target for the go-live.” Why Mission First also helps in business.

Outing yourself as a military guy is not always well-perceived in the business world. Nevertheless, I do it. I am an active reserve general staff officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, and at the same time, I am the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

I am not the only military guy in the company. One of my co-founders was an active reserve officer in the National Emergency Operations Centre, and our employees include a former infantry platoon leader and an RAF Tornado navigator.

The parallels between business and the military are often discussed in the business media, but I want to focus on two very specific aspects which I believe are most relevant in a company of 20 people: mission first, and surviving in a complex world.

Mission First

Both business and the military have clear strategic missions: Businesses should make money, and armies should bring home victory.

Mission Command

These strategic missions are broken down into operational and tactical missions, which are then executed by the subordinated leaders with as much freedom of action as possible. This is referred to as mission command. Therefore, every leader needs to know his mission by heart, and always put it first. The mission is non-negotiable, and the ways to achieve it are.

Once internalized, the mission command philosophy often stays with a person for life. It is an integral part of military training and doesn’t magically disappear once a person transfers into civilian employment. This is where startups can take advantage of hiring military guys: do whatever it takes to achieve your mission.

Here is a real-life statement I heard in our company:

This was said a few days before a major customer go-live when the team was working day and night to make the go-live successful. One of our military guys skillfully synchronized all activities to make sure all go-live relevant tasks were finished on time, and everything else was shifted to the post-go-live phase. The go-live was very successful and achieved with strike precision.

Reality vs. Ideal World

Legend has it that Winston Churchill called military planning a “necessary evil”, and experience shows that no military plan survives the first shot. This is the same in business — create as many business model spreadsheets and as many Gantt charts as you like, you will always need to adapt them when problems surface.

I am not talking about internal problems here, I am talking about external factors that lead to changes to the original plan: delayed deliverables from the customer side, corrupted data, etc. Military guys are used to adapting to new situations and remembering their mission.

Here is a real-life statement I heard from one of our military guys when customer inputs for a major work package were delayed by several weeks but the original deadline stayed unchanged:

We don’t brag about working day and night, but if night shifts are required to accomplish the mission, we do it.

Survive In A Complex World

The entire world talks about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) In the military context, the VUCA world is often associated with hybrid warfare. In the business context, digitization in all its facets and external factors such as COVID-19 do their part to create a VUCA world. In today’s business environment, light and shadow are very close, and reality often changes much faster than your business plan.

Situation Assessment

Therefore, constant situation assessment is key in a complex world. While this is normal in the military, businesses (and the military administration!) still tend to stick to budget cycles and approved plans. When the situation in our company changes abruptly, I usually initiate situation assessment with the callout “new situation”. I learned this expression in the military, and I use it to inform everybody in the company that planning will start all over again, irrespective of the budget cycle, previous plans, or personal plans for the weekend.

In this way, we reorganized the entire company when COVID-19 struck and our pipeline in the aviation industry collapsed. My co-founders and I used the planning processes we knew from the military — instead of panicking, we used our judgment and a clear methodology to assess the new situation, develop options, decide on the new course of action, and communicate it to our team.

The result? Since COVID-19 struck, we significantly enlarged our customer base in the aviation industry and added additional customers in a new industry.

Agility

Even when using structured planning processes, the situation tends to change faster than approved operational plans. Therefore, employees on the tactical level need to adapt to new situations already before new plans arrive. This requires a combination of mission command and agility: employees need to remember their mission and use their full creativity to adapt to the changed circumstances. As stated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

On one hand, agility means quickly adapting to a new situation. On the other hand, it means not replanning the entire operational plan on the frontline. I usually remind our employees about this with the following statement:

Agility and structured situation assessment go hand-in-hand, the one cannot substitute for the other.

Conclusion

If I had to summarize my statements about “mission first” in a complex world in one sentence, this is it:

Speed and surprise are well-known tactical principles in the military, and they also work in the business environment: whether you have to outmaneuver an enemy or a competitor, the tactics are the same. That’s why I see clear benefits in hiring military guys.

​

LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

How to Achieve ISO 9001 Certification Without Paper Folders and Excel Lists

There are many digital tools available to make ISO 9001 certification less painful and more effective, but make sure you’re using the right tool for the right type of information

In our company, there isn’t a single paper folder — all information is kept fully digital. Nevertheless, we achieved ISO 9001 certification without any major findings or a helping hand from expensive consultants.

​ISO 9001 used to be a static, heavy norm designed to produce folders full of paper processes that collected dust after the certification audit was over. Not so anymore. With its 2015 update, the ISO 9001:2015 norm became more actionable and practical, with more focus being put on living the processes in daily life rather than on completeness on paper.

Being practical people, we asked ourselves the following questions at the beginning of the certification process:

Only after answering these questions did we start to read the norm to find out if all the required information is available in our company.

Below are the exact steps we took to get ready for the ISO 9001 certification audit.

Step 1: Eliminate Excel lists and use interactive tools

Before starting to define and document our processes, we eliminated as many Excel lists as possible — information stored in Excel lists is often outdated. Instead, we rely on tools such as JIRA to organize important information that changes regularly, for example, risks and assets:

​Building an ISO 9001 compliant risk management tool using JIRA​
​​Building an ISO 27001 compliant asset management tool using JIRA​
​​

Dynamic tools such as JIRA allow us to aggregate information in different dashboards, which we then use to track progress in our regular leadership meetings.

Step 2: Distinguish between technical documentation, company documentation, and process documentation

We explicitly distinguish between technical documentation, company documentation, and process documentation:

• Technical documentation includes specifications, system documentation, etc. Since technical documentation is updated often and collaboratively, we use Confluence to manage technical documentation. Technical documentation is uncontrolled, i.e. all team members can contribute directly to Confluence without an approval workflow.
• Company documentation includes finance documents, marketing materials, proposals, etc. These are stored in our digital folder structure (see step 3 below). Company documentation is controlled only by the folder access rights, but all team members with access to a certain folder can generate, update and delete files without an approval workflow.
• Process documentation is kept short, where we use the power of the hyperlink to refer to technical documentation and company documentation directly from the processes (see steps 4 and 5 below). Process documentation is controlled, i.e. only the process owners can change process documentation. However, all team members can raise change requests to initiate a change to a process.

Step 3: Reduce duplicate information

It is imperative to keep every piece of information only available in one place. A well-organized digital folder structure is the key to reducing duplicate information. We use Google Drive for Business, which has the advantage that linking to a certain Google Drive folder from our technical documentation or process documentation is very easy, as the entire Google toolset is built around the core concept of the hyperlink.

Step 4: Set up process documentation

Only after steps 1 to 3 did we start to set up the process documentation. We set up one document for every core process in our own content management solution:

• Leadership Processes
• Sales Processes
• Customer Processes
• Design Processes
• Development Processes
• Support Processes

Contrary to documents kept on a digital folder structure, these documents are much more interactive, as they are based on individual information modules.

The advantages of the modular approach are best explained in a real-life example: Whenever you ISO 9001 documentation, you probably think “flow chart” immediately. We killed the flow chart. Process flow charts might make sense in production companies, but certainly not in a SaaS company like ours. We created linear processes, where we used the checklists as we know them from aviation as a guiding principle. Of course, all processes are interactive — links allow one to jump between the process steps, and tags allow one to filter out information that is not relevant to a certain group of employees. The key to this approach is that each process step is an individual information module, which can be linked, filtered, and changed independently from other information modules.

Furthermore, many processes require forms and templates. We have embedded forms and templates directly into the processes, where the current version of a form or template can be downloaded directly from the affected process step — no more searching for the right form, or the latest version of that template!

Here is a sample screenshot from our recruiting process, where links, tags, and embedded templates are visible:

Step 5: Live the process

Once the process documentation is set up and fully linked, it’s all about keeping it up to date. Updates are initiated by a change request directly in our content management solution, and once approved by the process owner, the changes are communicated to all affected teams. When reading a document, changes are visually marked by a black bar on the right side of the text. Furthermore, all changes in a document are provided as a clickable revision list. In this way, both employees and auditors can see what has changed in the process documentation since the last version.

Here is a screenshot with the changes to our expense process, as we recently switched from Expensify to Yokoy:

Conclusion

ISO 9001 certification is less painful when the right digital tools are used. However, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution: it’s all about using the right tool for the right purpose, and about linking information in these different tools to avoid duplicates.

Kudos to the guys who invented the hyperlink.

​

INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Capital vs. Carbon: Investing in a Warmer World

Learn why carbon and water metrics matter most when investing in climate solutions — from an engineer and entrepreneur’s perspective.

Climate change is visible everywhere you look.

Glaciers are melting like never before.

Farmers worldwide need to cope with more frequent and severe droughts, even in moderate climates such as Switzerland.

Even the U.S. Navy is contemplating abandoning some of its major bases, as sea levels rise faster than ever.

On top, economic troubles start appearing everywhere you look.

​Capital is becoming scarcer. Not just for fancy startups, but for business in general. Part is because governments doled out huge stimulus packages in the wake of COVID-19. Part is because markets tend to become smaller due to the rising geopolitical tensions between the West, Russia, and China.

And don’t forget the costs of restoring our defense capabilities, modernizing our social security systems, and preventing future pandemics.

Oh, and we forgot the costs of climate change and the energy transition.

It’s obvious: We’re in both economic and ecological trouble, in a global context.

We will need to change some of our 20th-century habits for good. And with habits, I don’t mean micro-habits of individuals, but macro-habits of entire societies.

In this article, I propose new investment metrics adapted to the realities of climate change.

• Part 1: We need to accept that climate change will cost us dearly
• Part 2: Our top focus is CO2 avoidance and removal
• Part 3: A good life needs water

Let’s dive right in.

PART 1: CLIMATE CHANGE WILL COST US DEARLY

Mitigation vs. Adaptation

There are two ways to tackle climate change: mitigation and adaptation.

Mitigation Is About Prevention

Mitigation is the proactive part of tackling climate change. For example, it means shifting from fossil to renewable energy long before the last drop of oil is burned. Or it means reducing waste by repairing things instead of throwing them away long before raw materials become scarce.

The best time for climate change mitigation was 30–50 years ago. Unfortunately, the wider public wasn’t susceptible to effectively mitigating the then-remote threat of climate change.

Adaptation Is Now Inevitable

The world kept turning, and climate change unfolded — first slowly, and then faster and faster. It became visible by melting glaciers, frequent droughts, and rising sea levels. Right at your doorstep.

And suddenly governments and people were busy fighting fires instead of preventing fires. Putting out that forest fire in your own country, and sending aid to other countries fighting ever bigger forest fires. Saving your people from floods, and supporting your farmers in droughts.

Mix the Two

Even if it is too late to focus on climate change mitigation alone, focusing only on climate change adaptation would be fatal. If we don’t invest in climate change mitigation, we will fuel the vicious cycle even more, and through it raise the costs for climate change adaptation beyond imaginable.

The Costs Are Enormous

It’s an old saying: Easy choices now, hard life later. Hard choices now, easy life later.

For all my readers who are older than 60 years, this should resonate with you. Your generation chose the easy life 30–50 years ago, and now we are experiencing the hard life. No finger-pointing, we have to live with the decisions you took a couple of generations ago.

Life is hard now because the costs of climate change adaptation are enormous. Consider the infrastructure costs of abandoning U.S. Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, due to rising sea levels. Consider the economic costs of melted glaciers, preventing the agricultural sector of entire countries from being irrigated with natural water. Consider the social costs of entire populations leaving their home countries, simply because it gets too hot to survive at home.

Choose Your Battles

Not even the richest countries will have enough funds to adapt to all the climate change problems.

Because funds are scarce, we need to place “bets” on how climate change will progress: What will we do? What will we not do based on those bets?

That will involve some hard choices: Abandoning a naval base because we bet on disproportionate sea level rises in the North Atlantic. Abandoning your hometown because we bet on extreme droughts in your area as opposed to other regions.

Remember the old saying: Easy choices now, hard life later. Hard choices now, easy life later.

When choosing our battles, we cannot just choose what is best now, we need to anticipate the best solution for the future. Let’s consider the learnings from the military: It takes decades to build bases or develop ships and airplanes, so you need to plan carefully to meet operational demands 20–30 years into the future.

The military is a good example for another reason. It cannot afford the luxury of ideology. It has to operate and fight in the world as it exists, with the resources it has.

Evaluate Your Investments

In my view, there are three high-level core criteria to evaluate an investment: Bang for the buck, a long-term perspective, and a win-win mindset.

Core Criterion 1: Bang for the buck

The times of investing in 10% fuel efficiency improvement projects or disposable bamboo tableware are over. We need to measure every investment against avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested. And we need to make sure that those investments with the best scores are made first — no matter if they are your pet projects or not, and no matter if you like the technology or not.

Maybe it’s better to avoid huge amounts of CO2 emissions in a less-developed country with less efficient technology than going from clean to super-clean in a highly developed country. In this respect, Asia is pivotal to winning the battle against climate change.

Core Criterion 2: Long-term perspective

It’s no longer enough to score a quick win and postpone rather than avoid emissions. We need to think long-term when making decisions for our investments. Rather than having a business case for 3–5 years, focus on a business case where the payoffs will be reaped by your children and grandchildren.

Core Criterion 3: Win-win mindset

Capitalism produced winners and losers. “Winning” meant becoming rich faster than others. The “others” were colonies, the communists, and… our planet.

That will have to change. If we screw it up in some place, the effects will be felt in the global climate. If someone loses, we will all lose in the end.

PART 2: CO2 IS OUR TOP PRIORITY

Now it’s time to drill down. Your investment opportunities satisfy the three core criteria described above. Let’s dive into more detailed core metrics.

Core Metric 1: Avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested

We need to measure every investment against avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested.

There is a clear primary target: Coal.Coal is a relict from the industrialization of the 19th century, one of the most polluting fuels, and still widely used all around the world. Strangely enough, coal is one of the core fuels to produce electricity, even though electrification is often heralded as the solution to climate change. I agree that electrification will solve a large part of our problems if done right — but not if we use coal to produce electricity.

There aren’t any silver bullets in climate change engineering, so let’s not promote one single solution to fight climate change; we will need many different solutions for all our problems.

The secondary target: Oil and gas. The fossil energy economy is a relict of the 20th century, and it needs to go quickly if we want to reach zero emissions. Whether fossil fuels are replaced by renewable energy sources or by avoiding some of the consumption at all doesn’t matter — remember that it’s the avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested that is relevant.

It’s that easy. Removing coal, oil, and gas from the global economy will do the trick.

It’s not that easy, of course. Think of all the people around the world earning a living from those industries. Not being able to propose to your sweetheart because you can’t afford the wedding after your coal mine job is gone might be a good reason why you’re not supportive of sunsetting the coal industry for good.

Core Metric 2: Time-to-implementation

Investments with the best scores regarding avoided or removed tons of CO2 per dollar invested need to be made first.

This might mean that we start with proven, boring technologies rather than with new, fancy technologies. Because we are running out of time to combat climate change, having a good solution scaling quickly is much better than having an awesome solution that takes two decades to develop and another two decades to scale.

Hydroelectric dams, photovoltaics and wind farms should go first; fusion reactors and hydrogen-powered aircraft should go second.

Just because we are running out of time doesn’t mean we shouldn’t research new technologies. But we need to focus on projects with a favorable time-to-implementation score — which will buy us time until the new technologies become effective at scale and affordable.

There is another thing that can buy us time: CO2 removal. No matter if we use large-scale reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, or direct air capture, removing CO2 from the atmosphere will slow down climate change and buy us time to fully transition from coal, oil, and gas towards renewable energy.

Just like with CO2 avoidance, think like an investor when looking at CO2 removal projects. Removing one ton of CO2 through soil carbon sequestration is still 5–10 times cheaper than removing one ton of CO2 through direct air capture.​

Core Metric 3: Energy input-to-output

New technologies are exciting, deserve the benefit of the doubt, and should be allowed to fail. That’s how agencies like DARPA work to generate breakthrough innovations like the internet, self-healing fabric, and others.

The difference between military innovations created by DARPA and energy innovations is that the military usually doesn’t care too much about energy consumption. Effects-on-target and time-on-target decide between victory and defeat, not energy efficiency.

To achieve net zero, new energy technologies shouldn’t consume more energy than we get out of them. For example, fusion reactors still need more energy input to spark the fusion than they produce energy output. Much of the hydrogen is still produced with electricity that was generated from fossil fuels. Direct air capture consumes much more energy than reforestation.

Energy input-to-output is a variable metric. Technologies tend to become more energy-efficient over time, so assessing a technology’s energy efficiency over the past few years might provide informative insights into its scaling readiness and potential.

PART 3: A GOOD LIFE NEEDS WATER

Even with the most efficient CO2 removal and avoidance technologies, you will thirst and starve to death without water.

Water Is Underpriced

Even though billions of people still don’t have access to clean water, water is heavily underpriced in the rich world. No research is needed here, it’s enough to look at toilets: in many rich countries, they are flushed with drinking-quality fresh water. That’s only possible when water is underpriced.

​Just as I invested in solar energy some ten years back and was laughed at, I am now investing in rainwater harvesting to flush our toilets and irrigate our garden.​

Whilst the financials of this investment do not look favorable with today’s water prices in Switzerland, I am convinced that water prices will explode over the next decade. Going back to my solar energy investment ten years ago, I now earn 4 digits per year from selling my excess electricity to the local utility.

When looking at investments in climate change technology, it might pay off to invest before resource prices explode.

Water Is Scarce

Irrespective of the price, freshwater is scarce. Farmers have started realizing this, too, and are experimenting with techniques such as not using fertilizer at all, using compost and humus extensively, or planting trees in their vegetable fields to save scarce water.

It’s common knowledge that farmers don’t take any experiments for the fun of it. Farmers are a breed of down-to-earth people, and they change when a changing climate shows them that there is no other way to succeed but to change with the climate.

Despite all the technology out there, farmers still work with and in nature. They serve as bell-weathers for climate change, as they are much more dependent on the climate and nature than other professions.

When looking at investments in climate change technology, it might make sense to ask a farmer for advice before making an investment decision.

Water Becomes The Top Priority Very Quickly

No water, no life. Humans survive without eating for weeks, but they can’t survive even for days without drinking.

So if water is missing, it becomes the top priority very quickly. Missing water can not just spark wildfires, it can also spark large-scale migration. Similarly, too much water from rising sea levels can also spark large-scale migration.

Therefore, it’s in society’s best interest that nobody has too much or too little water.

CONCLUSION: WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Let’s finish with three core things to keep in mind when investing in a warmer world — no matter if you’re a homeowner, an angel investor, or an institutional investor:

• Support policies that prioritize CO2/$ spent
• Invest in proven green tech, not just hyped innovations
• Conserve water, it’s the next big climate currency

​

About Me

Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon—it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.

As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and experience on entrepreneurship and resilience in The Resilient Entrepreneur, my weekly newsletter.

When I'm not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.

Like this newsletter? Please share it with your friends!​

​

​

​​​

​Unsubscribe · Preferences​