The Most Colorful Peacock

By Marc Jantke

How does the CEO of a respectable IT company end up writing about birds, fairy tales and greek mythology in his very first company blog article?

I will take you to the answer of this question, but we have to start at the beginning.

About feathers and ambitions

entimo is providing software products and professional services to the pharmaceutical industry since its beginning back in 2003. Our products are used in the areas of Statistical Computing, Clinical Data Management and Standards Management by some of the top 10 pharma and many other small to medium sized companies around the world.

How can a company with 50 employees serve the global leaders in their core business processes?

The answer is simple. entimo is a reliable business partner to all customers. Our relations are lasting for decades and are based on a solid foundation of trust. As the saying goes trust is something you earn and not something that is given. entimo is ambitious about constantly improving towards perfection. This applies to our processes, quality, transparency and our own culture. That may be one of the reasons which earned us trust from our employees. Many of them have been with us right from the start, many more joined us during the journey and most of them stayed with us until today. The consistency in our teams, the agility in our minds and the ambitions in our goals seem to have earned us the trust of our customers as well.

And what about the feathers?

We are in the middle of developing the next evolution of our products and it will for sure revolutionize the market. It has the power to change the vision of the pharmaceutical research and development process, away from individual and monolithic software products with clunky interfaces towards a holistic ecosystem that puts the clinical data and the people who work with it in the center.

entimo is looking for additional ways to bring interested parties closer together to involve you into the development of our future. This is where the idea of this blog comes in, with the goal to establish a new communication channel between our company, its customers and any other interested party in the life sciences industry.. The thing with blogs is: they have to be attractive in order to be read.

So if you have never written a blog before and are striving for the creation of a perfect blog in order to attract your readers, you start reading blogs. Then you read blogs about blogging and you end up consuming questionable expertise about how a perfect blog should look like. You learn a lot about golden rules, do's and don'ts and the importance of titles. Finally you stumble across advice on how to find the perfect title for your blog posts and they tell you that the most colorful peacock draws the most attention.

And here we are now in the middle of this article and you followed along because the colorful peacock drew your attention. But there is more to discover.

About the ugly duckling

Catching someone's attention with an attractive title is not enough to make a blog post worthwhile. It should tell you something of interest, inspire you or at least be entertaining. At best, all of the above.

Something inspiring

Now entimo is taking its first steps in the world of blogs. Thinking of a company full of software developers with lots of coding, coffee and pizza, certainly does not strike the mind with the picture of a colorful peacock. You might have rather a flock of pigeons or sparrows in mind.

The analogy that came to my mind, was "The Ugly Duckling", a fairy tale from the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen first published in 1843. It is a heart-warming story about a little bird, raised by a duck but rejected from siblings and other animals because it is such an ugly duckling. After a winter of loneliness and despair, the little ugly duck has grown but still feels miserable and tries to end its life by getting killed by a flock of beautiful swans. To its surprise the swans take the duckling in, as one of them and the bird finally realizes it has been a swan itself all the time. The fairy tale ends with the swan flying away with its new family.

We are the swan

How does this relate to a software company getting familiarized with the approach of writing a blog? One might argue, writing software and writing blogs is technically close by and should be a natural fit. Having done both myself now, I can tell you: It is not. This feels like comparing a bookbinder with a poet. Nonetheless, there is a deeper truth in it, as we at entimo have stories to share with you and those stories come from our professional lives in a software company. So, in the greater sense are we the swan of this story, recognizing at the end that we have been bloggers for a long time, but simply never realized this and thus never lived up to it, sharing the stories which could have been shared long ago.

About phoenix and the ashes

Until this point I have been talking about the most colorful peacock and the ugly duckling and explained how these birds relate to entimo as a company, entering new ways to get engaged more closely with our customers. And if you think, this is enough of questionable analogies between birds and software specialists... there is one more:

We are the phoenix

This bird from the ancient Greek mythology that was told to die in flames and combustion just to be reborn from its own ashes, has made its appearance in all kinds of art over all times.

Shakespeare wrote about it in Henry VIII, as well as J. K. Rowling in Harry Potter. Queen honored the bird in their band logo and Conchita Wurst won the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 with the song "Rise Like a Phoenix". And even modern computer games like Starcraft 2 and DOTA 2 make use of this mythological figure.

The phoenix appears often as symbol of renewal and reinvention. And this applies to entimo just as much. With the switch to agile methodologies a few years ago, we adopted a mindset that constantly strives for renewal and reinvention in order to keep the wheels of improvement turning. The development of our future platform as a natural evolution of our existing products is just another example for this.

The rebirth of the phoenix is associated with an end and a new beginning, giving room for new ideas, making things better than yesterday. This is the path to remain successful in any business and our customers are adopting this philosophy just as we are.

And this is it. When you want to hook people on your blog, find catchy titles, appealing pictures and a worthwhile topic. Fill it with some random facts and the information you really want to share. Of course, all of this has to be polished by a conclusive summary and a call to action.

TL;DR

Our goal for the first entimo blog article is not to teach you a lesson about birds. It is to share some insights about who we are as a company and where we would like to go in the future. And most importantly, how we hope that this blog can help us to take you along on this journey.

If you are interested in reading more about what we are doing here at entimo, besides ornithology, you are invited to drop a comment and make suggestions for any future topics you would like to hear more about.

Less bird-oriented proposals are most welcome.

May the upcurrents carry your safely through these stormy times,

Marc Jantke (CEO)