Hi – and welcome to GBLCG.com!

I am pleased to see you here…

My name is Raymond den Otter and I am GBLCG.com’s main Administrator. I live in New Zealand, am married to a fantastic woman – who also happens to be my business partner - and am blessed with three children who are growing up too quickly.

If you’d ask me ‘what I do’ in a few phrases they would include Scenario Planning and Future Studies. In short, and very much in a nutshell: I earn a living by researching, exploring and analysing how professionals and their organisations can take firmer control over their own destinies.

Since 1995 I worked with private and public sector organisations, big and small, matured and start-ups. I worked alongside forth-thinking and visionary entrepreneurs, business leaders, ground-breaking mavericks and a few geniuses who made millions simply by being obstinate and simply different than anyone else.

The names of some of these individuals may have featured in the media today. You may know the names of many of them.

I now know, after all these years of working with professionals who sank to their deepest levels of despair as well as collaborating with those who rose – and often kept on rising – to what initially seemed unfathomable professional highs, that it takes heart, spirit and mind to crafting futures.

After almost two decades of intensive travel, countless hours spent on backseats of taxis, airport lounges, hotel rooms and many, many presentations further I can proudly say that I have been able to leave tracks at some of the world’s best known Fortune 500 companies.

I blame my Dutch heritage on not being subtle. There’s little room for sacrilege in my work and, often, very little can be considered fact. To make real change, not just marginal improvements, anything must be considered moveable, changeable and in constant state of flux.

There’s an art to keeping discussions on-point, to debate intelligently – especially when controversial topics must land on executive tables. One needs courage not just to tackle controversy but to raise it in the first place. If you want to get to ‘right’ answers you must ask ‘right’ questions first – even when they are considered out-of-bounds. Sometimes there’s more value in questions than in answers.

What I learnt from the people I worked with is that if you want to make your mark on this world – in whatever way – you must be able to make that mark yourself, no matter who or what you are. Making such a mark goes beyond merely copying and pasting what others think and do. Making such a mark is about doing something different – and making that ‘doing’ meaningful to others eventually.

I firmly believe, without compromise, that all of us possess an ability to make a difference of some kind. Some of the differences we already make may never appear on anyone’s radar; may never lead us to feature on a magazine’s cover or see us nominated for a prestigious award. But differences we make, each and every day. We should embrace that – resoundingly so if, and only if, these changes are aimed to better our world.

To make these differences visible, tangible and ‘real’ we need channels to make them known to others. To gather others around us who can help us sharpen our axes, refocus our thinking and to stay in tune with what we truly, really want to achieve personally.

Herein lay the seeds for GBLCG.com.

• The Idea For GBLCG.com Innovation

-