A Stranger in a Strange Land: How to be a physicist outside academia and still have Fun

Description
This seminar is organized within the framework of WATER project. http://www.water.imm.cnr.it Abstract This is a story about how to make successful transition from being deeply emerged in leading-edge Physics and Research to the very Non-Academic Corporate Life and still keep your sanity and having lots of Fun (while you earn a lot more than you will ever do in academia). I left Academia beginning of 1999 to join a mobile start-up company in The Netherlands. Man what a culture shock! and boy what fun it was! and still is!. Though, more often  than not, and certainly in the beginning, I felt like a stranger in a strange land where 98% of my colleagues had little if any analytical and numerical abilities and was a lot slower in seeing trends that appeared so obvious to me. However, it is also a story about humility and realizing that being very quick in analysing data and trends is only a small part of the important tool set to make a career Outside Academia (and possible inside as well when it comes to that). Over my 15 years on The Outside, I have learned that the importance of having Fun in a Serious Way and having an Insatiable Curiosity about how life works. This is a story about how to combine Real Life real dirty problems with a Physicist keen observant mind and analytical capabilities and to impress the socks out of your managers and managers manager (i.e., the CxOs). As I am way too young to only talk about myself, I will address some of the challenges the telecommunications industry are facing together with the cool & exiting stuff we do on social networks, techno-economics, billion dollar valuations, technology diffusion, mining the customer.