I grew up in a simple home in Umeå in northern Sweden. I am the oldest of three siblings.
At home, we never talked about career or money. However, we learnt early on how important it was to work hard and to keep your promises. When we were playing football, our father said “why don’t you go out and dig in the potato field instead…” He thought that was a better way to work hard…
With these values clearly etched into my system, my journey through life began.
I have always been and acted like a typical big brother. I like order. And to lead. But I also love to learn – learning is my strongest driving force.
Since learning is such a central part of my personality, it has always pushed me to learn more, to be better, to never slow down. This characteristic has given me the opportunity for many interesting assignments that have contributed to new insights and learning. If I had been wired in a different way, I could have settled for a more managerial role and thus a better balance in life.
But the desire to learn has forced me to move on, to accept new assignments even though they would sometimes require all my waking hours in my eagerness to fulfill my mission.
After many years of radio silence on LinkedIn, I have decided to share small stories from my more than 30 year journey as a CEO in small, medium and large companies.
In recent weeks I have shared some episodes from my amazing journey at Atea Sverige. Now, in some upcoming posts, I will tell you about my Bisnode journey. Bisnode was a company that initially had an extreme inherent complexity that we had to address in order for the company to enter the future as a winner.
Next week I will tell you about how we dealt with the branding issue. When I joined the company, we were operating under 276 different brands… We were going to change that.
hashtag#Leadership
hashtag#learning
Below is a very interesting interview with NVIDIA‘s CEO, Jensen Huang, conducted at Stanford University. Always learning! Well worth listening to.
Lars – you have to work hard – and keep your promises …!
