Self-determination and the limits of freedom

| Esther de Boer
Self-determination, that sounds good. Individuals want to be able to act autonomously. Everyone who has children knows that this desire sets in early. But where does this personal freedom end? “The freedom of the individual ends where the freedom of the other begins,” said the philosopher Immanuel Kant over 200 years ago.
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Marriage is not social security

| Esther de Boer
It is a gruelling war of positions, the discourse on the reform of social security, with trench battles between minority opinions that checkmate. No vision, no great gesture in sight. I suggest that we shake the current paradigms and concentrate on the essence. I plead for “a policy of equally long spears”. Unequal spears would […]
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Constitutional task

| Esther de Boer
I go to the “salarium” when I hire employees. That’s not a typing error and it’s not about tanned skin or trying to get close. It’s about money. To be more precise, wages. The Federal Statistical Office conducts wage structure surveys among 750,000 Swiss employees in order to make these data available to the public […]
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Talents become self-employed

| Esther de Boer
In Switzerland, there are 51 women entrepreneurs for every 100 women in leadership positions. For every 100 men in management, there are only 40 entrepreneurs. Are you irritated by this surplus of self-employed women? Well, for your peace of mind, 39 out of 100 entrepreneurs are women and 61 are men.
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Which Switzerland should it be?

| Esther de Boer
Let’s do a thought experiment together: Imagine you were a completely different person in Switzerland in another life. How would you like Switzerland to be? Which Switzerland would you like to wake up in – overnight? But beware: you are simply placed in a new situation and don’t know beforehand whether you would be privileged, […]
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Diving for pearls

| Esther de Boer
I turned 50 in 2018. The second half of life begins and maybe the Midlife Crisis? In any case, I clearly belong to Generation X, the generation that belongs to the digital immigrants and therefore has to cope with this deficit for a maximum of time in working life. An esteemed colleague of similar age […]
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More courage for diversity

| Esther de Boer
In Switzerland, over a quarter of a million women earn their living as entrepreneurs: as freelancers, as partners in the owner team, as entrepreneurs with employees. They make up 39 percent of all entrepreneurially active people in the country. This impressive proportion of women has grown without specific support and on their own initiative. Many […]
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No room for victims

| Esther de Boer
“Responsibility is when someone holds his head up, when something goes wrong, takes the consequences and then leaves.” Last week, “Blick” quoted Oswald Grübel, former head of UBS and CS. He didn’t know what investment banker and UBS employee Kweku Adoboli was doing, and the bank lost CHF 2.3 billion in 2011. Do you remember? […]
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Football may be a beginning

| Esther de Boer
Once I listened to a dialogue, on the train, in the compartment beside me: “The Netherlands became European Football Champion on Sunday”. – “No! That’s Portugal since 2016.” – “Yes, with the men’s team.” – “And now, the Dutch with the wheelchair club, perhaps?”- “No, with the women’s team.” – “Well, frills.” With the men, […]
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High performance and humanity

| Esther de Boer
What is healthy peak performance? In recent years, some top performers at company tops have committed suicide, one suspects, because their relationship between high performance and their humanity was fatally out of balance. Let’s look at how we can maintain balance and enable healthy peak performance. The image of the scales is central: If the […]
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