It has been a year of persistent sad news. It has culminated (and it is not yet half-way through the year) with today’s news that we have lost Jens Halle.
That statement in itself is almost unimaginable and difficult to comprehend, for our immediate reaction is to argue the impossibility for someone so young to die – unconfirmed, but I think him to have been 58.
Nothing brings home the fragility of life so pointedly than to lose a colleague, a friend of many years’ standing and so much in his prime. Jens was, as we all know, full of vitality and more than capable of standing the stresses of maintaining the high profile head-of-sales position with so many subsidiaries of his principal career – that with Novomatic until last year.
He left to spend more time with his family in Florida, taking up the reins of Gauselmann’s expanding Latin American business – because he could access it so easily from Miami. It looked a perfect fit for Jens, notably one he could adequately accommodate given his determination to create more quality time at home.
That has been cruelly taken from him and the entire industry now laments for one of its own. It is not a question of how Novomatic was to fill the void last year, or of how Gauselmann Group will fill the void left in its ambitions by his passing; it is more a case of the rest of us coming to terms with an industry and a future devoid of one of its driving characters.
It is easy to say that the industry has lost a wonderful advocate, but it happens to be true. And for many of us, we’ve lost a friend.
Image: Jens Halle, who died today
