Jan Bakker

Embrace change is the most important life principle for Jan Bakker. Background and age are unimportant when you sincerely want to make a change. The most important motivator for Jan Bakker is taking this message to the established order, sceptics. The only security is change. Change is also a guideline in his life. After school he started in accounting, checnged this after 5 years and went into life-insurance. Another 8 years further he became an entrepreneur, which accumulated in the depth of the recession in 1982 with one of life's important lessons: bankruptcy. He continued as a loner, found the establishment again and started making a living as a consultant to large medical practises. Biggest change at that time was the introduction of the PC and its application in the writing based corperate environmental culture. The PC led to many solutions in environments that were not accustomed to change. This is where he brought the motto EmbraceChange also. In 1997 he got involved in the Internet. First as a CFO and later as a CPO he played an important role in facilitating the exponential growth of the company from 25 to 125 employees in a short period of time. As a staff member he was in charge of software development when they were talking about embracing XP as a methodology or process. Jan also embraced XP as a very productive way to deliver high quality software on-time, on-budget. Reorganisational urges from a new management set him onto his next big change: Fullfilling the ideals of Agile Principles in his own company Brains4All.