“It is not the mountain that we conquer, but ourselves.”
Edmund Hillary
What do we stand for, preach, and practice?
We use three guiding principles in our work every day. We focus on Strategy, Courage, and Daring.
Let’s phrase them like this:
- Hope is not a strategy…!
- Courage is resistance to fear. Mastery of fear, not absence of fear…!
- Daring is what makes you win. It guides you on the axis between strategy and courage…!
We have chosen these guiding principles as they indicates the very soul of who we are and how we wish to operate.
We operate as the ancient warrior monks did. We train to solve, and we study to serve…! Meaning we approach challenges with muscle and/or humanity. Muscle can be used to solve or serve, as can humanity.
The way of the ‘Warrior Monk’…?
“In battle, usually the orders of the warrior monks are successful and victorious. Not the orders of the warriors who are not monks. Nor the orders of the monks that are not warriors.
Only the warrior monk knows when to use the sword and when to use the pen. They operate with equal respect for both. And know that both muscle and humanity have their respective areas of application.
By using one or the other wisely, these highly trained individuals combine them into one balanced entity of being…!”
Regula Templi Melitae
And then four operational entities came, organically,
into existence…!
Starting in 2012, we laid the foundations for the overall philosophy we wanted to move forward with. Not knowing at that stage that, over the years to come, this would result in four different activities.
These are:
- Tribus Montana, where we ‘Serve’.
- Founded in 2012.
- Vade Ad Cor, where we ‘Solve’.
- Founded in 2014.
- Inscriptio, where we ‘Train’.
- Founded in 2018.
- Cuspis Hastae Editores, where we ‘Study’.
- Founded in 2025.
So, what shaped this unique approach?
There are four components in my life that truly shaped me into who I am today. These are: (1) martial arts, (2) my military formation, (3) my time as a management consultant, and (4) business transformation practitioner.
That means, based on these four areas, I had the opportunity to use both the harder, more muscular side and the softer, more human side.
It pushed me to learn how to solve problems and how to serve people. And over time and a lot of driven kilometers, I came to realize that we really need to train and study hard to sharply evaluate in which situations we use muscle or humanity. Or an in-between approach.
So all of the organizations I started, more or less developed on their own, based on the learnings that tipped over from one to the other. Over these four boxes, being ‘Serve’, ‘Solve’, ‘Train’, and ‘Study’, we use the same conceptual models to stay and/or get clear-minded and focused in our own heads. You might call them our guiding principles.
These are:
- Life is simple, yet not always easy. It can often be hard, and make us fail often.
- What is caring and what is helping? Some solutions require muscle, and some require humanity.
- If we want to serve the people and the planet, we need to master leadership, ownership, and extreme ownership.
- People only follow a leader if the leader cares for them and they trust the leader.
- Understand that life is not a free lunch, and accept that it often looks more like a battlefield…!
- To become the best version of yourself, you must never, ever, ever,… give up!
To lead is to serve…!
Over time, I also started to understand that ‘To Lead Is To Serve’. Given my background as a military guy, specializing in mountain teams, and moreover, given my family name, I decided a new entity had to be formed for commercial purposes, under the umbrella of The Mountain Tribe.
Or ‘Tribus Montana’, in Latin, as it soon became. It includes three other operating companies: ‘Vade Ad Cor’, ‘Inscriptio’, and ‘Cuspis Hastae Editores’.
But at the same time, it has a ‘Not For Profit’ focus, supporting volunteer work, networking, and sponsoring for three non-profit initiatives. Being the Belgian Chapter of the ‘Invictus Games’, the international organization ‘Merci Ships’, and the Belgian disaster recovery team ‘B-Fast’.