Lectures
Talks and lectures
I am available for lectures, conversations and deep dives based on the material.
Here are five ideas to start from. They can be held separately, combined or adapted to audience and occasion. The length is approximate, and I am happy to extend it.
Lecture 1
Does money have a soul?
From Stureby to the world
"Why is the world so badly run when people basically mean well?" I was eight years old, standing outside the Konsum supermarket in Stureby in 1968, when I asked the question. I have carried it ever since. On a hill on Långholmen in 1986, I sat there at the age of twenty-six, choosing between two ways to be free: to live outside the system or to make enough money never to have to think about it again. Then came the Mentawai people on Siberut, and the car towards Eskilstuna in 2004 with Chief Oren Lyons beside me. The answer I finally ended up with is about money, and it is neither philosophical nor esoteric. It is practical. It is about what we admire, and therefore what we build.
Suits
Conferences, management teams, schools, libraries
Length
45–60 minutes
Related chapters
Can be combined with readings from the chapters When the child's question was born, How do you create your own freedom? and The conversation that never ends.
Lecture 2
Seven generations
Decision-making beyond quarterly capitalism
The Haudenosaunee think about time differently than we do. Decisions are tested against the seventh generation — that is, against people born two hundred years from now. Consensus is reached in thirty seconds. Chiefs are chosen without pay, and the clan mothers who appoint them can remove them again. I tell what the years in their company have taught me and hold it up against Western business, where a quarter counts as long term and the person making the decisions seldom lives on to see the consequences. The comparison becomes sharp without pointing fingers, because it shows that another way of organizing power and money has worked for a thousand years. Plantagon and the companization model stand as examples of what happens when the principles meet the modern business world, and of what it costs to try.
Suits
Sustainability days, boards, innovation forums, political gatherings
Length
45–60 minutes
Related material
Can be combined with audio clips from the interviews with Chief Oren Lyons.
Lecture 3
Value change for survival
Cordism as a thought experiment
Capitalism is not a law of nature. It rests on an assumption that could be chosen, and that once was chosen. A thought experiment: a time machine to Scotland in 1788 and a professor of moral philosophy named Adam Smith. He is today regarded as the founder of capitalism. But he first wrote a book about morals and then one about markets, and posterity read only the second. On that half-reading an entire economic system was built. I go back and replace the assumption, away from admiration of wealth and power, toward admiration of wisdom and virtue. The rest of the lecture tests what happens then, because an assumption is no small thing: change it and the whole economy looks different on arrival. I walk through the concept of cordism, from the Latin cor, cordis, the heart, and the difference between capital and socium, between GDP and Gross National Socium. Finally come the seven principles, from virtue and cooperation to contribution and wisdom.
Suits
Economics students, philosophers, business days, cultural centres, think tanks
Length
60 minutes
Related chapters
Can be combined with readings from The real question and Money's soul. The answer.
Lecture 4
From vision to reality
Innovation takes time
I have built things that did not exist. A new form of marketing in the eighties, a vertical farm twenty years later, and in between companies driven as much by social benefit as by profit. I came there from journalism, not from business school, and it shows in how I see organizations: a reporter first asks what is actually happening, not what should be in the plan. What all of it has in common is that nothing happened fast and that people around me had to dare something they did not know would work. What does it take? An organization driven by a mission, a climate of safety rather than competition, and a leadership that forgives mistakes and lets people grow. Innovation comes from people. Therefore, the one who leads must enjoy human development. Both the successes and the missteps are included, and the missteps are usually more instructive to hear about.
Suits
Entrepreneurs, innovation forums, incubators, management teams, technical universities
Length
45–60 minutes
Related chapters
Can be combined with readings from Fifteen years among money and Business for seven generations.
Lecture 5
What is leadership, really?
Chiefs, monks and a few mistakes of my own
Leadership without titles and pay checks. I bring experiences from Buddhist cultures in the Himalaya, where spiritual practice and responsibility are intertwined and where the one who leads is expected to have worked on themselves first, and from the Haudenosaunee, where the clan mothers have the right to say no. Then I place my own leadership in the West beside them, both what worked and what did not. I have led companies for over forty years and can say with certainty that most of my mistakes came from thinking I understood better than others. The question is simple: what is leadership that serves something larger than itself?
Suits
Leadership days, boards, public sector, executive networks, trainings
Length
45–60 minutes
Related chapters
Can be combined with readings from the chapter Fifteen years among money, or with audio clips from the interviews with Chief Oren Lyons.
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