Maarten van Beek, a senior executive at ING, has written a very good book about people, leadership, HR, work and organizations. The book contains 145 well-written, well-researched columns with his thoughts about the peculiarities of modern organizations. The book reads like one long, necessary conversation about what it means to show up as a human being in organizations that have trained us to show up as anything but. Moreover, I like the personal core running through them. Van Beek is not lecturing from a distance. He is turning over the same stones we all live under, and inquiring what we’ve learned by pretending not to see them.
Although the range of topics is wide – from the poor quality of job descriptions to the terror of Christmas sweaters and from the importance of self-knowledge to why bonuses don’t improve performance – I see two common themes running through them. But first about the sweaters: “The Christmas sweater was once subversive. A wink at bad taste. A quiet rebellion against corporate seriousness. Now it appears in
Outlook invites with the authority of a quarterly results call.” Ugh.
The first thread through the book is a call to see and treat each other as real human beings. Stop treating colleagues as KPIs and dashboards. Stop the rituals that hollow people out—the nods in meetings, the PowerPoints, the off-sites designed to feel meaningful, the jargon that distances us from each other. Presence sould gain prevalence again over efficiency.
Van Beek understands that people feel this emptiness. And to survive in a large organisation, they learn to harden themselves against it. The price they pay is a bit of cynicism
The second thread is about the necessity of taking time and paying attention. Too often busyness is masquerading as importance. Too many apps, too much motion, the paralysis of trying to hold everything at once. And here Van Beek makes a sharp observation: a leader who is always busy is doing something wrong.The apps and notifications fragment their capacity to think. You cannot do your best work in pieces. You cannot lead if you’re not actually present. And yet the system rewards the appearance of constant activity.
Van Beek sugggests to treat time not as a resource to optimize, but as a precondition for depth. He describes sitting for days on the Trans-Siberian Express, watching the birch trees pass, not doing anything. Not FOMO, but JOMO: the Joy of Missing Out. Boredom isn’t wasted time. It’s where creativity might emerge.
A telling example of a column is Van Beek’s statement that the real work happens at the coffee machine, not in meetings. He calls it a small place of meaning. His way of writing is that he backs up this observation by relevant studies, showing that spontaneous encounters at work encourage collaboration and innovation. MIT’s “smart badge” research found that the most productive teams are those with the most informal conversations. Not in meetings. At the coffee machine. Even Google, for all its data-driven design, places coffee points and snack bars strategically to maximize chance encounters. They call it “serendipity design”: the art of engineering unplanned brilliance. “So perhaps we should stop treating the coffee machine as a luxury perk and start honouring it as what it truly is: the office confessional. The therapist that runs on beans. The micro-arena where culture is made and remade in quiet moments.”
A final observation is that Van Beek underlines the importance of listening. He identifies listening as the least developed competence in modern organizations. The higher you go, the worse it gets—because broadcasting feels safer than receiving. To speak is to hold power, to listen is to give it up, at least for a moment. But that is exactly backwards: real influence comes from the capacity to understand what someone else sees, to let it move you, to let it change your thinking. Leaders who listen are the ones who actually move things.
This is solid work. Van Beek observes closely, grounds his observations in evidence where it matters, and asks the right questions without pretending to have all the answers. It’s the kind of writing that makes people uncomfortable in exactly the way they need to be, often with a wry smile, hopefully become more clear-eyed about what we’ve accepted and what it costs us.
Maarten van Beek. Thoughts on people, labour and organisations. SB Uitgevers, 2026