Ulrike is a social entrepreneur, connector, speaker and author whose work spans sports, business, digital culture, social innovation, and grassroots transformation. She studied business management at the University of Mannheim before embarking on a multifaceted career that moves fluidly across systems — corporate and informal, Western and Global South — translating complexity into lived, human experience. Rather than following a linear professional path, she has built a body of work rooted in presence, trust, and long-term relationships, working with companies, institutions, communities, and individuals across continents.
This talk is an argument for direction over prescription. I want to start with a very simple question. Think about a child who walked into your school this year. Five years old, maybe six. Can you picture someone specific? Good. Hold that. That child will finish school in 2037 or 2038. In a world we […]
I broke my shoulder hours after I had returned to Janwaar. Not dramatically. The kind of accident that happens on these roads at night. And then you stand there for a moment working out what has just changed. By the time I understood what had happened, someone had already noticed. That is the thing about […]
A Non-Human Way to the Gate Today marked my first international trip with real visa stakes — Germany to India — and something quietly strange happened along the way: I made it from check-in to gate without a single human interaction. Not one. Boarding pass? Machine. Passport control? Machine. Bag drop? Machine. Every checkpoint, every […]
I have been writing this book, in one form or another, for most of my adult life. Not always consciously. Not always with the intention of turning it into something anyone else would read. But the questions it circles — why do we live the way we live? how much of it did we actually […]
I am leaving for India in a few days. Everyone I know there has sent some version of the same message: it’s extreme, be careful. Not the usual seasonal warning. Something more urgent. More tired. Yesterday a longtime friend wrote from Banda, Uttar Pradesh — a district I know, with people I love. A record […]
A Nomad’s Compass to Change That Holds I have been carrying this for a while. In talks, in workshops, in conversations after conference sessions when someone pulls me aside and asks: but how did you actually do it? This booklet is my answer. It started with a simple question I asked myself in 2014 when […]
I have sat across from a lot of young people in the last few years. In villages. In universities. In conference rooms that were trying very hard to feel informal. In circles on the floor in Janwaar, where the rule was simple: whoever speaks, speaks for themselves. What I notice, more and more, is the […]
These are the values that run underneath every decision, every process, every moment of change we lived through in Janwaar, a social experiment I ran for 10 years — and equally through everything we didn’t pursue, through our struggles and our failures. They were not designed in advance. They became visible over time — through […]
I think we owe Trump a thank you. No, really. Stay with me. Not for the policies. Not for the lies, the tariffs, the daily circus of a man who has somehow convinced half the world that chaos is a leadership style. Not for any of that. For the crash. For accelerating what was already […]
Armona is a small island off the Algarve coast. No cars. Maybe 50 all year round residents. Pine trees, dunes, the Atlantic doing what it always does. I have been here before. During Covid — five, six months — when the world closed down and this place became the kind of stillness that was hard […]