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After several years at advertising agencies to an interesting role at Bang & Olufsen as Chief Intrapreneur, can you tell us how this career evolution came to be?
You could say destiny is one part of it. Bang & Olufsen (B&O) has always been part of my upbringing — it was present in my own home and even grandparents' home. I suppose that's the case for most Danish people, and perhaps Nordic people in general. I had B&O in my professional bucket list, and at this point in my career, just short of a decade on the ad agency side, I wanted to try something different.
During my time in advertising, I had been in the experiential side of it, moved into something more strategic, and then I needed a new challenge so I started my own agency, which was the time I felt like I needed something on the entrepreneurial side. That went quite well and we got some pretty big clients like Carlsberg. It was quite fast considering there were just two of us at that time. We then allowed ourselves to be acquired by a bigger agency where I became agency director. After everything was settled, I then felt it was time for a new challenge. And then came the destiny part — a position opened up at B&O that was pretty much spot on and they were looking for a person with an entrepreneurial mindset to come in and basically co-found a start-up within B&O called Create.
I was lucky enough to join back in August 2016 and I held that position until May 2017, where I managed to work across a whole range of verticals: Sales, marketing, strategy, creating a whole narrative of what are we doing, and why. I was later moved into the main company, but brought that same entrepreneurial mindset.
How was the career shift like? What were some lessons from advertising that you brought over to B&O?
Working long hours? (Laughs) As humans, we are visual beings. Communication becomes visual, and we love stories, and how we retell things and interpret things based upon narratives. So from the big things to the small things, it's about being able to create narratives and visualize that for myself and the people around me. So that's something I'm really happy to bring over from my experience working in the agency side.
Can you give us a peek of what a day in the life of a Chief Intrapreneur is like?
It's a terrible cliché to say that no two days are alike, but I would say that a big part of what I do is traveling. For me to do what I'm supposed to do well, I first need to know what's going on in different markets. There is also the task of empowering all the great people we have in the company to go and do their absolute best. So that means providing them with motivation and knowledge, and that's basically what I preach. Then there's the part of trying to keep disrupting the flow in myself, making sure that I keep having a lot of meetings with people, spending time outside the office at cool working environments like co-working spaces to keep getting new input and not being too caught up in being at a big organization.
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