How culture drives success in the Nordics
Brave, bold, or even brash — founders need to be pretty fearless if they’re going to build a global business from scratch. But the line between audacity and arrogance is a thin one. And we have all seen how easy it is to step over it and ultimately put your whole company in danger.
We think there’s another way to do things, and we’ve actually seen it play out time and time again in the Nordics. The region is recognized as having birthed some of the best and biggest tech businesses in Europe — its share of multi-billion-dollar exits relative to GDP is the highest in the world. Much has been made of ingredients like early broadband access, the social safety net, engineering and design skills, work-life balance etc. But we think there’s something else that’s core to the people and their values.
[The Nordic region] is recognized as having birthed some of the best and biggest tech businesses in Europe — its share of multi-billion-dollar exits relative to GDP is the highest in the world . . . What has been distinctive is the remarkable way they lead their teams.
What has been distinctive is the remarkable way they lead their teams. Irrespective of the industry or stage, we have seen a pattern in how our Nordic businesses manage to build cultures of care and cooperation. The founders have been deliberate about giving away control from the start and in the process have shown how it’s possible to achieve excellence without ego. There’s an untold story here, and we felt compelled to write about it.
Of course, many start-ups we meet talk about culture, and many are getting it right. In the Nordics, it’s organic: they build their companies around it. At root, the Nordic style of leadership is less about being a commander and more about being a cultivator: of culture, of values, and of the potential of your team. People are straight-talking and action-oriented, squashing the inevitable and toxic internal politics. It would be easy to conclude that the Nordic start-up culture is ‘soft’. In fact, what we have seen is that their style of management often makes their companies both enduring and resilient. There is real company-wide alignment on building lasting businesses that will stand the test of time and markets — because ultimately that seems to be the yardstick by which they are measuring themselves.
In order to bring some of these themes to life, we had conversations with three of our founders to try and lift the lid on this very Nordic way of building billion-dollar tech businesses.
- The first: Ilkka Paananen of Supercell lays out how he organized his company to ensure that the leaders didn’t call the shots, and instead empowered the game developers to make the big decisions.
- The second: Lars Björk from Qlik, a global data business, tells us about how he approaches team motivation and explained why being straightforward matters so much.
- The third: Jonas Nordlander from Avito, Russia’s leading classifieds business, shares his story of how Nordic culture can be transplanted — and survive and thrive — in a totally different country and cultural context.
