Me & My Mentor

by Sarah Johnson, marketingmagazine.co.uk 28-Jul-09, 08:30

Paul Nicholls, marketing director, Gerber Juice Company

My inspirational colleague and unofficial mentor is a crazy multilingual Dutchman from Suriname called Peter Van As.
I worked alongside Peter in Argentina in the 90s, as part of the Lipton soft-drinks team. Peter, who is now managing director of Unilever Kenya, was a budding magician and lived by the mantra ‘Life’s an illusion’.

He taught me that working had to be fun - otherwise, why give up so much of your life being miserable? He believed in becoming native wherever you were living and really got beneath the skin of the locals to find out what made them tick.

He treated everyone with the utmost respect and kindness and was an absolute joy to work with. Thanks to him, I have developed my own mantra – ‘Perception is everything, reality is nothing’.