Author: Darko Soković

9May2021
by Darko Soković

Do You Speak Digital?

Blog

If nearly 60% of citizens believe spin, disinformation, and propaganda plague our media landscape—as revealed by CeSID’s ongoing New Literacy research for Propulsion and USAID—then who exactly is doing the spinning? Over a third point to the most-watched national TV channel, followed by public broadcasters, two tabloids with their online portals, and one (barely watched) national frequency. Yet when asked “Which media do you follow most?” citizens name—you guessed it—these very outlets. How does this paradox persist?

One might assume people have simply tuned out a world gone mad, retreating into private bubbles of self-preservation. Of course not. Consider this: 83% of parents think their kids waste time on YouTube, while teens actually spend hours daily on TikTok, glued to influencers who—they claim—“show the world as it really is, no filters.” Parents and teachers vaguely recognize these digital stars exist, but through a distorted lens: clueless about what messages their children absorb, beyond occasional tabloid headlines screaming about some influencer’s tragic demise. So Gen Z constructs reality through random internet strangers they follow religiously—on platforms their parents can’t navigate—while adults soak up propaganda from the very TV channels and portals teens haven’t touched in years.§

Under one roof, two parallel universes: parents scrolling fear-mongering headlines on portals, teens scrolling unfiltered TikTok takes—neither speaking the other’s language. The influencers holding generational minds hostage wield nuclear-level cultural impact, yet most have no clue how to use it responsibly. Meanwhile, legacy media bombards adults with spin they swallow uncritically.

What’s to be done?

First, let’s acknowledge our media ecosystem’s dizzying complexity—enough to make anyone throw up their hands. Second, resist the urge to lecture each other (however tempting) and instead listen across generations about this new digital literacy. Third—think systemically. Parents, educators, influencers, policymakers, media, businesses: New Literacy works with all these groups to collaboratively map this chaotic terrain and gradually, step by step, become fluent in the language of our new reality.

If motivation is strong, even Chinese can be learned overnight. This? Far more complex—but exponentially more urgent. Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry—at least you’re not alone.

19April2021
by Darko Soković

130 Years of Optimism

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Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 will cost a staggering $11.5 trillion—yes, thousand billion dollars.

Right now, 800 million people worldwide live below the poverty line. An equal number suffer from chronic malnutrition, 6 million children die annually before their fifth birthday, and 620 million remain illiterate, according to the UN’s Bosnia and Herzegovina office. Poverty, hunger, healthcare access, and education are just a few of today’s most pressing global crises. The UN has identified 17 such challenges, including gender inequality, clean water scarcity, sustainable energy, and economic growth worthy of human dignity. Add to this innovation gaps, urban sustainability failures, resource overconsumption, climate change, biodiversity collapse, armed conflicts, and fragmented solutions—the picture looks bleak.

Yet humanity isn’t idle. Four years ago, UN member states adopted the 2030 Agenda, transforming these 17 urgent issues into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—a blueprint for people and planet.

Of course, it’s easy for governments to pledge their citizens’ money, especially without robust accountability mechanisms. The UN estimates achieving these goals by 2030 (practically around the corner for anyone running a business) requires $11.5 trillion, including $1.4 trillion just to eradicate poverty. For perspective: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entire annual GDP is roughly $18 billion. If the entire Western Balkan region (all six economies combined) worked exclusively toward the SDGs, it would take us 130 years—our collective GDP barely scratches $90 billion annually.

Unlike the 2000 Millennium Goals, the SDGs enjoy far broader global recognition. For businesses, their applicability extends beyond corporate social responsibility into core operations. The 2030 Agenda offers a vital framework to align local initiatives with global progress.

This conversation is gaining traction locally. The UN in Bosnia recently hosted SDG Business Week, spotlighting leading companies in sustainability. Awards recognized pioneers in “People” and “Resources & Environment” categories:

  • Isatis Software Solutions
  • Kakanj Cement Factory
  • DM Drogerie Markt
  • GOLD-MG Donji Žabar
  • Coca-Cola HBC Sarajevo

The overall 2019 Sustainability Leader, Kakanj Cement Factory, was honored for fully integrating SDGs into every business segment.

How can these strategies accelerate Bosnia’s climb from 69th out of 162 Agenda signatories? How might a company’s actions here help eradicate global poverty or gender inequality in a decade instead of 130 years? In upcoming columns, we’ll explore how to better leverage and understand the SDGs—because the 2030 Agenda deserves nothing less.

1April2021
by Darko Soković

Parade of Success

Blog

At work, it’s easy to assume we know someone—their name, role, social circle, preferences. But people are complex, layered with identities: a brilliant colleague, an expert in their field, a devoted friend, partner, parent, perhaps a triathlete, a person of faith, a binge-watcher, or a self-taught linguist.

And what if they’re also gay? So what? It’s just one word describing a facet of their emotional life, another label on the list. Yet all these identities coexist in the same person, each surfacing in different moments, public or private.

But why should any of this matter at work? Shouldn’t professionalism mean leaving personal lives “within four walls”? The problem lies in the nature of identity: it can’t be neatly compartmentalized. We exist in relation to others. What does it mean to be an exceptional colleague if there are no colleagues? A great parent if there’s no child? If private lives with partners must stay hidden—if we can’t speak freely when needed—even a layperson can grasp the professional and psychological toll this takes.

This issue impacts business on multiple levels. Employers want employees to feel safe, comfortable, and accepted—not just because it’s humane, but because it boosts productivity. Research by Out Now estimates U.S. businesses could save $9 billion annually by fully implementing LGBTQ+ inclusive policies. Studies from the Williams Institute (commissioned by IBM and Credit Suisse) reveal employees who hide their sexual orientation due to fear suffer higher stress, anxiety, and related health issues.

Where people can thrive as their authentic selves, companies grow more effectively. In such environments, employees are 30% more likely to stay and grow with the organization—the ultimate goal of any HR strategy.

Some regional companies are already leading change. Dalmacijavino in Split recently shook the Balkans with a Facebook post featuring a gay couple lounging on a beach under the hashtag #BoliMePipi (“Pipi Doesn’t Care”). Cockta followed with a lesbian couple’s portrayal. Erste Bank Croatia boldly supported Zagreb Pride, declaring, “We believe all people are equal.” Their parent company has long understood LGBTQ+ inclusion’s value for business. In Bosnia, a Headhunter study of 61 companies found only a handful—like DM, the British Council, and Represent Communications—actively safeguarding LGBTQ+ dignity in hiring and workplace culture.

Serbian brands, however, still hesitate to take decisive steps. The “four walls” concept is tempting when avoiding discomfort or controversy. But true prosperity—especially in crisis—requires expanding those walls. For now, they enclose homes, safe spaces with friends, and a few brave companies. It’s time to tear them down entirely, so everyone can contribute fully—to their own success, their company’s, and their country’s.

Pride parades matter, but what we truly need is a parade of success—for every person, in every facet of who they are.

14December2020
by Darko Soković

The Faculty of Dramatic Arts

Blog

The smell of coffee and ratluk pastries. Brutal concrete beams and pebbles trapped in cement. Grand lobbies and dimly lit studios, offices and labs. If you’ve never been, this is your first impression of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in New Belgrade.

A well-meaning observer might say “there’s no accounting for taste,” and for casual small talk, they’d be right. But for a higher education institution where aesthetics—both as discipline and skill—are conditio sine qua non, taste is everything. Yet what strikes you about FDU isn’t its somewhat faded, time-warped architecture, but rather the substance being studied inside.

I’m sitting with Miloš Pavlović, the dean, and Ana Martinoli, the vice-dean, in his office. I’m pitching potential collaborations between our young company and their 70-year-old institution—media literacy, digital skills, influencer projects, social responsibility initiatives, YouTube content. They listen, silent. Across the long, dark table, plaques and awards are lined up, the most prominent being the Vuk Award. It’s easy to feel self-assured facing what seems like an old-guard institution.

Founded post-war as the Academy of Theatre Arts, the school quickly realized that theatre alone couldn’t cover the rapidly evolving media landscape. So in the 70s, it rebranded as the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (theatre, film, radio, and television). My hosts point this out, then start talking about video games, transmedia art, critical thinking, and their students’ competitiveness in the job market.

What Ana and Miloš are really describing is how an institution expected to embody stability adapts to chaotic times. And this isn’t just trial and error—FDU has codified its approach.

The faculty routinely demands innovation from new students, ensuring they grasp the zeitgeist. They’ve updated curricula to reflect media evolution, launching master’s programs like Digital Transformation of Media and Culture and Advertising and Media, while hosting conferences on political, democratic, and cultural shifts. They don’t shy from the everyday—they prepare students to thrive in it.

How does FDU know where to position itself? By embedding axioms into its strategy:

  • “If it’s about gaming, it’s about our students.”

  • “We don’t look down on competitors (even private ones)—we learn from them.”

  • “In the region, this faculty is a hub.”

The results speak for themselves. FDU is the most prestigious school of its kind in the region, a magnet for gaming industry giants, and recently secured an Epic Games grant to develop a new program in animation, VFX, and game art.

During the pandemic (and long before), FDU improvised—successfully. “We value every chance to break routine, so we’re not afraid to experiment,” they tell me. This ethos is formalized in their Interactive Arts Lab, where hackathons, gamification, VR, and AI have become part of the school’s DNA.

What Ana, Miloš, and their colleagues are doing isn’t just a knack for crisis adaptation. It’s a toolkit for navigating chaos, echoing strategies Fernando F. Suarez and Juan S. Montes outlined in Harvard Business Review: well-systematized routines, simple heuristic rules, and structured improvisation. These can take you to Everest’s summit—or, in FDU’s case, to another inevitable rebranding.

But they’re not the only ones who need a new name.

If we lead our companies through perpetual crisis with the same agility, we’re all ripe to become Faculties of Dramatic Arts.

So—what kind of dean are you for your own FDU?

11November2020
by Darko Soković

Leadership for All

Blog

Leadership isn’t optional – it’s every young person’s duty

If you’ve traveled around the former Yugoslav countries at all, you know conversations with people don’t go as badly as you might initially think. In these chats, the “us vs them” divide isn’t nearly as strong as in the media, or when we’re not together. We often unconsciously make concessions to avoid potentially offending “the other side” – how many times have you called your language “ours” for exactly this reason? And although we all know, consciously or not, who’s responsible for everything that happened, these conversations usually end with some variation of “Who the hell turned us against each other?!” After we hug it out, we typically arrive at the same layman’s consensus: if anything can save us all, it’ll be the youth, the economy, and knowledge.

We’re not the first to think this way in a post-war context. After WWII in 1948, young people from seven European countries came together determined to do everything possible to prevent such conflicts from happening again. They hoped, you see, that they could change the world – one person at a time. Thus was born the Association internationale des étudiants en sciences économiques et commerciales, an international association of economics and business students. Today we know these brilliant young people as AIESEC – the world’s largest youth-led organization, present in 126 countries with nearly 40,000 members, and at least that many more participating in their programs each year.

Impressive. They want to prevent wars, clearly, but what do they actually do there? You sign up and…?

The story of AIESEC is actually a story about leadership. Simply put, difficult times demand a special set of skills from young people to help them navigate an increasingly complex and changing world. This was true in the mid-20th century, and it’s especially true today. Without these skills, it’s impossible to stay relevant in any field. We’re talking about things like:

  • Teamwork skills where you can both lead and follow, while understanding how the team as a whole contributes to set goals

  • Goal-setting – determining necessary resources, who can do what, timelines, and separating personal interests from project interests

  • Communication skills – being able to clearly, unambiguously and focused articulate thoughts and inspire others to action

  • Personal integrity, self-awareness and respect that translates to professionalism, personal responsibility and business acumen

These skills, I believe, were crucial for the global elite that emerged from AIESEC and similar post-war European movements. Today however, AIESEC members say leadership isn’t optional – it’s every young person’s obligation. That’s why their international volunteer, entrepreneurship and talent internship programs focus on developing exactly these skills through structured, multi-month approaches in collaboration with top companies.

AIESEC Serbia is known even outside business circles for at least two projects bigger than themselves: what ambitious young person in Serbia hasn’t heard of – or participated in – Career Days? Who among those with something meaningful to say hasn’t spoken at their annual New Leaders conference or at least dreamed of being there?

AIESEC’s Belgrade office was founded at the Faculty of Economics back in 1953 and long ago stopped being just for econ students. They’re active in Niš, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, across all faculties, and they’re just getting started with big plans for Serbia. Despite this impressive history, “AIESECers” are everywhere today – leading key departments in companies, in executive positions, as leaders in public administration or running their own ventures.

Many HR managers will tell you: seeing AIESEC on a CV is a valuable and important recommendation signaling you’re dealing with a dead-serious candidate. These young people – and I’ve personally confirmed this many times – thirst for knowledge and achievement. When we as employers give them that chance, they repay it many times over – to themselves, to us, to the company and the community.

Usually all we need to do is point them to opportunities – AIESECers are trained to grab them. Just watch them go.

10November2020
by Darko Soković

I Want to Create

Blog

We need companies that don’t just meet expectations—but exceed them, going beyond what the market even demands.

For days, I’ve been reading reactions to the video “I Don’t Want to Leave,” where a group of successful young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina explain—in a deep, affected male voice (?)—why they choose to stay in the country. The campaign is backed by a youth association, supported by companies and media, including the outlet you’re reading now. And why not? Every year, BiH loses 150,000 people searching for better working conditions and a life with dignity. Serbia has even done the math: each highly educated emigrant costs the state nearly 70,000 KM—the amount invested in their education from elementary school to university. The figure in BiH is comparable. So any initiative offering potential solutions deserves praise.

But here’s the catch. Instead of giving us, say, three weak reasons to stay, the video lists at least thirty reasons to leave! Just as you start wondering whether the point is to make the bleakness even bleaker or to offer a new narrative and a glimmer of hope, the online comments don’t hold back. The blame falls on the ruling class, the opposition, the ’90s generation, retirees—and even the youth themselves: “You’d rather live off your parents’ pensions and drink three coffees a day. Get up, take initiative—who will if not you young folks?” says some anonymous internet loudmouth. At first, I thought only a rare few were on that path, but the work of hundreds of young (and not-so-young) individuals and companies has convinced me otherwise. The combined GDP of all Western Balkan economies is less than €100 billion—about the same as Slovakia’s—yet we have 12 million more people than that small country. Things can’t get worse, so the only possible direction is forward.

The same goes for corporate social responsibility: a donation here or a responsible action there won’t fix decades of systemic gaps. We need companies that don’t just do their jobs—but do them exceptionally, beyond what’s expected, beyond what the market demands—so we can leap into the future in giant strides.

Who even knew about Tuzla’s airport before Wizz Air started flying there? Or imagined a plane ticket to a European destination could cost just a hundred marks? The airline didn’t do anything revolutionary—it just offered the same quality service it provides across Europe, doing its job better than it had to. Or take the recent introduction of 4G in BiH: a country that got fast mobile internet among the last in Europe, where only 15% of the population uses mobile payments. In Croatia, that figure exceeds 50% and surged after faster internet arrived. The telecoms here didn’t perform miracles—they just pushed the state to let them deliver excellent service, and eventually succeeded. Similarly, Sarajevo’s PR agency Represent Communications, the British Council, and the Center for Investigative Reporting earned LGBTIQ Index awards not because they had to, but because they chose excellence in fighting discrimination and fostering inclusion—simply because they wanted to.

It’s hard not to feel hopeless—years of traveling this region have taught me that. When I say, as a 35-year-old, that I’d never leave this part of the world, reactions range from disgust to admiration. When I mention that I moved to Sarajevo before turning 30—without any family ties or pressure to do so—few understand why.

So my answer to that anonymous online critic is simple: Create something more than an illiterate comment, my friend. Build something of your own, something that improves this country and employs people, something you do not because you’re forced to, but because you want to. Then we’ll talk. It’s not about what I won’t do—not even #Idontwanttoleave—but what I will do: I want to create. Here. Now. Every day. Until we’ve built the BiH and the region we actually want.

31October2020
by Darko Soković

Nostalgia for the Future

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Walking through Banja Luka one evening just after nine, the icy Vrbas wind cutting through the empty streets, I heard Pink Floyd’s “High Hopes” drifting from a doorway near Trg Krajine:

“The grass was greener / The light was brighter / The taste was sweeter / The nights of wonder…”

A group of kids huddled nearby, warming themselves while streaming music from a phone.

The scene brought to mind an interview I’d read days earlier—a disheveled, award-winning director and activist for the “Serbian cause” praising Banja Luka’s mayor for transforming “a backwater into a city displaying all the symptoms of a European center.” I cynically wondered if any of these four kids had concrete plans to seek those “symptoms” in their undiluted form somewhere in Europe, as Bosnia’s grim statistics suggest, or if at least three had never traveled beyond their hometown.

I nearly crafted a sardonic social media post about it, but something stopped me: my mobile internet worked seamlessly. Without a second thought—just as I would in Belgrade—I’d opened Facebook. Banja Luka isn’t exactly abroad from a Serbian perspective, but not long ago, my phone bill would’ve screamed otherwise: 300 dinars for a short call, 3,000 for half an hour on YouTube. Yet here I was, months into using my Serbian mobile plan across Bosnia, Montenegro, and even Kosovo (a story in itself) without roaming charges, thanks to Telekom Srbija and its regional subsidiaries. For a fleeting moment, I glimpsed the mundane reality young Europeans take for granted: borderless connectivity, flights cheaper than three Big Mac meals, freedom built on “the familiar, just slightly different.”

For us, it’s harder.

The 450 km between Belgrade and Podgorica takes eight grueling hours by car, while flights to Tirana or Sarajevo cost a month’s minimum wage. Bosnia and Kosovo enforce Europe’s strictest visa regimes, and the main border crossing between Montenegro and Bosnia still lacks asphalt for kilometers. Despite being each other’s largest trade partners under CEFTA, regional mobility is paralyzed. Roaming fees remain exorbitant (despite short-lived abolition promises), and cross-border work permits are humiliatingly slow to obtain. No wonder 80% of Western Balkans residents reject the idea of living or working in neighboring economies, while over 60% haven’t traveled regionally in the past year.

Our combined GDP barely matches Slovakia’s—yet we have 12 million more people.

I’d never call any place a “backwater,” unlike that lauded director, but our infrastructure—both physical and mental—lags catastrophically. In this disconnected reality, where Europe’s three-decade-old integration remains a distant dream, regional companies are quietly bridging gaps faster than governments. Telekom Srbija’s seamless network, United Group’s “UniFi” Wi-Fi hotspots across the Balkans, or UniCredit’s fee-free ATM access for clients—these aren’t just business decisions. In our fractured context, they’re de facto corporate social responsibility, rewriting the rulebook on what connectivity means.

Back on Banja Luka’s main square, sipping tea in a dim café, I posted “High Hopes” instead of that scathing status. Those shivering kids reminded me: the grass is greener and the light is brighter—but only “when friends surrounded.” Only where borders are clear yet permeable, where people, services, and capital flow freely, can nostalgia for the past give way to nostalgia for the future.

19June2020
by Darko Soković

The Editorial Room

Blog

“I’m the editor—what I say goes!”

That declaration ended all discussion—the work would be done as ordered. This was public radio, after all, and I was just a slightly older teenager at the time. In any case, an editorial team’s responsibility is determining how the program should sound. The frequency of these “no debate” decisions fluctuated with circumstances, but noticeably spiked during crises—which, in public media, meant constantly. That shout, a perpetual symbol of perpetual crisis, remains my most vivid memory of those days.

Fifteen years later, I often catch myself and colleagues tallying how often we invoke our status, role, position, past successes, experience, or ownership stakes to make “the program sound” the way we want in our teams. How often do we inspire people through vision versus resorting to “I’m the editor—what I say goes”? We keep score in a mental ledger of small leadership wins and losses. And just like back at the radio, crises almost always tip the balance toward authoritarianism—that leadership style so endemic to Serbia and the Balkans.

But must it be so?

Mid-March could have been catastrophic for our organization: Colleague F., a linchpin of our team, was hospitalized with severe pneumonia—then diagnosed with that disease we’d only heard about on TV. The deadly pandemic was no longer about “those people over there”; it was now our painful personal and professional reality. Though we’d been pushing for 2020 to be our most successful year yet, most active contracts were in transitional phases or just beginning, threatening our liquidity. Worse, no one—not the government, business community, or global experts—knew how long this would last or had reliable data for midterm decisions.

Before the state of emergency was declared, we realized surviving as “winners” required crisis leadership unlike anything we’d practiced. Our emergency team quickly divided roles: financial planning, remote-work infrastructure, and—critically—curating information flows became equally vital.

“Colleague F.’s condition is serious but stable… stable but in ICU… stable but reserved a ventilator,” the hospital updates came daily. Someone had to dam the rising dread infiltrating our bones with each report, crafting narratives that were accurate yet free of panic, sensationalism, or the misinformation wildfire spreading globally.

Most crucially, we understood the team must emerge stronger, wiser, and more united—or battling a crisis this magnitude was pointless. This demanded radical transparency. Daily (sometimes hourly), we openly discussed projections, F.’s status, payroll viability (including temporary pay cuts to endure longer). In global chaos, we found refuge and security in each other.

These approaches align with advice from Sam Tsima of Forbes Business Council: continuous communication, pre-prepared crisis scenarios, expert consultation, and viewing crises as learning—not panicking—opportunities distinguish modern leaders. But as mindfulness expert Tamara Levitt’s research shows, none of this works unless leaders make peace with not having all answers—just facilitating optimal team solutions.

F. fully recovered. We’re back in the office. Liquidity and salaries normalized (we’ll repay those temporary cuts). Travel resumed. Two team members secured permanent contracts mid-crisis. That leadership scorecard? Forgotten—because “how our program sounds” became a group decision, not an individual decree.

“We’re the editors—what we say goes!”

That’s how we weathered this crisis as a team—and how we’ll face the next. So ask yourself: who’s in your editorial room deciding how your crisis—and everyday—program sounds?

11May2020
by Darko Soković

The New Literacy

Blog

I’ve been a proud resident of our homeland since birth. My not-so-long life in Serbia—I’ll turn 35 this year—has gifted me what you might call a crash course in Serbian clichés: I’ve been a citizen of four different states while never leaving Belgrade, enjoyed two states of emergency and one state of war, had tear gas thrown in front of the National Assembly at least twice (maybe three times—I lost count, though I do remember conveniently being abroad during that whole “illegal footwear appropriation for Kosovo” incident, much like our then-president). I’ve witnessed two tank battalions in the streets, hyperinflation, once-in-a-century floods, multiple referendums, dramatic shortages, a few sieges over freedom of assembly, two instances of pot-banging from balconies, two zeniths of whistles and vuvuzelas, two major counter-protests, and a handful of side dramas.

Then there’s the time a pop starlet sang on bridges during air raids (and again, 20 years later, in a ghost city under police curfew), or when special forces striked with armored vehicles on the highway, or when MiGs buzzed overhead in low flight, or during derby riots, or when mafia clans wiped each other out in broad daylight, or when a “complete idiot” temporarily abolished the state and his bulldozers razed entire neighborhoods after tying up bystanders—only for the police to hang up on those terrified hostages when they called for help. Minor details, really.

In this circus, all we were missing was another serious pandemic in the last two decades. Humanity will eventually defend itself and recover from new viral diseases—epidemiologists assure us, and history confirms it—but what about the lasting social and economic scars? No one knows. Here we are, drowning in an explosion of information: verified facts, half-truths, outright lies, surreal conspiracy theories, and the sheer human need to process incomprehensible global shocks into some coherent, digestible narrative.

One thing is certain: nothing will ever be the same, simple, or easily understandable again. As Satchit Balsari, Caroline Buckee, and Tarun Khanna note in Harvard Business Review, we’re entering an era where we must learn to navigate contradictions that would make Schrödinger’s cat dizzy. We’re told to both isolate and expose ourselves, to reduce contacts while increasing productivity, to expect a second pandemic wave while being assured it might never come.

This new reality demands nothing less than a complete rewiring of how we process information. We need to develop the ability to think critically while identifying credible sources, to respect authority while still verifying its claims. The modern world requires us to parse complex data, extracting only what’s relevant while discarding the noise, and to defend against conspiracy theories not with knee-jerk reactions but with open minds capable of contextualizing even the most outrageous claims. Perhaps most crucially, we must grow comfortable viewing uncertainty through the lens of probability rather than binary absolutes, understanding that most of life’s important questions don’t have clear yes-or-no answers.

The greatest challenge may be making peace with the unknown—accepting that little is certain anymore, that change happens by the hour rather than by the day. Those comforting, straightforward narratives we relied on in simpler times have become obsolete. Where Schrödinger’s cat was once just a physicist’s playful thought experiment, we now find ourselves living inside that very paradox every single day.

When a friend recently quipped, “We’ve lost our minds!” I had to wonder—have we? The truth is, I don’t know. But what I do know is this: I’m no longer afraid to take that leap into the unknown, because in this strange new world, that’s the only way any of us will ever truly understand what’s happening.

9March2020
by Darko Soković

The Case of Milan J.

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There are a few unexpected gurus from public life whose wisdom—filtered through my own values and context—I turn to when making big decisions. Some are underrated politicians, leaders, the odd tycoon, globe-trotting entrepreneurs, showbiz wizards, obscure lyricists… you name it. One of them is Jadranka Kosor, the woman who, during her brief tenure as Croatia’s prime minister, managed to spectacularly root out corruption in her own party, stabilize regional tensions, broker a “personal trilateral” with neighboring presidents, unblock EU negotiations stalled by Slovenia for years, and practically usher Croatia into the European Union—all without fanfare and without the recognition she deserved from the Croatian and regional public.

Recently, I heard that our former colleague Milan J. was inquiring about a newly opened position at our company. Milan had always been close with Jasmina R., a current team member, and over their usual after-work glass of wine, he asked if we’d consider rehiring him. Jasmina wasn’t sure, so she told him she’d “look into it”—the polite corporate non-answer. (Names and details here are fictional, but the scenario is stitched together from real situations over the past decade.)

At the management meeting, we debated Milan’s potential return. “No one can leave and yet stay, nor stay and yet leave,” I recalled Jadranka Kosor’s Pythian remark from 2010, when she blocked a former PM’s attempted comeback with an iron fist. Should we take the same hardline stance? Opinions were split. “What’s done is done—wish him well, but his time here is over,” argued one side.

The Boomerang Employee Dilemma

Our conundrum isn’t unique. 85% of HR managers in the U.S. have fielded applications from “boomerang employees”—former staffers seeking to return—and 40% have rehired at least half of them, according to Employee Engagement studies. Most executives say these applications carry weight, yet only 1 in 10 flat-out refuses to consider a return. No such stats exist here, but you know how it goes: in Serbia’s tight-knit marketing, media, NGO, and international org circles, the same faces rotate like a carousel.

Former employees offer clear advantages: they know your business, culture, team, and clients, requiring minimal ramp-up time. They’re often cheaper to rehire, especially if they left on good terms—chasing growth, not running from failure.

At our meeting, egos flared: “A second chance? We’re not the Red Cross!” But reason soon prevailed: We’d invested heavily in Milan J. We taught him the intricacies of event management, how to help big companies craft (and monetize) a social mission with measurable impact, how to rally communities around these programs, how to draft winning tenders against international rivals. Most crucially, we trained him to think critically in line with our values—where the client isn’t always right just because they’re paying, and where profit and purpose aren’t mutually exclusive. That last part is devilishly hard to instill—and with Milan, we’d succeeded.

The Ego’s Last Stand

I thanked Jasmina for relaying the message. The conclusion? Our investment in Milan demanded openness to his return. But accepting that wasn’t easy—the ego is every leader’s fiercest opponent.

“Will I accept the decision? What does ‘accept’ even mean? Should I slit my wrists?” —Jadranka Kosor’s words in 2013, when (yet again) she had to bend to realpolitik and outmaneuver her own pride.

I called Milan J. myself to set up an informal coffee the next day. We’ll see if it’s true that no one is truly irreplaceable—or if some gaps never really close.