Dear all,

03Jan… a return to work… I don’t know if this is because of the new year or what, but my mind today felt as if there has been a massive change, I don’t know why all looked different at work, even when the only difference between “this transition from 2021 to 2022 weekend” has been only the fact that I did not work on Friday… I am not complaining, I am just surprised at this feeling.

I sent today a message to my team members with a new year resolution: I proposed that we should be “more awesome” than the year before; and said that being “more awesome” means: “do a very nice job while having fun”. I am still surprised at the replies I got, lots of thank you messages for recognizing that “fun” is “part of the deal” in our team, something we will strive for as much as we will strive for doing a good job. These replies came from team members in North Macedonia, Hungary, Portugal, Israel, France, Poland… Some of them, I have never talked to or seen over a screen -let alone in person-, I don’t know how old they are, or anything else other than what I can imagine by reading the emails they sent and how they deal with the work, what they do when issues come up, whether they are responsive or not, and things like that. But all of them today appreciated the idea of having fun as we work…

And you know what? I think the email with only three lines that I sent this morning to them, will probably be the most important email I would ever send to them in 2022… because somehow “set the tone” for the year I want to have, but as the Pep Guardiola (the football player and former coach of the Barcelona Football Club) once said: “everyone of us can try to be the best, but without the others, it is impossible.

So, here we are, striving to be “more awesome” together.

Setting the tone loves,

Cris