Introduction to Letters To Human Doings

For the past decades, the emphasis of many businesses has been on growing. The mantra seems to be: “Grow More, More, More!”. But continuous growing requires a tremendous amount of of energy. Energy that must be replenished. Replenished by flourishing. Growing cannot be without flourishing. You can experience this in nature and in your business. That is why we are now launching Letters To Human Doings. To inspire businesses to grow more sustainably by incorporating flourishing along the way. We would love to make purposeful contributions easy. With Letters To Human Doings.

Letters To Human Doings

Letters To Human Doings are, well, exactly what it says. Letters to humans beings that wish to contribute by acting. “Human Doings”. We aim to publish inspiring, educative, practical and sometimes provocative letters to entrepreneurs and business leaders.

We have defined seven themes for Letters To Human Doings:

• holistic thinking. Our world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected. Stand-alone solutions are hardly possible anymore and certainly not beneficial. A broader perspective is needed.
• compassion. People are wired for compassion and so are employees of businesses. Compassion is needed on individual level and business level as organisations need to serve society more in collaboration with many shareholders.
• responsibility. Everyone has the capacity to develop a positive and responsible attitude, regardless of circumstances. Responsibility for inner leadership is the foundation for outer change.
• creativity. Our reality is changing. “What got you here, will not get you there”. We have to find creative solutions.
• collectiveness. The issues our world faces are beyond individual contributions and solutions. Diversity may be the key to practical solutions in our open world. We need to work together and find solutions, not despite diversity but thanks to diversity.
• education of mind and heart. Past education is in many cases obsolete today. We need to continuously train ourselves on all levels: knowledge, inner leadership and social qualities.
• entrepreneurship. The art of having great initiatives and the mastery of making things happen. Entrepreneurship is a means to change, not a goal. But nonetheless, essential.

The first six themes we have taken from the excellent book “Business as an instrument for societal change” by Sander Tideman. We have taken the freedom to add “entrepreneurship”. We firmly believe that entrepreneurship is key to trigger initiatives that lead to change and transformation. Themes may change along the way.

You can view these themes from a societal perspective and a business perspective. Although we focus on businesses, we believe that businesses are embedded in our society. Letters To Human Doings can cover both perspectives, as long as it is interesting for entrepreneurs and business leaders. So who is behind this idea and why?

Grow And Flourish Foundation

The Grow And Flourish Foundation is a not-for-profit venture initiated by Dutch entrepreneurs: Floris Koumans, Patrick van Aalst and Pieter van Osch. The foundation is looking to initiate and spread impact by making it easy for organisations to adopt the Grow and Flourish” approach. From our own experience, we have noticed that growing our own business requires an enormous amount of energy. We also discovered that focus on only growing is not sustainable and even destructive. Your organisation will run out of energy. We found that combining growing with flourishing is the key to sustainable success.

The foundation aims to achieve this by:

• Letters To Human Doings. Memorable letters that make entrepreneurs and business leaders think and take action.
• purposeful projects for businesses. We help business to be purposeful by running meaningful projects. Small projects yet impactful. Visible and impact driven, in order to promote the flourishing within a business. Currently, the foundation runs a project that helps eliminating plastic waste by converting them into useful tools.

We want to make it easy for businesses to contribute. How can you contribute if you wish?

How you can contribute

At the moment, we offer you two options to contribute:

option 1: help us to achieve our goals

If you experience any Letters To Human Doings as valuable, you can help to:

• share the article with as many relevant friends that you feel can benefit from the article
• buy us half a cup of coffee to keep up the good work. As half a cup of coffee may be rather difficult to handle, you can pay its equivalent of € 2 by sending us a text message. We are now working on getting this option alive. In the mean time, you can clap as many times as you want while we drink our own coffee.

If you wish to share from abundance, expertise and wisdom, please do not hesitate to submit a letter to human doings.

option 2: contribute to the Letters To Human Doings

Of course, you can contribute and offer your letter for publication. That would be splendid! We invite every thought leader and experience expert to contribute. The more diverse, the better. Your contribution fits excellently if:

• it is written in English
• it consists of between 500 and 1,000 words
• it is written with entrepreneurs and business leaders in mind
• it inspires, educates or triggers action. Think of unique point of views, tools, ‘how to’ articles, action plans.
• send in your letter to Pieter van Osch

As you may understand, these two options are complementary. You can select either one or both.

We hope that Letters To Human Doings inspire entrepreneurs and business leaders to take action. We kindly invite everyone to join and contribute.