A guest post by Barbara Hesse When I first met Angie Weinberger, I had just spent a few months in Switzerland and was on the verge of a crisis of purpose. On the one hand, everything seemed so easy (a misconception when you come from a neighboring country) and friendly. On the other hand, with great effort, I adapted my gruff northern German temperament to Swiss customs rather than staying true to myself. This put me in a pretty bad spot for some time, but after I understood how to get along here in Switzerland, even with my character, things started to go uphill. I also understood how different the clocks go here and what you must pay attention to. […]

In consulting firms, you have to maintain a timesheet in which you document daily how you use your time. This can be great to give you an understanding of where you are focused and where your priorities lie. Similarly, you can increase the value of this exercise by maintaining a daily diary in which you document your accomplished tasks (Have-Done-Diary). I recommend a notebook and handwriting for this exercise.

As a networker for most of the past 30 years, I have seen LinkedIn (and related platforms) go through ups and downs. While I did not like LinkedIn in the early days of my business, it became the best replacement for the business card collection and Rolodex I would have used in the past (and now I sound like my grandmother). While I don’t make phone calls anymore, and nobody seems to call anyone spontaneously these days, I noticed a shift in my excitement about being on LinkedIn. It was mainly an algorithm change, but most of the content no longer excites me. I want to determine whether we can build better relationships on LinkedIn than annoying salespeople or AI-driven […]

As I mentioned in this post during the early days of the pandemic my mother could not find yeast. Her village in Southern Germany had a yeast shortage. We don’t have a shortage of anything here in Zurich, neither toilet paper, nor yeast, even though demand for both was higher than in “normal” times. My mother likes to bake in normal times but I felt she needed to bake even more in these times.

I started Global People Transitions in 2010 as a blog, and after I left my well-paid job in 2012, I had a rollercoaster of experiences as a founder, author, wife, daughter, and friend. The “Seven Principles of Intercultural Effectiveness” helped me get through many of these personal stories, and I thought it was time to revisit the original “classics” of my earlier writing. Yesterday, I revisited principle 5: I trust even if I had been hurt before. Many years ago, I fell in love while traveling to India, and this man borrowed a lot of money from me to start a new shop. I truly believed in his business and in him. I had considered moving there and marrying him […]