About 15 years ago, I had the great fortune to work for an American Internet software company in Germany. An exciting time. My direct superior was a highly successful German sales executive, whose unique personal style – spiced with hard work, politically incorrect humour and too many cigarettes – taught me an awful lot. Including these 2 key mantras:
“Your experience and your network are all that matters. Everything else you can learn”
“Our real product is not the software, not the features, not the project – but trust”
Having seen way too many misguided digital strategies and failed web/intranet projects in the 5 years before, I started my own business. I felt that there had to be a better way. Not better software, not yet another agency, but a radically different way to increase the sum total of knowledge – and the benefits of such know-how – for customers and vendors alike.
When I launched J. Boye almost 10 years ago, we built the business on trying to leverage experience and networking in such a way that customers felt they were in safe hands – that they could trust us. With their commercial secrets, their personal careers and even their innermost doubts.
At the beginning of 2013 we’ve reached 500+ members in the J. Boye Groups, more than 2,000+ participants at the J. Boye Conferences held in Europe and America, we've carried out high-level consultancy work for large, complex global organisations, and – last but not least – somehow managed to build a talented team of people who are both inspiring and fun to work with.
The J. Boye focus remains digital. However, while being experts in the field of Content Management Systems (and other digital tools-for-the-job) remains the core focus for the J. Boye organisation as a whole, experience has taught me that finding broader-perspective ways to help our customers turn practical, technical experience into concrete commercial advantage is increasingly becoming the real agenda. Knowledge only has value when it is actually applied.