Getting the Goods Where They Are Needed

“Purchasing is the big dog — logistics is a support function,” says Bo I. Andersson, who has been running General Motors’ global purchasing and supply chain since 2005. It’s his job to bring in the stuff GM needs for production and get the products out to the dealers. The process has changed drastically over the past decade, thanks to free trade and technology, Andersson says.

“We buy parts for $86 billion a year, $15 billion’s worth of supplies, machines and equipment, fuel and natural gas, and so on. On top of that we spend $6 billion on logistics, $4.5 billion of which is for North America. So if you look at the big picture, purchasing has a much bigger impact on our profitability, while logistics is more of an operational issue.”

But as every general knows, weak logistics can undermine even the loftiest plans (just think of the failed attempts to conquer Moscow made by Napoleon and Sweden’s Charles XII). Andersson, a former army officer, doesn’t take logistics lightly, even though it only counts for a small fraction of the $105 billion in total expenditures he handles (revenue was $193 billion in 2005).

“Around Christmas 2005, after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, we had 250,000 units in the pipeline on outbound logistics, and the railways and waterways were down,” he recalls. The circumstances forced Andersson and GM to find new solutions. “We started to ship short sea in the U.S.,” he says, referring to short-haul sea transport from Mexico to San Diego, which takes 30 days. “It was time consuming, but cost effective.”

The second solution to the crisis was “drive-aways,” the hiring of young drivers to deliver new cars to dealers within 50 miles of a GM plant. “They can sell these cars as new as long as the odometer reads less than 50. It costs $200 to $400 to send a car by truck or rail, but a drive where away only costs $50 per car. We saved a lot of money that way,” he says, noting that having this option also keeps some healthy pressure on water- and rail-transport companies.

At GM, logistics is increasingly being seen as an integral part of the supply chain, which is reflected in the fact that the term was dropped from Andersson’s title in 2005, when he became GM’s top general for global purchasing and the supply chain.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on logistics over the last two years, because of its complexity. We buy 160,000 parts globally and ship 9 million cars a year. Here in North America, we ship 19,000 cars every day, seven days a week. Material supply, production control, and logistics are all part of the supply chain.”

It’s been said that the earth is flattening, business-wise. But is it really that flat from a logistics and supply management perspective? Or is this just another media buzzword?

“I think it’s very real,” Andersson says. “If we take an example from components, 66 percent of our aluminum wheels, of which we buy more than a billion dollars every year, come from China. By [buying from China], we’re saving over 20 percent on a landed basis. If you take a $100 aluminum wheel, the logistics cost for me to bring it from China is $16. It’s not something I want to ship, but on the other hand, the shipping cost for the $3 billion of radios I buy, half of which come from China, is $2 per radio. That’s $2 out of $100. Ideally, I would like to ship more radios and fewer wheels.

“The earth is very flat, but on the other hand, we make all our decisions on a total landed cost, so it’s not that many parts costing $100 where you can allow $20 in logistics cost.” (Total landed cost = all costs to make and deliver a product to its revenue-generating stage.)

Bo Andersson came to the U.S. in 1993 as head of Worldwide Purchasing Electrical; a $15 billion unit that included Delphi, which was spun off in 1999. In 2001 he became number two in purchasing and joined the company’s 15-member board, where he is the only non-American. What do you see when you look in the rear-view mirror?

“The first thing is that competitive pressures have changed dramatically as a result of the various free-trade agreements. For example, we used to be the biggest player when it came to vehicles, but there were only 33 vehicles sold in Mexico then, as they had to be produced domestically. Today there are 133 vehicles sold on the Mexican market, which has been opened up more than anywhere else.

“The second thing is that the logistics and transportation industry has become globalized, and we have more people with full-fledged capabilities. Just look at FedEx and DHL, and shipping companies like the Norwegian Höegh and the Swedish Wallenius. Competitive pressure has created new needs for transportation solutions, and for tools and visibility. We are focusing very much on supply-chain visibility. We might tell suppliers, you can manage the supply chain, but we want visibility. We want to know where the 15 containers on the way from China to the U.S. are right now. We have an advanced control center in Detroit for the supply chain, and when we go into crisis mode, it becomes more like a military organization.” (Andersson notes that the retail giant Wal-Mart’s supply chain dwarfs that of GM and even the Pentagon. In 2002 Wal-Mart imported 292,000 forty-foot containers, compared to 182,000 by Home Depot and close to 100,000 by Heineken. GM imported 11,000, one quarter of Toyota’s exports to the U.S. Today, GM’s number is around 100,000, he says.)

The rise of China has been one of the biggest shifts in the world’s supply chain since you started at Saab in 1987.

“We’ve been in China for eight or ten years now, and we’ve been active in purchasing for export over the past five years. A lot of people are saying, Bo is buying everything from China, but what I am losing sleep over is how to supply parts to China domestically, because the Chinese automotive industry is growing by 100,000 units a month. We estimate it to be 8 to 8.5 million vehicles, and we have 10 percent of that market. We believe we will sell over a million vehicles in China in 2007. We sold 856,000 units there last year, and we are profitable. We make much more money in China than in any other country in the world. My primary focus is to supply China’s domestic market. My second is to export out of China, to Korea, Australia, India, Europe, and finally to the U.S. This is something we look at every day.”

Globalization is not the only global trend. Do the counter-forces increase the risk for a company such as GM? Does it affect your planning?

“Yes, and no,” he says. “I run a huge operation and we have purchasing people in 40 countries, but we run it in a both centralized and decentralized way, which means that I have four people sitting in Mexico buying seatbelts for the whole world. That doesn’t mean that they buy them from Mexico, but that they have centralized control of all the seatbelts we buy, and they figure out the best place to buy them from, whether they’re going to Europe, North America, Asia, or Latin America. We also do contingency planning every day. We use airplanes and helicopters somewhere in the world every day, because something always happens, whether it is a fire, a tornado, or a bankruptcy. We are very good at handling disasters, because if you move 35,000 vehicles and get 160,000 parts in every day, something will always happen somewhere.

“People are often very surprised over that we have such short product pipelines and never have more than one or two days’ inventory at our assembly plants,” he says, but adds that the auto industry still has far to go in taking advantage of the flattening earth compared with the white-goods industry and Wal-Mart.

New and tougher rules and inspections from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have not been a big problem for GM. Andersson says that the company has been working very close with DHS for three years and has been proactive; whether it concerns the $10 billion shipments the company receives from Canada every year or the container traffic it operates on its own from South Korea.

Andersson has won many battles to rein in and control GM’s costs, but there are areas that have stumped even this hard-charging Viking.
“We have not been successful in pharmaceutical, and healthcare costs are going up 15 percent a year. We are the largest buyer in the world of Viagra.”

Why — because it makes the cars go faster?

“No, it’s part of the union contract! UAW won free Viagra in the 1999 negotiations. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is,” he says.

Well, it’s probably not something to lose sleep over, and certainly not a Waterloo.

Hans Sandberg

The Swedish Crime Stoppers, Inc.

Currents' Fall issue 2006.

To many Americans, Sweden is more known for social security, than for stopping crime. But then we have Securitas, Inc., which around year 2000 became America’s largest private security company through a series of acquisitions orchestrated by Don Walker. He ran the U.S. security giant Pinkerton before it was picked up by the Swedes. Currents' editor Hans Sandberg interviewed him about Securitas in the U.S.

Don Walker started out working for the Federal Bureau of Investigations back in the 1960’s, but later left the FBI to set-up his own security programs, first at a bank in New York, then at a company in Cleveland, Ohio, and six years later he started a similar program for a company in Nashville, TN, which eventually was spun-off as a wholly-owned security company. With the help of investors, he bought out the company and sold it to Pinkerton in 1991, where he became executive vice president and chief operating officer (COO.) Today, Don Walker is chairman of Securitas in the U.S., and of it's daughter company, Pinkerton. Securitas’ American branch has about 100,000 employees and about 2.6 billion dollars in revenues.

How do you explain Securitas presence in the American market?
“When I was COO for Pinkerton, we analyzed the competition in the U.S. and the world, because we were expanding Pinkerton internationally. Securitas was a company we watched very closely – this was before 1999 – as it had made some significant acquisitions in Spain, Germany, France, and the Scandinavian countries.”
“It was obvious that the Securitas leadership had the ambition to be number one in Europe, and that it didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to think that they wanted to get into the American market, since it was the biggest security market in the world.”

What followed next was a set of meetings with key players in the industry to gage market facts and trends, and obtain general information about how to raise standards and develop the industry. It was during this process that the leadership of Pinkerton came to know the leadership of Securitas. “In 1998 we started to have serious discussions with them which culminated in the acquisition in early 1999,” he says.

One would think that the Americans would have the upper hand in the security business. How come it wasn’t Pinkerton that bought Securitas? And what did the Swedes bring to the table?
“When we saw what Securitas had accomplished, how they did it, and the stock market’s appreciation of what they had done, we realized that we could learn something from them. They had a model and a plan. It was fairly simple, easy to understand and easy to communicate. Even though we all like to think that we know more about our positions than anybody else, we understood that Securitas had taken a fresh look at security,” Don Walker explains.
“It was not an issue of pride, but of professionalism. This is a tedious business with lots of details, and Securitas simplified it with their model. That’s why they were able to do certain things in Europe, and we brought that model to the U.S.”

Could you say that they benefited from coming in with an outsider’s perspective?
“Yes, definitively. Most people tend to get buried in the details, no matter what the job is. Or sometimes people focus on doing the same things differently, but there was no need to do more of the same. Securitas and in particular Thomas Berglund, was a dreamer who could visualize what should be. He had a very broad and deep imagination, which incorporated the idea of taking a risk. As Thomas and Håkan Winberg developed the strategy, and presented it to the Securitas board, it became very clear to the board, and the U.S. market, that they were on the right track.”

Don Walker says that Thomas Berglund early on in the talks made clear that he didn’t want to create just another U.S. security company. He wanted to lead and change the industry, and knew that it took market size to do that.
“He asked if we could create the largest security company in the United States, and I said, absolutely. Then he asked to see our plans for how to do that, so I put forth a strategy of acquisitions that was consistent with Securitas’ plans. Securitas then acquired Pinkerton.”

Within a year, Securitas has bought up a large part of the private American security industry, including American Protective Services (APS,) First Security Services, Smith’s Security, Doyle’s Security, and Burns International Security, which was the second largest security company in the U.S.
“Before buying Burns, we had grown Securitas from a company with roughly 600 million dollars in U.S. sales, to a company doing about a 1.3 billion dollars. Burns added another 1.1 billion,” he says.

What is Securitas in the U.S. today? You fused a number of regional and local security companies with Pinkerton at the core?
“Yes.”

What’s the difference between Securitas in the U.S. and in Europe?
“Well, it’s really a totally new company. When you take ten acquisitions with ten different cultures and mold those together, then you have to create a new culture.”
“It took a lot of hard work, but the Securitas model was a roadmap that made it easier.”

We had three objectives in mind and we accomplished them:

1. Establish a clear market leadership in each region of the country, as well as in the U.S. as a whole.
   
2. Create a large platform for organic growth.
   
3. Achieve density and cost efficiency.
   

“We’ve achieved all three, so now we are in the process of refinement and transitioning from selling services to selling security solutions.”

When you had just packaged these changes, 9/11 happened? How did 9/11 change things? Has it affected growth and strategy?
“It changed things in certain regions in the U.S., obviously in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and other mayor cities east of the Mississippi River. It was a change in attitude and perspective, but I would not say that there has been much of a change in other parts of the country.”

It must have been hard to merge ten different corporate cultures, but how about the merging with a corporate culture that came from Sweden, with its labor laws and so on? Swedish companies entering the U.S. can have a hard time dealing with America itself, its size, complications and lawsuits. People sometimes think that the world is more globalized than it really is. How was it for Securitas in the U.S. to work with the Swedes and the original model?
“The Securitas management probably underestimated the legal system in the U.S. They believed that there were differences in every country, but I don’t think that they fully appreciated the legal system, and how litigious the U.S. environment can be. Neither did they always understand the extent to which the industry is the controlled by individual states. It was an educational process,” he says

One would think that security is a very local business where you need to get down to the nitty-gritty of things? How come then that we are getting global companies with models that you can transfer from China to the U.S. and so on?
“This has changed dramatically over the past few years. Smaller accounts and contracts are local, but major U.S. corporations – not so much European and Asian corporations with the exception of Toyota – are looking for global commonalities. We have been talking about this major shift as far back as 1999, and even before that. Globalization is real and security is part of that.”

Could one say that the Swedish background affects the relationship to labor?
“Training is definitively a benefit that we have received from the Swedish experience. Thomas Berglund has been so committed to the Securitas executive training program that he personally attended every session. That’s been a major time commitment. Through his example, everybody understood that we are not just talking about training, but that it is real. Securitas has been very supportive in encouraging new training programs, some of them from Sweden, some from Norway and other countries. This has been a benefit of this new corporate structure within Securitas. We have all benefited from each other’s experiences.

So training is not only for executives?
“No, it goes all the way down.”

Does that affect your ability to retain staff?
“There are several things, of which retention is one. It’s also that we are telling people that we care, and that there is a career path. People may start as a security officer, and work themselves up to a supervisor and security manager. We have several vice presidents that started as security officers.”

Securitas has a national footprint in the U.S. and is spreading out into consulting. Is that the wave of the future?
“Yes, consulting, investigations, and risk analysis. We are working with the energy industry, and the government, especially the federal government.”

Isn’t hard to work with the federal government when you are a foreign-owned company?
“We’ve addressed these issues by creating Pinkerton Government Services, which has an independent board of directors in the U.S., and is well received to handle top secret or cleared government contracts. But Securitas can handle many other contracts that don’t need to be cleared.”

Will Securitas U.S. experience help in your global expansion?
“We’ve already announced that we are expanding into new markets. We’ve just opened our first office in India, Pinkerton Investigation Services, and we’ve just opened our first office in China. We have a company in Argentina that is relatively new, and we are working on a company in Brazil. It’s a global expansion.”

What is your impression of working with Swedes?
“We’ve all been impressed by how hardworking and dedicated the Swedish management is, and how loyal they are to the company. Sometimes we’ve had concerns that our particular issues here were not as well understood as they should be, but then we had to step back, and say that maybe we didn’t do such a good job in explaining it. It’s an educational process, because people from different cultures have differences. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what country you are from. What is important is to have an open mind and work together. It’s been fine, a good relationship.”

Hans Sandberg

We're all neighbors now

I can't help but feeling that there is something rotten … no not in the Kingdom of Denmark … but in the entire world. As much as I want to, I cannot put all the blame for the ugly state of the world on George W. Bush, or Dick Cheney, or for that matter Osama bin-Laden. Contrast our current malaise with the world at the end of the Cold War. Do you remember how good we felt when the wall came down? There was hope in the air, where today, there seems to be mostly smoke after bombs and disasters. It as if the only bright spot in the world is China, which is very sad, as it is a repressive authoritarian regime.

What happened to hope? The current outrage among fundamentalist Muslims is a sign of what is wrong with our time, but it also points to the underlying causes that makes people on one side of the world explode in fury over a set of cartoons published on the other side. Technology has brought the world together and released the economic forces of globalization. Hence we are now much closer to each other than anybody thought was possible, rendering us not only benefits of trade, but the whole shebang. Mankind has rather unwittingly entered into a global wedding, for better or worse. The honeymoon was quick and sweet, and then came the fight over the dishes, and fear of our new neighbors, who are watching those strange movies on their satellite-TV system.

We are so close now, so close that we care for each other the way people care for each other across ethnic and micro-geographic borders. It used to be that neighbors hated each other, like the Germans and the French, the British and the Irish, the Khmers and the Vietnamese, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the Iranians and the Iraqis, and once also the Danes and the Swedes – Remember the Bloodbath in Stockholm 1520? (I guess, there were not enough good fences to go around.)

You don't hate people who you don't see. It's when you see them you realize how different they are, and how scary the thought is that your kids may want to play with their kids, and that your daughter may one day fall in love with one of them, one of THEM!

Greed and progress brings us all together, but coming back from the market with the short end of the stick, you are upset. Fear and suspicion undermines the marketplace and breeds resentment, which is why the scale is not just a symbol for justice, but a peacemaker. Some people are not ready for the marketplace, while others seems to have grown up there… It is easy to throw blame around, but deep down you know that it was your own weakness that made you into a victim. What are you going to do? Sharpen your knives or your skills?

It is always easier to blame someone else. Who wants to go tell the chief or the elder council that our age-old traditions and accumulated collective wisdom doesn't work anymore? For all of its poetic beauty, it doesn't do the trick. The priest, the rabbi, the mufti or the medicine man may be great comforters, telling us what we want to hear so badly, but they don't heal bleeding wounds, nor do they fill empty stomachs.

Adam Smith was right. You don't expect the baker to give you a loaf of bread out of charity, or the baker will go out of business. You have to bring something to the market in order to bring something back.

It was probably easier when roads were short and markets small. You knew whom you were dealing with, and you would meet him or her during the week. But who knows where that pair of sneakers are made (except that they were assembled in China, by a subsidiary of a company whose shares are traded in New York.) Marx called that feeling alienation. You don't know your producer anymore, and feel estranged from the product and the world behind it. You have lost control; you depend on others. That is why trade breeds fear. There is a lack of trust.

During the Cold War, there were at least two rivals caring for us out of fear that we would turn to the other. When the wall came down, and the Kremlin crumbled, they stopped caring. The new U.S. president, George W. Bush, looked at the Middle East back in the beginning of 2001 and told the world that he didn't care. It took the terror attacks of September 11 to make him change his mind. No, I'm not saying that 9/11 was his fault, but his initial pullback from the world – remember his dizzing of the Kyoto Protocol and the International Court? – gave the world the impression that America doesn't care, which played into the hands of the reactionary mullahs of Iran, the Talibans of Afghanistan and the bitter Osama bin-Laden. America's walkout was their big chance.

Globalization pulls the world together economically, while at the same time pulling it apart emotionally. It's time to focus more on what our neighbors say and think, rather than to focus on what they look like.

Hans Sandberg
21 feb 2006

How St. Paul Got Energy

(This article was first published in Currents Magazine, Spring 2006).

Back in 1979 -- during the second oil crisis – the state of Minnesota sent a delegation to Europe in search of a way to break its oil dependency. They found it in Uppsala, just northwest of Stockholm. “What made us unique was that we could use many different types of fuel,” says Anders Rydåker, president of District Energy in St. Paul, which runs a huge state-of-the-art system for remote heating/cooling.

District heating means that you warm up buildings by circulating hot water or steam through underground pipes, instead of relying on heaters in each individual factory, office or apartment building. The basic idea goes back to the aqueducts of the Roman Empire, but one of the oldest written reports is a complaint in France about two citizens, who didn’t pay their heating bills. The year was 1332.
“The modern technology for district heating was invented in the U.S. about 120 years ago, but Sweden has developed the technology to a point where we can help other countries. Our system knowledge is quite unique,” says Sven Werner, professor at Chalmers University of Technology, and a leading expert on district heating systems.

When the Minnesota delegation arrived in Uppsala, Anders Rydåker worked for Hans Nyman at Uppsala Industriverk (the local energy authority,) who had pioneered an advanced district heating system. It produced and distributed heat generated by a wide variety of methods, from burning household garbage, waste products from forestry, to tapping energy from fields of solar panels, and extracting heat from sewage water with heat pumps. “Today, half of all heating in Sweden is district heat,” Sven Werner says.

The energy department of Minnesota was so convinced by the Uppsala demonstration that they called Hans Nyman and asked him to come over and evaluate the prospects for introducing the technology there. It took four years to investigate and prepare for a new system, but eventually they could start converting the old obsolete district heating system in St. Paul to the new Swedish model. However, Hans Nyman called Anders Rydåker in 1983. “You have to come over. I need you here,” he said. Nyman felt that it was hard to get the Americans to understand the new model, which used hot water in contrast to older steam-based systems.

“The project in St. Paul was seen as a pilot project for the entire state. It took two years to build it, but just as we had finished it, the oil and natural gas prices dropped, which made it economically hard for us to compete,” Anders Rydåker says. He was offered the job as head of St. Paul’s energy company after Hans Nyman died from cancer in 1993. District Energy Inc. today serves close to 475 commercial, industrial and residential buildings in and around St. Paul. President George W. Bush toured the company before he gave his first major speech on his energy policy in May of 2001. In it he described the company as a model of energy efficiency, diversity and affordability.

The system in St. Paul relies on biomass in the form of wood chips, but can also use oil, natural gas, or coal. Over time it eliminated 75 percent of the oil and coal usage, delivering heat at stable prices for two decades while providing this city of 400,000 with an environmentally friendly energy system.

However successful the district heating system was in St. Paul, it lost much of its steam when oil and gas prices dropped drastically, forcing Anders Rydåker and his colleges to rethink their mission. They now started to design systems that circulate cold water instead of hot.
”Property owners realized in the 1960’s that a more centralized system could save money by reducing the size of the maintenance staff for heaters and air-conditioning units. We investigated the technology and by 1993 we had figured out how to do it,” says Anders Rydåker, who had moved back to Sweden in 1989 and convinced Stockholm’s public energy utility to build a seawater-based system that keeps all of downtown Stockholm cool during the summer. “It is one of the world’s largest district cooling system,” Sven Werner says.

One reason for why Sweden became so strong in district energy and other alternative energy technologies was the country’s energy taxes, especially on oil and gas.
”They forced its engineers to be more inventive when it came to diminish the dependence on oil and natural gas. This helped Sweden to move ahead in this field,” says Anders Rydåker.

The hardest part when it comes to promoting district energy is that it takes large investments, which may seen from a strictly economical point of view only yield marginal benefits. The interest in district energy has been much stronger in Europe, Russia and the former Eastern Europe, and Canada, but the interest is growing in the U.S. as well.

The rising oil- and natural gas prices, and the growing awareness of the global warming has opened up new opportunities for District Energy, both when it comes to heating and cooling. Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning, a subsidiary of District Energy’s affiliate Market Street Energy, is currently developing a 120 million dollar system for cooling downtown Honolulu with deep-seawater. One of Anders Rydåker’s colleges, Ingvar Larsson, is chief engineer for the project.

“I am very optimistic and believe that we are in the beginning of an expansion phase. Our customers are very happy, and we will expand our systems. We are right now evaluating different expansion scenarios dependent on various price levels for oil and gas. We don’t need to search for new customers. They are knocking on our doors,” he says.

Hans Sandberg

Trollbäck: Street-Smart Swede Takes Fifth

(From Currents' Fall 2005 issue)

Jakob Trollbäck comes off as the stereotypical humble shy Swede, but don’t believe it. He is actually one of the hotter creative names in U.S. advertising, and all you need to do feel his impact, is to flag down a Manhattan taxicab. Chances are good that the sign on top will read ”Getaway car.” And if you head for the bus, a sign on the side might read: ”Witness Relocation,” while the sign on the bus that you can’t get around reads ”Roadblock.” These subliminal signs, which hint at an unseen world of excitement, are part of a multimillion campaign for Court TV produced by Trollbäck + Company.

Jakob Trollbäck came to New York pretty much empty handed, well not quite as he did carry his “book,” when he did his rounds, looking for a job in the big city. He didn’t have much in terms formal education in the trade, but he was - among other things - a pretty good disc jockey, and he had taught himself how to do graphics design on a Macintosh, which in December 1991 was not as common a skill as it is today.

Why New York? He went there as a tourist in 1987 and was struck by the creative environment, and the “can do” attitude. Back home in Stockholm, he had found it impossible to the foot in the door, as the first question would always be about his education in the trade. “Things have changed since then. This was fifteen years ago,” he reminds us.

In the Big Apple, he landed a job with Bob Greenberg’s agency R/Greenberg, a pioneer in using CAD (computer aided design) to make movies like “Alien” and "Superman.”
“I knew a freelancer that had worked for them and I knew that they worked with animation. Besides, I did know computers, which at that time was not as common as today,” he says. He worked there for seven years and became its creative director before leaving in 1999 to start his own company. The new company was set up with his and his wife’s money as the only investments. His first client was Leo Burnett, the Chicago based agency. “We started with motion graphics, and did a logo for Leo Burnett’s ad movies.”
Trollbäck + Company has also done work for HBO, TCM, Jaguar, Nike, Volvo, Target and Chevrolet.

About twenty people work at the main office on the fourteenth floor at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 31’s Street, two blocks south of the Empire State Building. The company recently opened a second office with five employees in Venice outside L.A.

The difference between Swedish and American TV is that the pressure is much higher to get people to stay with the channel, he says. That makes it essential to communicate brand attitude to the viewer, which is something Trollbäck + Company did when they redesigned the cable channel TNT, and later the American Movie Channel (AMC) and Court TV.

“Swedes are highly respected in the trade, he says, and suggests that their popularity has something to do with the Lutheran heritage, which favored the clean and simple message over the elaborate and ornamental. “When you come to New York, it is all cool stuff, but after a while you start to think about how to cut through the clutter,” he says mentioning keywords such as “clever,” “intelligent” and “truth.” “It’s about respecting people’s intelligence.” Part of the secret behind the success of Jakob Trollbäck could be that he approaches the country with a degree of skepticism. “Sometimes I feel like America is a land of teenagers, where there is little respect for wisdom.” What is it that Sweden brings to America in advertising? “In Swedish advertising you have to respect the customers. That is ABC. People say that they do it in America too, but advertising tend to be superficial and to talk down to people.” Another Swedish trait popular in the U.S. is its “dry” humor, like that sign on the phone booth saying “The Lookout,” or the umbrella over the hotdog-stand with “Undercover” on it.

Hans Sandberg

Don’t Forget Your Heritage, But Don’t Overplay It Either

Currents Fall issue 2005.

In Sweden, you can take chances without risking your job, argues Hans Ullmark, in a wide-ranging interview about Swedes and advertising, and how you communicate in the American market. Hans Ullmark is CEO of the San Francisco based advertising agency Collaborate. Back in the mid 1980’s he started up Anderson & Lembke in New York City together with Steve Trygg.

One would think that it would be hard to crack the advertising business for anybody but a true native. However, we have seen a bunch of Swedes making it over here. Why is this? Is it just a matter of highly talented people lured to the huge U.S. market, much like Swedish hockey stars dream of the national hockey league? Or do they bring anything else that helps them succeed in the U.S.? “I don’t know,” Hans Ullmark says, warning against hyperbole. “I have been here for 21 years and I have had agencies in Europe and in Sweden, and I have seen people coming over here, but some of them failed despite being very capable people. One was a professor of design in Sweden, and had an enormous talent, but it didn’t work out too well. And then there was Hall & Cederquist, whose New York office failed despite them being extremely good in Sweden and having a very good local manager,” he says.

“But Sweden has been very strong in advertising for at least forty years. Sweden is probably the European country that has won most international awards per capita. I’m not sure about what it is, but we do have a large degree of creative freedom. You are allowed to make mistakes, without having to fear for your job. Another thins thing is that our agencies are less hierarchical compared to the American ones. It is fairly egalitarian, which creates a leveled playing field for talents and ideas. Neither do we in Sweden believe in polling and testing every idea, which allows us to follow your our heart and mind. If it feels right, let’s go with it,” he says and adds. “We also worked with a rather refreshing humor, which may have been a bit raw, but not vulgar. People could relate to it.”

“When Swedish advertising professionals took their craft to the U.S., they quickly found themselves at home, with agencies that were willing to listen to their ideas, and clients who were ready to consider the ideas even if they at first sounded a bit wacky.”

Should I take it that the Swedish employment-security model nurtures creative talents, who then skip over to the U.S. to avoid the high income taxes? “Well, I can only speak for myself, and in my case it wasn’t the high taxes, but the dream of a larger playing field.”

Sweden is, despite its Lutheran heritage, deeply Americanized. You grow up entrenched by the American popular culture, and at the same time, while the French and Germans have the option of focusing on their home markets, ours is too small. “You are making a good point, and I believe that there is a lot to it. We Swedes find it easy to take in the American culture, and to figure out how to use it. I have just finished a branding workshop with 300 people from all over the world, where many had a hard time getting the message, despite the fact that they all speak English. It is as if they don’t really understand what I am saying. We never have that problem when we work with Swedes coming to the U.S. to work with marketing.”

At the same time, one could argue that the Swedish environment in many ways is hostile to advertising, with politicians trying to limit it and the average consumer being very skeptic against ads. Isn’t this a paradox? ”Yes it is, but all I know is that there are people who like to do the opposite thing, myself included. I grew up as a socialist, and took flak from my friends when I started in advertising. ‘How can you do this?’ they asked, but after a while they understood that I was not out to hurt society.”

Does being Swedish still affect your work after two decades in the U.S.? Does it help, or does it trip you up sometimes? “Steve Trygg and I may have been talking a little too much about Sweden when we came here twenty-one years ago, but we corrected that and defined ourselves as a global agency, coming out of Sweden. We sometimes used our history to help explain our thinking, while we ignored it if it was not relevant. But it never tripped me up, and if anything it was something positive,” he says.

“As for my new bureau agency Collaborate, the only thing Swedish about it is that we try to give people a little longer vacations, and that we want our staff to have a balance between life and work. We try to be more egalitarian and a little less hierarchical than an average American agency. This worked out really well at Anderson & Lembke.”

Growing up in Sweden, you become somewhat naïve, and not as cynical as a native New Yorker. When a Swede comes to New York, he jumps on the first train to Harlem. “Well, when I came to New York the first time, I walked a hundred blocks down from the Apollo Theatre in the middle of the night and dressed in a white suite. That was naïve, but nobody did anything to me. They just laughed,” says Hans Ullmark.

“Swedish and Scandinavian design was of tremendous help when we started Anderson & Lembke in the U.S. It was well known, and our American clients were impressed when they saw how we implemented it. It went home really well.”

“The Swedish way of communicating is conceptual and focuses on the idea. We often had to retrain our American designers, and teach them a new way of thinking, a cleaner and more striking graphic design.”

What are the biggest communication mistakes a Swedish company can do when it tries to reach the American market? “I have met with hundreds of European and Swedish companies over the years, and many are extremely naïve about how to pursue the American market, both large and small companies. The main problem is that they look at the U.S. as one single market, but it is very hard for any Swedish company to take on this huge continent. They don’t understand market segmentation very well. In Sweden, you can go from zero to being a leader in a fairly short time because it is a small market, but it is impossible to do that in the U.S. Even if you managed to do it in Europe, it is not going to work here,” he says.

“Another mistake is that they stress their Swedish origin too much, and talk way too much about Sweden. You can talk about Sweden when it is relevant, but you need to show that you are committed to this market and here to stay. People often fail to make this point.”

“You also need to have an American management. There can be Swedes too, but they have to play it in a way so that it feels like the company has an American leadership.”

So it is more a matter of substance, than the language itself? “Yes, right!”

“Swedes can also be naïve when it comes to money and investments. It will cost a lot of money to start a company here, whatever business you are in. Most companies have no clue about the cost. When Steve and I started in the U.S., we took out a meager salary, which was hardly enough to pay the mortgage on our houses in Connecticut. It was tough, but we prioritized to invest 100,000 dollars in marketing the company. We invested more in marketing than in our salaries. Few Swedes get this, as entrepreneurship is less risky in Sweden compared to in the U.S. We have no safety nets. You’re on your own.”

”It takes some time to figure these things out, but some companies do. They hire the right Americans and blend the best of their Swedish heritage with the best of the American corporate culture. I remember a piece of advice I got from Volvo in the beginning. They told me to always speak English, even if you are two Swedes sitting alone in a conference room. Other ways, people may assume that you are talking about them. Small things like that are important when you build a company in the U.S.”

Hans Sandberg(This interview was first published in Currents' Fall issue 2005.)

Americans Are Finally “Getting” Cheese

(First published in the Norwegian food retail newspaper Dagligvarehandelen in September 2005.) 

If you ask for American Cheese in an American supermarket, chances are that you will be offered a small square block of an industrially processed product that is pre-sliced and individually wrapped, but has little if any taste. But the American cheese landscape is changing, and could follow the path towards sophistication, similar to what happened to the country's coffee and wine culture over the past few decades. 

“We are serving 160 wines by the glass and have over 200-250 cheeses,“ says Frank Bismuth, General Manager of Artisanal, a New York restaurant located on the 32^nd Street close to Park Avenue.

Artisanal opened in 2001 and seats about 180 people. One of the most popular items on the menu is the cheese fondue, of course! Many customers, who come in for lunch or dinner, and smell the cheese, end up buying a piece of hand made and often pungent cheese from the cheese deli, which sits along one side of the restaurant.

“Cheese is becoming more popular, especially in New York City, which is very cosmopolitan and where people travel a lot,” says Frank Bismuth, who came to New York from Paris eleven years ago. “We find that people are very passionate about cheese," he says.

It is a bit of a paradox that cheese is gaining in popularity at the same time as health care experts and mass media warn of the obesity epidemic, but Frank Bismuth gives at least some of the credit for the current cheese craze to the Atkins diet, which allows its dieters to indulge in fatty foods, as long as they cut back on the carbohydrates. “You can enjoy your cheese without feeling guilty,” he adds. 

Artisanal carries cheeses from all over the world, from Spain, Italy and France, England and Scotland, just to name a few places of origin. “We also have a lot of great domestic cheeses, like those from Vermont and California,” he says. “And more and more restaurants are expanding their cheese selection,” he says. This growing cheese interest led to the opening of the Artisanal Premium Cheese Center in New York in 2003, which promotes and distributes artisan cheese, as well as gives classes to cheese lovers and aspiring cheese sellers alike. New York Times recently reported that many women are entering the cheese trade, and some even have taken up making artisan cheese. Over 1,700 people have taken classes at the center. The American Cheese Society, which is headquartered in Kentucky, has seen its membership double in four years and now counts about 1,000 members.

Good cheese is of course not new to New York City, but it seems that the taste for good non-industrial cheese is spreading beyond the ethnic enclaves of the big cities. Valdemar Albrecht is in charge of the cheeses at Artisanal. He is from Germany, but has lived in Barcelona, Spain and about ten years in the U.S. “Our focus here is to showcase artisan cheese making. All these cheeses are small batches. We both sell cheese to customers, but also prepare them for customers who want some cheese to their wine,” he says, adding “Almost everything you see here comes from the Artisanal Premium Cheese Center, but we have our own cave here where we stock our cheeses.” 

“Rouge River Blue is one of the most expensive domestic cheeses we have. We also have a classic French cheese called Roquefort. They sell for about 37 dollars per pound. This might sound like a lot, but these are cheeses made by artists, so I think they are prices accordingly.”

“I think that the attitude to cheese is changing the more we expose them to cheeses and educated about them. Luckily, we have an extremely savvy clientèle here in New York. They are world travelers, very well educated and they know the products that they want. But there is definitively a shift in the United States’ cheese culture. We were in Kentucky two weeks ago, at the American Cheese Society’s convention, and you can see cheese makers coming out of every single state of the United States. That speaks very positive for the future of America’s cheese culture,” says Valdemar Albrecht. 

“People see cheese as the perfect food. It has been eaten for a thousand years and it is easily digested, and there is something wonderful about it. As far as the cholesterol goes, you may need to have some red wine with it,” he laughs.

Are there any Scandinavian cheeses among the 250? 

“No, but we are very interested in tasting artisan cheeses from Scandinavia. I am really fond of Norwegian gjetost, which my father used to give me when I was little. I might have issues with calling it a cheese, but I really enjoyed it.”

Good cheese can also be a very personal choice. When asked about his personal favorites, Valdemar Albrecht says: “I do have a passion for many of these cheeses. They can bring memories of a happy time that I had. When I for example think of a cheese such as the Spanish Roncal, it reminds me of my grandfather, because that was the first cheese that he gave me. That cheese will always have a very special place in my heart.” He says that one of the most rewarding aspects of his job is to see the expression in the face of somebody when he has served them that special cheese they are connected to.

Hans Sandberg

The New New Boss - Annika Falkengren

(Article first published in Currents 2 2005).

“I never felt that anybody looked at me differently because I was a woman. What made the difference was that I got the opportunity to work in line management where you can show results,” says Annika Falkengren, deputy CEO and soon full CEO of one of Sweden’s largest banks, the SEB.

Annika Falkengren was recently named the most powerful businesswoman in Sweden, but female bosses are a rare species in the private business sector of welfare Sweden. Women are found in many management jobs in the public sector, they have captured close to half of the seats in the parliament (45 percent), and eleven of twenty-two posts in the cabinet. Although 90 percent of Sweden’s women work, the private sector has been embarrassingly slow in letting women join the ranks of management, and even more so when you reach the top. Only two percent of the CEO’s of publicly traded companies are women, and although the number of female board members took a dramatic jump after vice-premier Margareta Winberg in November 2002 threatened with quotas, women are still few and far between in most boardrooms. This in a country that has been run by social democrats for most of the past three quarters of a century, not counting a couple of short-lived non-socialist interludes.

Annika was of course not selected as a CEO because she was a woman, something Jacob Wallenberg, the chairman of the board, made explicitly clear as he introduced the result of a yearlong executive search done by headhunters. She got the job for the same reason that Samuel Palmisano became the new CEO of IBM when Louis Gerstner retired. She had been a line manager in charge of SEB:s largest business area – Corporate & Institutions - that had produced the right numbers year after year, adding value to the bottom line. There may have been many good soft reasons to pick a female CEO in a company where 60 percent of the employees are women, but this decision was about competence and performance.

The symbolic significance of this decision may however not lie so much in today’s outcome, but in the fact that she might very well have been overlooked a generation ago.

“I am proud over the fact that the bank, for the first time in 50 years, picked the new CEO from inside. The SEB and the Wallenberg family is sometimes seen as rather conservative, so it is nice to be able to show that we as always are professional and modern in our thinking. We preserve the heritage, but view the world with modern eyes,” she says.

But change is coming and it is reaching the boardrooms as well: Half of the eight members of FSB’s board are now women, five of fourteen board members at Svenska Handelsbanken (SHB) are women, as are four out of twelve at Nordea. In this area however, SEB is a laggard: When Annika joins the board next year; only three out of twelve members will be women.

Annika has worked in the bank for almost half of her life (she is 43), and claims that she never experienced any glass ceiling or glass walls. “I work in the financial sector, which I think is an excellent sector to be in, as it is results-oriented. I’ve also had very good managers. My first manager, Mats Larsson, followed my career for ten years, and he meant a lot to me. I turned down a couple of job offers in the beginning, not feeling quite confident about my ability, but he pushed me ahead. There was no corporate policy to promote women; it was just that my manager felt that I was suitable, even when I couldn’t see it myself. I think that women tend to hesitate more before taking on a new task. We want to be so sure, while men just throw themselves into the game saying ‘I’ll take care of that!’ I was lucky in having a manager that believed in me, and then I started to work for CEO Lars Thunell, which also worked out well.” (He is 58 and will retire when Annika takes over the reins.)

“I never felt that anybody looked at me differently because I was a woman. What made the difference was that I got the opportunity to work in line management where you can show results. I felt safety in knowing that I had delivered ‘kronor’ and ‘ören’ (i.e. dollars and cents) to the bottom line and had happy customers. It shows,” she continues.

She may not have faced a corporate glass ceiling herself, but she is fully aware of the wider impact of her appointment. She wants to encourage other women to become managers, which is why she has addressed the Swedish-American Executive Women’s conferences founded by Renee Lundholm, president of SACC New York, and speaks at universities and business schools.

For Annika herself, this has been only one of the large changes to her life over the last few years. She married Ulf Falkengren and gave birth to a daughter about a year ago. Now she had the option of enjoying 480 days of paid parental leave - the standard in Sweden - but she was soon back at work. “I married the right man. I was on maternity leave for three months, and now he stays home taking care of our daughter until she is ready for day-care. So far that solution has worked well for us. I am also privileged in that I can afford to buy the services we need to make our everyday life manageable,” she says.

When asked about managerial role models, she says that she has many, but can’t single out one particular. She is grateful to her managers at the bank, and admires Jack Welch for his focus on human resources and quality. In the background there is also her mother, who was working outside the house until her father, a diplomat, was stationed in Thailand. “I had a very strong father figure who believed that anything I did was fabulous,” she laughs.

Her road to the top was never mapped out at an early stage. “There are those who come out strong, pushing with all their might, but things don’t always happen according to your plan. You must be ready to seize the moment. My first boss left the bank when he was 51 and wanted me to take over. I was only 37 then. It was pure luck. If he had stayed on for ten more years, I may have been doing something else. And then we have the fact that Lars Thunell retires relatively early… Don’t expect the road to be completely laid out. Find a job that you feel passionate about rather than skit around from base to base.” For her it was also important that she worked in a wholesale division, and she advices women to pursue jobs as line managers, which is unusual as many women choose to work in HR, marketing or communication. “There are few women as line managers, but that is where CEO’s are usually picked, not from the staff at the headquarters.

“One woman cannot change society. There needs to be more of us for it to be possible to say that Sweden has truly embraced the concept of women as leaders in the corporate world. SEB is pro-actively aiming at increasing the number of senior managers. For us it is a question of profitability. We cannot afford to miss out on 50 percent of the most talented people,” Annika Falkengren concludes.

Hans Sandberg

Beyond the Superwoman...

(Article first published in Currents No. 2 2005)


You’ve heard it before: In Sweden, almost all adult women work and new parents get 480 days of paid parental leave, plus subsidies from the government. In America, soccer moms, with Ph.D.’s but no career, shuttle their children between after school-programs, while childless yuppies race for the top. Stereotypes about Sweden and America are not hard to come by, but the messy reality of contemporary life and work is harder to grasp.

“There are so many paradoxes,” says Lillemor Westergren, associate professor at the School of Business at Stockholm University. She and many other Swedish researchers are critical of Sweden’s achivements when it comes to gender equality in the private business sector. “Our massmedia are still making a big deal about the appointment of a female CEO,” she says, but adds that “the appointment of Annika Falkengren as CEO in a such conservative sector as banking, and in particular of SEB, could indicate that something big is happening in Sweden.” But on the other hand, she warns that it may be premature to talk about a new trend. Only a handful of women have reached the pinnacles of power in the private sector, and very few women have taken place in the overwhelmingly male boards of publicly traded companies.

It is true both in Sweden and in the U.S. that there are very few women at the very top of the business world, but over half of all managers in the U.S. are women, and women run many large companies. Here the numbers are not all that flattering for Sweden. Female managers at mid- to higher level in the private sector grew from 9 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2002, and 31 percent in 2004. In publicly traded companies, the proportion reached 31 percent in 2002, and 34.5 percent in may of 2004 (according to Micromediabanken’s 2004 survey.) In the Swedish banking sector, the percentage of female managers rose from 10 percent in 1990 to 28 percent in 2004.

“There was a large jump in the number of women board members in private industry,” says Anne D. Boschini, a research associate at the Department of Economics at Stockholm University, and author of a gender study for the Center for Business and Policy Studies (SNS). The jump occurred in 2003 in response to a government threat of legal action in order increase the number of women board members. This had been done already in Norway, where companies above a certain size must have at least 40 percent female board members. In Sweden, only ten percent of board members are women, and 42 percent of all corporate boards are exclusively male. The social democratic government is not happy with this state of affairs and still talks about quotas.

Sweden is about ten years behind the U.S., when it comes to women and management, according to Boschini. She adds that one of the more surprising results of recent research is that while the corporate glass ceiling has been shattered in the U.S., it remains in place in Sweden. And it is getting worse. “The differences in pay between men and women are increasing as you reach higher pay scales, which is not the case in the U.S.,” she says.

One possible explanation could be that the Swedish model is based on what Marianne Sundström, associate professor at Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) calls a ”working class” perspective. ”Women are expected to work, but not really to have a career,” she says. The pay after tax – even for a mid-level manager – doesn’t allow her to hire help to deal with the household work, or a private nanny, which might be a necessity if you have to take an afternoon flight to Berlin or New York, and your husband is also working fulltime. Even if you have the money, the private service sector is very limited, and besides, many Swedes frown upon such ”private” solutions. In the U.S. the service sector is much more developed, from take-out food to gardening and housecleaning.

”I remember how few women there used to be at the platform at the train station in Greenwhich back in 1983. Today there must be 30-40 percent women,” says Renee Lundblom, a veteran of SACC New York, and its first female president. She runs the largest and oldest of SACC-USA’s 19 member chambers, and is also the founder of the Executive Women’s Conference, which alternates between Sweden and the U.S. ”We want to build bridges between Swedish and American female executives,” she says and adds that networking is often hard for women, as they do more of the housework and have less time and energy for mingling. But networking is important, and the conference is one way to help women share their experiences and get ahead.

There have been large changes in both Sweden and the U.S. over the past 30-40 years. In the U.S. the civil rights movement and its aftermath led to a much tougher stand against discrimination, which over time made it risky for companies not only to engage in discrimination, but to ignore it. The threat of class action lawsuits made it a necessity to be proactive and institute policies that insulate a company from accusations of discrimination, and unequal treatment of women and minorities.

Sweden relied instead on a combination of legal and social reform to encourage women to work, and to promote gender equality at work and in society at large. The 1980 ”Act on Equality Between Men and Women in the Workplace” created an Ombudsman for Gender Equality (Jämställdhetsombudsman) to monitor and punish discrimination. This act, which in 1992 was replaced by the ”Equal Opportunity Act” demands of employers that they actively promote equality in the workplace. There is also a government Council on Equality Issues, which is led by the Minister for Gender Equality Affairs. Women have had the right to vote since 1921. 45 percent of the 349 members of the parliament are women, and eleven of twenty-two members of Göran Persson’s cabinet are women.

However, in the private business sector, change has been slow. And it seems that - one of many paradoxes in this field - the very same system that was built to support parents and women in particular, is holding back those women who want to pursue a career in the corporate world. The Swedish model is generous for working parents, as long as they stick to the model, which prefers uniform solutions. In addition, the egalitarian wage structure, plus the high and progressive income taxation makes it hard to afford help. “Pushing ahead in a career could mean that you have to work 60 hours a week, but it is expensive to pay your way out of household work in Sweden,” Marianne Sundström says. And even if Swedish men are picking up more of the household work these days, most of it still falls on the women, working or not.
Besides, a corporate executive may be less interested in parental leave, than having a nanny for their kids. “In Sweden, you are supposed to do everything yourself, taking care of the children, the household, the summer cottage. And as you are not supposed to hire help, it is very hard to strike a balance between work and life,” says Renee Lundholm.

Viveca Wahlstedt, who is manager for the consulting and executive search firm Carnegie Worldwide in Orlando, Florida, faced this negative attidude to hiring domestic help when she had applied for adoption back in the 1980’s before she moved to the U.S. The caseworker wrote in her case file that she intended to use a nanny, which was clearly a negative signal. (What kind of mother would do that?)

“I never took parental leave,” says Wahlstedt, whose father was an entrepreneur and had that “can do” attitude that led her to view things as possible rather than its opposite. “My first job was at a chemical company that faced an upsurge in international orders. They faced a crisis, because they couldn’t recruit more men and those they had already worked overtime. Why don’t hire women? There are many female chemist right out of school that can’t find jobs,” she suggested. It was an outrageous thought back then, but it worked and she made her way into management, and eventually to the U.S. “You need to build up your inner strength, so that you feel secure and don’t hesitate to try out things, or blame others for not achieving your goals,” says Wahlstedt, who is also a member of SACC-USA’s board.

Anna Stern worked in Sweden’s design world 1996-1998, and in the U.S. from 1999 to August of 2001. She says that men dominate the design business in the U.S., but that you can move ahead fast if you are willing to take responsibility and solve problems. And your pay moves too. Stern doubled her salary in two years time, but decided in the end to return to Sweden for sake of the lifestyle. She is a studio manager at the design firm Propeller, which was recently acquired by the larger firm Semcon. “Sweden has good design schools, and people are very open and creative,” she says.

Barbro Ehnbom came to the U.S. some 30 years ago on a scholarship fresh out of Sweden’s leading business school, the Stockholm School of Business (Svenska Handelshögskolan). She has worked in the pharmaceutical sector, in mergers and acquisitions, and runs her own investment advisory company, the DuHahn Group. She is also a longtime board member of SACC New York.

Her own experience – she was often the only woman around – has made her skeptical when it comes to women’s career chances whether it is in the U.S. or Sweden. This is why she has spent a considerable energy in building networks for young women entering the business world. Last year she launched a new scholarship for students at Svenska Handelshögskolan called “Female Economist of the Year.” She wants to put a spotlight on bright young women. It is not only about money and an internship, but access to a network of hundreds of experienced managers that stand ready to help and give advice. “You get a lead into the old boys network,” she says.

“But the real challenge is not right in the beginning of women’s career, which usually goes well until you are 37,38, 39. That’s when women tend to fall behind, because now you are suddenly a mother and have to deal with your husband’s ambition. At that point, it is not cute anymore to be successful. Your ambition is suddenly seen as a threat,” she says.

“It’s not enough for women to take the same role that men have had, and to find men who can run the household. All we’ve then done is to swap roles. The most important thing is to have those who put together the criteria for a board or the job description, to write them so that they can fit a woman. If you don’t do that, it will always be easy to say that there was no qualified woman available. Guess what, the criteria was written by three likeminded guys in their fifties,” she says.

Like many other female experts managers Currents spoke to, Ehnbom feels that the U.S. is ahead. “America is such an enormously diversified country. Of course, there are industries dominated by one type, i.e. white men. It was like that when I started out in the pharmaceutical industry, but other ways you do have a highly diversified nation, and that is true not only for women, but for blacks and Puerto Ricans and so on. If you have a good idea, you can make it here. You are not held back like in a more homogenous country like Sweden, where a few clans have been so dominant in the business world.”

“Many American companies understand the importance of diversity. This is true not only when it comes to gender discrimination, but also for ethnic discrimination. It is easier to be different in the U.S.,” says Agneta Rosenberg, who would have been the first female systems engineer in Sweden if she had taken an offer from IBM back in the 1980’s. She decided instead to take an offer from IBM in the U.S., and worked many years for them before starting her own consulting company Interim Ventures, which help Swedish companies to enter the U.S. market.

“It is easier to be a woman and a manager in the U.S. It is true that you have parental leave in Sweden and you get to keep you job even if you stay home with your children, but is it the same job that you return to? Many salespeople work with specific accounts, and maybe the client will prefer the person who took over while you were out. There is also the risk that you are loosing touch while you are home with the children. Other people may bypass you,” says Katarina G. Bonde, who has worked as a manager, venture capitalist and consultant in the IT-business for over twenty years. She is CEO of Kubi Corporation and a member of SACC-USA’s board.

Some American companies are trying to make it easier for women to combine parenthood with career, Bonde says while adding that many American women managers abstain from having children – yet another paradox. “It is hard to combine the two,” she says. Competition is so hard and many companies have a rigid attitude to parents need to stay home when a child is sick.

This dark side of the paradox was underscored in the March issue of Harvard Business Review. Too many women managers choose to “opt-out” from the career track according to its authors, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, director of the Gender and Public Policy Program at Columbia University, and Carolyn Buck Luce, a senior leader in the Global Accounts Group at Ernst & Young.

“Women want to work, and corporations must find alternative pathways to power. Our study, based on a sample of nearly 2,500 highly qualified women, examines the realities of women’s challenges and choices, probes their ambition, and traces the course of their careers. Our research shows beyond question that highly qualified women want to work. Not only have they invested heavily in their education and careers, but their professions give shape and meaning to their lives. Of the women who have taken an “off-ramp” from work, a full 93 percent want to come back. And many do take off-ramps. Nearly 60 percent of the women we surveyed take time out from their careers (37 percent) or follow what we call a “scenic route.” They decline a promotion, transfer from line to staff roles, take a job with less responsibility or work part-time, all in order to be able to manage the other responsibilities in their lives from time to time, be they children (45 percent), elder care (24 percent) or other outside interests. Put another way, the majority of highly qualified women have non-linear careers,” Carolyn Buck Luce wrote in a column for the Los Angeles Business Journal on April 4.

It looks like we are back where we started. But maybe not… While many Swedish experts and career women seem to yearn for more of the American dynamism, individualism and meritocracy, many American experts and career women seem to yearn for some of Sweden’s flexibility when it comes to giving parents more security, flexible work hours and maybe even a chance to smell baby powder now and then.

Could there be a middle way between the Scylla of the Swedish welfare uniformity and Charybdis of the American rat race?

Hans Sandberg