Goran Carstedt, Ph.D., former head of Volvo; president of IKEA North America and board of directors member for IKEA Group Management is one of Europe’s most prominent business leaders.
VentureOutsource.com catches up with this visionary who has a track record of leading some of the world’s best companies.
Dr. Carstedt is widely acknowledged as an innovative leader of organizational change and learning. Read what he says about how your company can develop a corporate culture that is effective, issues with sustainability, the problem with many HR organizations, and more.
Transcripts from that discussion follow.
VentureOutsource.com: It takes more than a great leader to make a great company. An organization’s DNA also plays a role in whether or not a company can stand apart from its competition. What can companies do to build a culture that encourages genuine commitment across the enterprise where the organization is greater than the sum of its parts? Why do so many companies fail miserably when trying to achieve this?
Carstedt: Good results are created and delivered from organizations that can mobilize necessary human energy. Such energy is created when people are invited to something meaningful and learning-full, when people are invited to something worthy of their full commitment.
Such energy is created in organizations that learn how to learn, and that learn how to share what they learn.
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Goran Carstedt Prominent Business Leader |
Organizations often fail because they tend to see their people as human resources, instead of human beings. HR should be more about Human Relations than about Human Resources. A resource is something sitting waiting to be used by its owner. Relations imply collaboration and sharing.
VentureOutsource.com: You’ve run some of the world’s best companies. Your roles as president with Volvo France and Volvo Sweden plus your tenure as president of IKEA North America each witnessed organizations going through considerable change. What major obstacles do you see organizations must identify and overcome if their goal is to differentiate their products and services in the marketplace and ultimately increase their market share?
Carstedt: A key challenge is building a trustworthy “brand-as-a-promise” to customers, to co-workers, to society and to shareholders. The company should follow an organizing principle of “What is our company good for?”, rather than “What is good for our company?” We’re all in the trust-building business.
VentureOutsource.com: You’re world-renowned authority on sustainability. Meanwhile, technology companies are tasked with developing new, strategic product life-cycle management approaches in which primary sustainability aspects can be identified through socio-ecological sustainability principles such as electronics products that can be deemed ‘green’. What interesting ways of ‘thinking’ do you feel large corporations should adopt to help them work toward a common goal of sustainability? As companies move toward the goal of achieving sustainability, how can executives manage against having to accept the trade-offs that often take place between product quality and manufacturing productivity?
Carstedt: New thinking should be about creating a desired future. Three interesting approaches can help corporations develop their work for sustainability – focusing on what to create; back-casting from principles; and finding new cross-border collaborations.
Creating is very different from problem solving. In problem solving, we seek to make something we do not want to go away. In creation, we seek to make something we truly care about to come into existence. That implies a very different way of thinking.
We need to use back-casting from sustainability principles, because forecasting is not enough when the system is very complex and when the trends are part of the problem. In Sweden there is great model for back-casting from sustainable principles, developed by The Natural Step and Karl-Henrik Robert.
New thinking is also about cross-border collaborations. Most of today’s problems can only be approached by cross-industry, cross-sector, cross-country, cross-company and cross-generational collaborations.
VentureOutsource.com: You’re involved with the William J. Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Climate Initiative. Please tell our readers how the Foundation is working to help reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions?
Carstedt: The Clinton Climate Initiative is working with the 40 largest cities in the world. These cities are not only large in terms of their populations, economies and impacts, but they are also leaders. They are role models for other cities.
All cities own buildings, infrastructure and operations, meaning they have the capacity to act quickly and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Clinton Climate Initiative aims to help scale up good initiatives and to help accelerate new technologies – by that we can help people, planet and profits by enabling faster, deeper and wider action to cut emissions.
VentureOutsource.com: If you could hold a long conversation over dinner with one person (alive, dead, or fictional) who would you select and what would you want to discuss?
Carstedt: I would choose the Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, whose research – over 100 years ago – on the relationship between atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and surface temperature sought to explain why the ice ages occurred.
Arrhenius estimated that halving global CO2 levels would decrease temperatures by 4-5C. Conversely, doubling CO2 levels would cause a 5-6C rise (in 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated 4.5C rise with doubling of CO2). He estimated that temperature in Arctic regions would rise at higher rates than the global average.
I would ask Arrhenius how he identified the link between increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming, and, since his research was largely neglected or denied for almost 100 years, I would talk with him about the state of our world and the lessons we should learn as we face up to the challenge of climate change.
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