Nordic Leaders

"Music attracts luck" - Nitin Sawhney

In this episode we have a warm and uplifting chat with Nitin Sawhney, musician, producer and composer, known around the world for his  albums, film scores, DJ skills, and collaborations with Paul McCartney, Sting, Jeff Beck, Ellie Golding,  Annie Lennox, Will Young, Bob Geldof, Andy Serkis, Mira Nair, Anushka Shankar, Nora Jones, Herby Hancock and David Gilmore. 

In a wide ranging conversation on music, intuition, collaboration, leadership and learning, Nitin references Beethoven, Pythagoras, Johannes Kepler, Einstein, Michelangelo and Nelson Mandela. This episode is fascinating, packed with positivity and downright good fun. We were thrilled to have such a lovely chap on our show, thank you Nitin! Below some tasters: 

Changing your attitude to change your fortunes

• When I let go and stopped fighting, and stopped being angry and frustrated, and instead looked at what I could do to positively to change things, then everything shifted. 
• And it shifted really fast. Within a matter of weeks, I got a new record deal and went from playing to 100 people at the Jazz Cafe, to filling the Royal Albert Hall and playing to 5,000 people, and then touring with Sting.
• It was a change of attitude. I focused on what I could positively do rather than what I could retain from the past. I just went what can I do? What are the things that I'm capable of? What are the things that I could do to change my situation? What do I have control of? 

Intuition 

• If you follow your intuition, the universe has a habit of taking care of you. 
• You have to train your intuition and work on it to the point where you feel able to trust it. 
• The more you follow your intuition, the more you end up in a place where you are able to be a medium for possibility.

Collaboration 

• John Coltrane said that improvisation was like a bird that you catch in the air … that lends itself to the idea of discovering rather than creating music; it's what Michelangelo famously said, that the statues were hidden in the stone.
• Listening is a prerequisite of finding a collaborative voice with anyone.  
• It comes through discovering each other's thoughts and processes and of what goals we might have, or whether we want to just simply explore a possibility rather than focus on the specific goal. So, it's just kind it's about seeing how people want to work and being open to that.

Leadership and learning 

• You can always learn. There is always something that you can find. And so, the idea that you are thinking of leadership in the fluid way in your interactions, I think is also really important. 
• Anyone can be a leader at any time. I've spent my whole life playing the guitar, but I might meet a guitarist who's actually only played for a short time, but they could teach me something. It's very important that you can give way to them and allow them to lead a situation so that you can learn from it. 

And here is a link to artists, musicians, composers, who have worked with Nitin talking about  how he has enabled them to be more than what they imagined themselves to be. To go a little bit further. To let go.   Nitin Sawhney

You’ve probably heard of Hal Gregersen… A global name in leadership and academia.

An author and senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management, a former executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, and ranked in the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2021.

 His latest book, Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life  is based on 200+ interviews with catalytic questioners such as Elon Musk and Orit Gadiesh. 

Hal begins by talking about his lifelong passion of photography and a significant moment of failure with the camera.

Hal knows about questions! And in this episode we find out what are the most important questions in our lives and how to create a culture of fearless inquiry, including: 

1.  The power of Inquisitive Creativity
2.  Fearless Questions and Hal’s work with the no 1 ranked Thinkers 50 Amy Edmondson, pioneer and champion of psychological safety
3.  The Question Burst Process – a game-changing tool to help us tackle our own most challenging projects and dilemmas. 
4. What questions give you energy what questions take it away, key stone and shadow questions
5. Many leaders are only asking, ‘What do we do?’ ‘How do we do it?’ They might be missing something
6. ‘Call-to-Action' questions and the power of  'What if' questions. 

Hal gets us thinking about our relationship with questions, for example the role of authority figures in our childhood (at home, school, first job) and how they responded to our tough, challenging questions, and how that shapes us; right through to how we use questions in the workplace. 

We hope you enjoy this warm and engaging conversation as much as we did: please consider smiling, following us, and perhaps a 5 star rating! 🙂

Now here’s a conversation we can all relate to, on the nature of working life today and how to navigate people, tech, and change, gracefully. 

 Johanna is co-founder of RELEX Solutions, a huge success story and the world's coolest provider of retail planning solutions!

 Johanna describes what it’s like navigating the ‘hard skills’ world of engineering, data and tech, and at the same time sharing her experiences of collaboration and leading people and teams through change. 

 In our experience it’s rare to talk to somebody who is equally skilled at both the so called ‘hard and soft’ side of working life. Enjoy a warm-hearted conversation from someone ‘on top of their game’. Topics include

1.      How to work with humans, ‘the enigma for everyone’. You can never know other people fully and perhaps not even yourself completely’

 2.      How to: 

• apply your Intuition to identify what’s urgent/ important, and ‘fake emergencies’
• think about things, (‘thinking is so underrated’)
• use notifications effectively

 3.      Defining success for yourself, without peer pressure. When you get an impulse to do something, step back and ask, ‘Is this something I really want to do? & how is this gonna make me happier?’

 4.      In a world that’s never done, Johanna describes how she creates ‘progress’ everyday

 5.      Competing is ‘kind of irrelevant’, ‘but I am ambitious’

 6.      On leading people, ‘you should never fall into that trap of assuming that you kind of understand things. It's better to be explicit and ask. That's one lesson I've learned. 

 7.      Confidence and public speaking, ‘A big change for me was finding an area where what I'm saying actually adds to the knowledge of the world.’

 Enjoy this conversation with Johanna! J

Fail Smart: Lessons in Leadership & Life

 The brilliant Charles Jennings covers everything you need to know about life and learning in way less than an hour: 

 Recognised as one of the world's leading experts on building and implementing learning and organisational performance strategies. He’s led pioneering work with the 70:20:10 model for 20 years + and led learning and performance improvement projects for multinationals, government agencies, not-for-profits, and more, for over 40 years.

 Included in this sparkling episode:

 1.    Navigating change; understanding the power of ‘changing minds’ before ‘changing things’ 

2.    Applying the 70.20.10 Model; ‘even more important today’

3.    Operational excellence v developing people - ‘not a trade-off, you have to do both’

4.    Three important steps to create true learning organisations:

• Pyschological Safety is crucial and starts at the top.
• Think organisational and team-learning first, then individual
• Move away from competencies towards critical tasks 

 5.    Support learning in 4 steps: Rich Experiences, Opportunities to practice, Networks, and Reflection moments

 6.    ‘Communityship’ to support and encourage people & teams

 7.    Reflection Moments & 3 key questions to ask yourself, and the power of reflection in business and in tennis

 8.    Trust: people only trust you when actions connect with words.

Tendayi Viki, Associate Partner at Strategyzer
 
Fail Smart - Lessons in Leadership and Life: The new series from the Nordic Leaders. We couldn’t possibly imagine a better way to start our Fail Smart series than this sparkling conversation with Tendayi Viki.

Tendayi advises leaders across the globe on strategy and innovation, helping companies to explore and create the future. He is a speaker, facilitator, advisor, and he’s written three books on innovation, his latest book is Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Drive Transformation.

Bringing great energy, humour and openness to this conversation, Tendayi shares with us:

💡How failing smart kick-started his career
💡Three principles of innovation including: 

• You can't pick the winner on day 1
• Make multiple small bets early
• Go with evidence and ideas that deliver customer value

💡The two questions every leader should ask their team if they want breakthrough innovation:

• Is that idea crazy enough? 
• What would have to be true for that idea to work?

💡And how he we should design like we’re right and test like we’re wrong. 

NORDIC LEADERS 2022 - FAIL SMART SERIES

Our season 5 series theme is Fail Smart, Lessons in Leadership and Life.

We help our clients with leadership development, coaching and communication skills.

If you like what you hear,  connect with Nick, David and Stefano on LinkedIn to ask our help!

In this episode we welcome Dr Matt Offord, esteemed lecturer in Leadership and Management from the Adam Smith Business School, Glasgow University.

Matt is a former Naval Officer with extensive experience leading agile 21st-century teams in high tech and data rich environments.

Matt shares many fascinating insights which include;

·      ‘Harnessing informal power is a very healthy thing; the idea that informal networks are not helpful, is not helpful’
·      Leadership Lessons from the Royal Navy; you learn how to lead and be led, people are encouraged to challenge leaders as well, it's 'seen as a duty if something is not right'
·      On the difference between military and private sector, 'people talk a lot about teamwork, but then you go into workplaces and you see that it's not  really happening so much'
·      Leadership starts when you start. Leadership training is given to everyone from day one. ‘It was self evident why everyone was treated as a leader in the navy but in business it's different, you have to justify leadership training’
·      On crisis communications and informal influencers, ‘I wanted to see whether they (the ship's company) were listened to, based on their rank or based on some sort of prestige.'
·      Hierarchies– ’throughout most of human history, we've not really lived in hierarchies'– ’I wonder whether data and technology are changing the game and we're reverting back to what might be more natural perhaps.’
·       How to be a data savvy leader and the importance of data-driven leadership


Please enjoy the episode! You may also wish to give Matt a well-deserved Five Star rating!

This week we host Patricia Ryan Madson.

Patricia is the author of "improv wisdom" and a professor emerita at Stanford university, where she started teaching in 1977.

In 1996 she founded the creativity initiative at Stanford, an interdisciplinary Alliance of faculty who share the belief that creativity can be taught.

Among other things she taught Design Improv for the School of Engineering and has been a guest lecturer for the renowned Stanford Technology Ventures Program and for the Mayfield Fellows Program.

In the episode today we learn all her wisdom, not just about improvisation but about a lot more.

We discussed with her

• 1:57 - How can improvisation make us more innovative
• 7:51 - What can leaders learn from improv techniques
• 13:45 - How aiming for average can boost innovation
• 20:43 - How to be comfortable with ambiguity
• 24:10 - Why you should pay more attention to gratitude

Tune in and have your weekly dose of insights in the world of leadership.

Music by Shane Ivers - Spark of inspiration

Perttu Pölönen is a futurist, inventor and author. In 2018 MIT Tech Review honored him among the 35 Innovators Under 35 in Europe.

He has written two books and his latest, “Future Skills”, is out just now.

In this book he argues that the next revolution is a human revolution. To counterbalance the world we digitalized, we need to develop creativity, perseverance, compassion, and curiosity—those same soft skills that give our lives meaning and set us apart from machines.

In this interesting interview we explore with him:
 - What does it mean to be the first generation being born digital
 - How to bridge generational differences and collaborative gap
 - The importance of cross-generational dialogue - and how to start having that
 - What grandpa Perttu will tell to his grandchildren
 - What are the things that won't change
 - What should we be studying
 - How to find inspiration in the irrelevant

Tune in!

“Everyone should do something to make the world a better place.” 

Listen in to the inspiring tale of 17000+ vegetable boxes and recipes delivered to Finnish families.   

The social economy in the EU comprises 2.8 million enterprises and organizations, 13.6 million jobs and 8% of GDP. It’s an important part of the economy, and the influence is increasing - so it was high time we invited Emilia Järvinen , co-founder of Venner, on to the pod to hear the story of rapid growth and social impact. 

 In just three years Venner has expanded from the original web-shop for grocery boxes that anyone can buy to also be a food education platform and has scaled up from local to national and now international. 

 Stefano declared himself “mesmerized” by Emilia’s food stories – and that’s something to impress an Italian with what you are doling with vegetables! 

 David found the story uplifting:  how Emilia and her sister Tuulia, and the Venner team, are making a difference on family dynamics and well-being, and at the same time boosting cooking skills. 

 Bonus: Venner Kitchen recipe service - one month for free!

 Check out Emilia's favourite Venner recipe: and get the Venner Kitchen recipe service one month for free, using the code:         

NORDICLEADERS2021

We explore the world of meaningful values, story telling and The Inclusion Canvas with Essi Knuutila of Futurice.

Essi is Global Head of Digital Marketing and discusses how Futurice's values of 'Care, Trust, Transparency and Continuous Improvement' shape this global digital innovation and engineering company.

Essi also describes how the values came into being, 'We didn't invent our values — we found them on our journey'. She also describes the best leader she ever worked with and what she has learned about leading people and caring leadership.

She also describes an innovative shared CMO role, there's mention of mushroom picking, learning Spanish, playing golf and a Jack Russell.

Themes;

• The war on talent and 'Coming Home' with Futurice
• The story of how teenage girls temporarily took over the CEO role at Futurice and what they did with that responsibility!
• Diversity and Inclusion - not only words but action, and not only a HR responsibility but of key strategic importance; it's everyone's job in order to have better thinking, better products and better services
• The Inclusion Canvas - check out Futurice's Inclusion Canvas
• Values that truly mean something and the importance of having a story behind your values
• Care, Trust, Transparency and Continuous Improvement - How to identify your core values and how they are applied everyday
• Caring leadership - the best leader Essi ever worked for and why
• Trust is given not earned at Futurice and the question of, when do you stop trusting?