My friend Jeff Stibel taught me a phrase that I have used often since: ‘Speed must be our friend’.
I believe there is great value in maintaining a fast pace, especially when implementing change. But it must never be at the expense of carelessness or nonchalance.
In my last column I talked about the incredible pace of change we had at Nexus Group – Global when, in a single year, in a company of 300 people, we said goodbye to 64 people and welcomed over 100 new people.
A change of this magnitude was obviously a huge challenge for the organisation. The benefit we experienced in this particular case was that we could change the energy in the company so significantly when 1/3 of all employees were new – and actively stepping up to be part of a cool change journey.
We created a lot of openness and willingness to develop and change with this big rotation.
During my first 100 days as the new CEO, I had gained a huge amount of insight from meeting and talking to many people. The company had a large and diverse customer offering, both analogue and digital. I began to realise that ‘identity’ was a common thread running through most of the company’s offerings.
After all these conversations, it was time to bring the new management team together to define the strategic direction of the company.
To ensure maximum progress and quality in the work, I hired Carl Lindeborg as facilitator. Carl is one of the most skilled facilitators I have ever met. His ability to conduct this type of exercise and ensure structured and documented progress is impressive.
With Carl’s help, we worked out what would become our new WHY. This would serve as a guiding principle for all employees as we continued our transformation of Nexus into a more focused company. The ‘why’ we eventually agreed on is as follows:
‘We secure society by enabling trusted identities’
This was also the culmination of all the sorting work – we landed safely on the fact that our focus in everything we would do would be about securing identity.
It’s great to see that Nexus Group is still keeping that beacon shining.
Thanks to the members of the management team Marcus Persson, Magnus Karlsson, Carolen Ytander, Jonas Dahlberg and Bernd Dieckmann.
And you – that was also something that became real. See the picture below from one of the internal temperature measurements we made on a regular basis:
Speed must be our friend
