The company I was working for, we were so extremely short-term focused and we almost changed strategy every three months, we were literally throwing money out of the window, just to get customers’ market share, and somehow it didn't feel right to me. I didn't have the financial understanding to really put a calculator to it, and then the company also literally almost went bankrupt at the end of the 3 years and so I said, you know somehow this cannot be right, you can't run a business with such a short-term horizon.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Going to INSEAD, I had two clear views in my mind - I wanted to work for a family owned, or a privately held business that offered me a real international career.
Altogether 9 years abroad, we came back to Holland, a family of 5, which was probably the hardest move we ever did, going back to what you thought was home.
I'm still with SHV, almost twenty years, I am on my ninth or tenth job at the moment. I've worked in cash & carry retail, switched to the energy division, liquefied gas, I've been on the board of SHV, and now I am CEO of Nutreco, which is one of the global leaders in animal nutrition.
ON TOPIC: Fossil fuels, energy transition, agriculture, animal nutrition, sustainability
Energy transition is probably one of the 2 or 3 large transitions that we are going through and that we will have to go through.
We really started to drive, I would say, a twofold course towards sustainability: 1) we set the goal to become a fully sustainable, so a fully renewable provider of LPG. And the second leg is to provide other sources of energy, like solar energy.
I've had my fair share of industry conferences, where there's on the one hand a group of companies that really wants to change; there's also a group of companies that are either in denial, or that they cling on to vested interests, or they see no need, or they see no opportunity. And so that brings tension, but I think it also can bring a lot of creativity
“You know, we are about to launch the first totally renewable LPG in the world”
This is why in-person education cannot be replicated in another form
The purpose of our company is feeding the future
Agriculture is responsible for about 25% of all emissions in the world.
The system that we have today is so super-efficient, for any new technology it is really challenging at the start to beat those economies of scale.
We're trying to really work on creating more sustainable solutions for current farming practices and at the same time we are investing and there I dare to say we're at the forefront of our industry. We're investing also in creating feed for lab grown meat.
That is an industry that, in the next 5 to 10 years will start to grow and I think once it starts growing it will grow exponentially.
Where we now provide nutrition to animals, we would then provide nutrition to cells. These cells, they need to eat, and so we provide, what we know about feeding an animal is pretty useful to feed a cell.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
Life is about learning, earning, returning and I didn't want to wait with returning until I stopped earning.
INSEAD for me has been – firstly, it was an amazing year to be together with such a great energy, I don't think I've ever seen the positive energy around me that was there during that year. People were so motivated, people were in for fun, people were in for serious things, creative ideas, the international dynamics. But it also really helped me make a jump in my career. I'm honestly convinced that I wouldn't be where I am today without INSEAD.