Ohmiq’s new CEO, Frederique Pirenne, hails from Belgium and has spent most of his career in international roles in large organizations, as well as marketing consultant in smaller start-ups. Besides that, he has both coached and played for a national sports team. We caught up with him and asked him a few questions about his approach to running a company like Ohmiq.

What's the most important thing for potential employees to know about Frederique Pirenne. Who are you?

Frederique Pirenne: First, I consider myself to be quite approachable, which I need to be because we are such a small organization. Regardless of the organization's size, I also think it's important to spend time with everybody and move through different layers of the organization. I believe this is an important way to ensure transparency in the organization. I’ve also been influenced by my years in Scandinavia, where there is a lot of respect between individuals as human beings regardless of their status. I think it’s a humane approach to life, and I’ve done my best to integrate that into my management style.  

Besides setting an example, how else do you make transparency part of the corporate culture?

FP: One thing I do is have company huddles where I bring everybody into one room to provide clarity on where we are, what is happening and the priorities for the next month. I will even tell everyone how much money we’re burning through.

Providing that clarity about the direction we’re headed helps people better understand how they can contribute in their positions.

How do you get people listening and talking not just to you but to each other?

FP: I try to get that going in the huddles, but also always encourage everyone to bring their issues forward and discuss them with their colleagues. People are doing that more and more all the time.

By the way, the reason I think that it’s important for everyone to be able to talk to everyone else is not just to create a friendly atmosphere. The reason I think it’s important is that it increases efficiency, encourages collaboration, and makes good ideas even better. According to me, true innovation comes from the crossroad of different views.

What are some lessons you learned from your coaching experience that you would apply here at OhmIQ?

FP: Number one, we need to build the common objectives that we can strive for as a team, while also thoroughly understanding that every player can be motivated by very different things. That is the only way we can create a high-performing team.

Number two, when I played on and coached the men's national team in my sport, we always talked about three levels: Effectiveness, efficiency, and excellence. 

Effectiveness is all about, “Did we win the game? Yes or no?” At OhmIQ, this means did we deliver what we promised our client? Yes or no? That's the first question. If we don't manage to do that, then nothing else matters.However, when we do manage to do that, whether it is to win the game or deliver for the client, we still have to question ourselves.

So winning isn’t enough? You must do more than that, right?

Yes. We must win efficiently if we want to keep winning.

Everyone knows you have to question yourself when you lose, right? What went wrong! But I think we have to question ourselves even if we win. We can ask ourselves how much effort we are putting into these wins. Are we hurting ourselves even when we win?

It’s not questioning just for the sake of questioning, of course. Then the organization would just keep going in circles, which we don’t do. However, we do need to constantly question ourselves and each other about how to make the overall process more efficient so that the effort to win doesn’t take as much out of us. That’s because there is always another game to get ready for. Or another client’s project to deliver.

So yes, if you don’t win, nothing else matters. But if the effort to win makes everyone burn out, then that one victory doesn’t matter, either, because it actually hurts you in the long run. So questioning leads to more efficiency, and more efficiency leads to more sustainable effort – and, hopefully, a very long winning streak.

Creating the transparency, openness, and approachability that I just talked about encourages this kind of constant, respectful, and important questioning.

That takes care of effectiveness and efficiency. What does excellence mean to you?

In general, I think excellence is a term that's overused and underdefined. For me, excellence is basically about how you can keep efficiency high enough to keep winning game after game, project after project. A couple of weeks, half a season, a whole season, an entire financial year? Year after year?

Especially also how long you can keep that efficiency going knowing the situation will always change. You’ll get new people in your organization, or others leave, or so many factors around your team you can’t control. If the team is agile and synced enough to keep up efficiency despite all those constant changes, you truly have an excellent organization.

We think we have a big future ahead, and it will develop over many years, not overnight. To do what we want to do over the long term, we have to keep winning over the long term. So, we have to question ourselves and be efficient to achieve excellence.

Any final thoughts?

When you can deliver efficiently for a long time, then you're truly an excellent organization. But it all still starts with the basics: Are we winning the game? Are we delivering for our clients? Yes, or no? Do we also know exactly what that delivery needs to be? Do we truly deliver up their needs? But that’s an entirely different topic that we’ll cover another time.