The First Day Was Not What I Expected

On my first day at Xebia, I expected clarity.

What I found was something far more interesting…

And that’s exactly why it mattered.

There’s a certain story we tell ourselves about first days.

You walk in.

You listen.

You absorb.

You nod politely.

You wait before forming opinions.

You wait before speaking.

You wait before seeing clearly.

But sometimes…

Clarity doesn’t wait.

What surprised me most

On my first day, I didn’t hear certainty.

I heard something far more rare.

I heard leaders say:

“We don’t have the answers yet.”

Not polished.

Not packaged.

Not wrapped in corporate certainty.

Just… real.

And in a world where most organizations try to sell confidence before they’ve earned clarity…

That stopped me.

Because beneath the presentations, the values, the strategy slides…

there was something else moving.

A tension.

The tension we don’t talk about

We are entering a world where:

🖤 20 people might become 3

🖤 Months of work might become days

🖤 Entire business models might quietly dissolve

And yet…

We still talk about:

💚 quality

💚 people

💚 value

💚 growth

As if those words still mean what they used to.

But they don’t.

Most organizations are still trying to optimize the past.

And I could feel it in the room.

Not fear.

Not resistance.

Something deeper.

🔥 a collective awareness that the rules are shifting faster than our language can keep up

Leadership in a world without stable ground

There was a moment that stayed with me.

A question about pricing.

If something that used to take two years now takes two months…

What do you charge?

Do you charge for time?

For effort?

For outcome?

For impact?

And underneath that question was a much bigger one:

❤️‍🔥 What is value… when creation becomes almost instant?

We don’t have clean answers to that yet.

And pretending we do would be easier.

But it would also be dishonest.

The contradiction leaders must learn to hold

I heard:

“People first.”

And also:

“We may need fewer people.”

I heard:

“Quality without compromise.”

And also:

“We must move faster than ever.”

I heard:

“Be the authority.”

And also:

“We are still figuring it out.”

At first glance, these feel like contradictions.

But they’re not.

They are the new reality of leadership.

And the leaders who will struggle most in this next chapter…

Are the ones who cannot hold two truths at once.

🐉 Dragon Wisdom: The Fire Is Not the Enemy

There is a moment in every dragon’s life where the fire becomes too strong to ignore.

You can try to contain it.

You can pretend it isn’t there.

You can fear what it might burn.

Or…

You can learn to breathe with it.

Not to destroy.

But to transform.

This moment we are in right now, with AI, with shifting value, with redefining work

This is not a crisis to survive.

It is fire to learn from.

A pattern I’ve learned to trust

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this.

Many years ago, I was working in California when the first cracks of the dot-com bubble appeared. I moved to Switzerland before the full impact hit Europe, and only later realized how much that timing mattered.

It didn’t feel strategic at the time.

It felt… instinctive.

Looking back, I don’t think I was simply “in the right place at the right time.”

I think I was responding to something shifting beneath the surface… before it fully revealed itself.

I’ve noticed something else, too.

These shifts in my life don’t arrive gently.

They often follow endings I didn’t choose.

And now…

That same signal is there again.

What I am taking with me

Not certainty.

Not conclusions.

But better questions:

🐉 What does “people first” mean when roles are evolving faster than skills?

🐉 What does “quality” mean when speed is no longer the constraint?

🐉 What does “authority” mean in a world where knowledge is no longer scarce?

And maybe the most important one:

🐲 How do we lead… when we are still becoming?

A different kind of beginning

I didn’t leave my first day feeling settled.

I left feeling…

Awake.

Aware that this next chapter of leadership will not be about having the right answers.

It will be about:

🔥 asking sharper questions

🔥 holding deeper tensions

🔥 and staying human in a world that is accelerating beyond comfort

And honestly?

That excites me.

Because leadership was never meant to be comfortable.

It was meant to be conscious.

If this is the beginning…

I’m curious to see what we become when we stop pretending we already know. 🐉🔥