I was born on July 13, 1965 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We moved to the Antilles when I was two years old, where my parents Jan and Emy, sisters Marjolein and Pascale and me spent 7 great years in sunny Aruba. A two year stay in Canada followed, first in the village of St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls on the US border and later in french speaking Montreal, state of Quebec, before returning to The Netherlands.

This multilingual youth engraved in me a passion for language, and as I was raised bi-lingual, Dutch and English are both mother-tongues. The other languages mentioned below, I speak more or less fluently - except Spanish on which I'm making steady progress (read my first Spanish novels recently!). I'm always improving my language skills through foreign literature, magazines and short-wave radio listening. Proficient in:

• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Spanish

My wife Esther and daughter Zoë are at the center of my universe. On this photo Zoë is bonding with her niece Jantien: friends forever ('Tien! Tien!'). For my ancestor and family tree on my mother Emy Bajetto's side, check out her sister Betsy and husband Jos' magnificent site on our genealogy.

A non-relenting thirst for professional and intellectual development demonstrates itself in the spare time spent with business literature and websites. Areas of special interest are user centric eBusiness building, Internet sociology, behavioral sciences related to marketing, business transformation and redesign, corporate creativity and innovation, reshaping of the media and entertainment industry as well as the switch from products and services to an economy focussed on using storytelling to deliver holistic experiences.

• On March 22, 2001, I was key note speaker -after the opening by state secretary R. van der Ploeg- at the Cumulus conference. Cumulus is a bi-yearly knowledge exchange of European educational institutes in the area of industrial, product and media design. It was hosted this year by the Willem de Kooning Academy on the programme of Rotterdam Cultural Capital 2001. My lecture was titled 'How design impacts e-business results, playing a key role in the total online user experience'. The lecture discusses the essential role design playes in driving e-business results. It shows how the all-ecompassing concept of user experience, of which design is a major component, makes or breaks the effectiveness of an online production from a corporate point of view. From the combination of my past experience as director of Grey's creative interactive agency with my current business of multinational consulting at McKinsey & Co. I explored the connections between design, usability, online behaviour, and financial business impact.
• On March 29, 2001, I was speaker in Budapest for the assembly of McKinsey & Co.'s eBusiness Building consultants on approaches to enhance eBusiness results through involvement of end users in early stages of the strategic consulting discipline, i.e. the idea generation, business case and seed to launch phases. To this end tools and methods were introduced into the consultants repertoire such as idea visualization, promise development, user case scenario design, prototyping and piloting of features based on users inexplicit needs, deducted from behavioral observations and target group immersion.

• ISOC : Member since 1997 of the Internet Society, Netherlands chapter.
• Nieuw Akademia : Day-one participant in the emerging initiative Nieuw Akademia, where Dutch artists, scientists and business minds meet -in real life monasteries and online environments- to explore and remove the boundaries of their disciplines. Site to be launched spring 2001.

As for sports, I train my mountain climbing skills weekly with my climbing buddies -mostly indoor in our flat country- and go windsurfing spring through fall when I get the chance. In winter I jog and cycle.

I also love books and read a lot! Business as well as fiction, literature as well as comic books. For my recent fav's in business literature check my section BOOK SPEAK. My stars in fiction are the UK's Graham Greene painting an incomparable picture in words of 20th century man's anxiety, Ben Elton with his socio-political satire, as well as intense young Americans Jay McInerney, Paul Auster and not so young and more absurdist Kurt Vonnegut. Add my recent surrealist discovery, Italian poet turned novelist Alessandro Baricco, dreamweaver Salman Rushdie, beguiled but majestic Jerzy Kosinski, Paris based SF writer Norman Spinrad and Dutch language classics Couperus and Elsschot and ... we've only just begun (don't even get me started!). Michael Crichton and Clive Barker are my favourite laid-back holiday reads... for the necessary unwinding so to speak.

Other area's of interest include all kinds of communication systems, electronic gadgets and media: from PDA's, MP3 players, and mobile messaging (king-of-simplicity SMS and destined-to-go-under WAP), to music, games and movies (Marx Brothers and Science Fiction fan, as well as Cronenberg, Tarantino, Scott, Scorsese).

Zoë shares her opinions [1,8 Mb] on a boat that suddenly materialized outside of her front window this past winter. Freely translated oneplusyearoldspeak: 'What were they thinking, parking this poor excuse of a sorry vessel in my line of sight, leaving no room for my ducky friends and obscuring my quaint but authentic Dutch windmill panorama?' Support her local lobby group to prevent anyone parking boats on the Amstel river during her waking hours (which vary day by day and night by night ;-( by the way) by dropping Zoë a line. Contributions by yours truly as well as by Esther, Zoë's favorite mom and my favorite -period- can be heard in the background choir. Letland, give us your votes please: mail votes to Esther at esther.zijlmans@e-office.com.