Jurgen Appelo is a writer, speaker, developer, entrepreneur, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, and… Dutch guy.

After studying Software Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, and earning his Master’s degree in 1994, Jurgen Appelo has busied himself starting up and leading a variety of Dutch businesses, always in the position of team leader, manager or executive.

Jurgen’s current occupation is Business Unit Manager at Sociotoco, and Chief Information Officer at ISM eCompany.  With 200 employees it is one of the leading e-commerce solution providers in The Netherlands. As a manager, Jurgen has experience in leading a horde of 100 software developers, development managers, project managers, business consultants, quality managers, service managers and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally.

At this time Jurgen has his full focus on the development of a new business unit within the mother company, which deals exclusively with social media and social CRM. His current responsibilities make him an entrepreneur-within-a-company, with a small but dedicated team of professional software developers.

Jurgen is primarily interested in software engineering, quality improvement and complexity theory, from a manager’s perspective. As a writer he has published a number of papers and articles in several magazines, including Dr. Dobb’s, Software Quality Professional, Methods & Tools, The Software Practitioner, StickyMinds, Software Development Network, Computable and Automatisering Gids.

He is also a speaker, being regularly invited to talk at seminars and conferences about agile software development, project management, process improvement, and development management. He maintains a blog at www.noop.nl, and he is writing a book with the working title “Management 3.0”, which has its own community at www.management30.com

However, sometimes he puts all writing, speaking and managing aside to do some intensive programming himself, or to spend time on his ever-growing collection of science fiction and fantasy literature, which he stacks in a self-designed book case, which is 4 meters high.

Jurgen lives in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) – and sometimes in Brussels (Belgium) – with his partner Raoul. He has two kids, and an imaginary hamster called George.