Who is this?
Václav Kňourek
Culture & Business Advisor, based in Prague, with 30+ countries behind the perspective.
Why “Being Václav”?
A ping-pong table won’t fix it
A ping-pong table won’t fix a team that stopped talking. That’s what I kept telling leaders, so I started Being Václav to do something about it. The name means being myself, with everything I’ve learned, put to work for others. It’s also a reminder that leaders get further by being themselves. I am in it for the long game, not for the perks or the temporary fixes: a business only gets resilient when its strategy lines up with what its people actually need.
Where does the perspective come from?
The travelling
Japan matters because I spent a lot of time there and it changed me. But that isn’t the foundation. The foundation is that I have travelled outside my own country for as long as I can remember: studies in Belgium, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, and many more countries as a tourist, for conferences, or visiting friends. When I travel I don’t go to the tourist spots. I care, I ask, I meet locals. All of it gave me context, something that lets me see around the corner and understand.
And Japan?
The Japan chapter
- Digital Nomad Nagasaki 2025 one of 23 chosen from 632 applications
- Shimonoseki Nomad Port 2025 selected
- Otera Stay, Nachikatsuura 2025 resident, and going back
- Colive Fukuoka 2026 pitch & storytelling coach, from 30 September
Ten weeks in Japan in 2025: five of them in Nagasaki on a government-backed programme, then a port city at the western tip of Honshu and a Buddhist temple in Wakayama. Japan taught me that doing something slowly and properly is not time-wasting.
Sometimes, to have more time, you need to spend more time doing something. Czech culture calls that time-wasting. Japan taught me otherwise.
So are you Japanese now?
The Czech half
No. I am Czech, a guy from Nová Paka now based in Prague, and I sound like it: direct, a little dry, suspicious of anything that calls itself a journey. I am not pretending to be Japanese and I do not speak the language. The brand is not a costume. It is what happens when a Czech habit of saying the thing plainly meets a Japanese habit of doing the thing properly.
What is the through-line?
Always trying to do the right thing
- student leader
- marketer
- happiness manager
- executive
- advisor
On paper?
Foundations
- Executive MBA
- Prague University of Economics and Business, AMBA, AACSB and EQUIS accredited. The thesis, the Happiness Management Guidebook, is an ethnographic study of IT companies (grade A) and the foundation of everything on this site.
- Master’s in Information Management
- University of Hradec Králové. The thesis measured how student teams are actually led: leadership styles and models, tested in the university environment.
- Across cultures
- Studies and summer schools in Belgium, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, and 30+ countries since. The same words land differently everywhere, and diplomacy is the fastest way to understand people.
- Languages
- Czech and English. No Japanese, despite appearances.
Is that a typo in the logo?
Why the logo has a macron
Ā is a letter that exists in neither of my languages. Czech writes Á; Japanese, in roman letters, writes Ā. So VĀCLAV is a spelling mistake in both, and the only spelling that is true to what this is. In running text I am still Václav.
If any of that sounds like your company, the framework is next.