All dressed up
This Monday I was in Stockholm over the day for what was called Nova Forum. The whole thing was arranged by an organization called Nova 100, for some reason they don’t have more info about themselves in English than is on that first page. Shortly summarized it’s an organization that arranges different kinds of networking events and acts as a bit of recruitment ground for companies.
Nova Forum is their biggest event and there were 250 people attending. They started out with an inspiration lecture by a guy from Procter & Gamble. He talked about his career path and how he came to be where he was by accident. If he had to give just one lesson for life it would be to not let accident guide life but rather that you should make informed decisions to take you where you wanted to be. All in all it was pretty fun, and apparently no one at P&G stays in one job for more than 2 or 3 years, then you’re forced to move do a different position within the company so that you’re constantly learning new stuff and don’t grow stale and stuff like that, which seems pretty fun.
The best thing about the talk was that he said in a traditional career path, you can’t really get to a higher position without working some years abroad, it just doesn’t happen. He then asked how many in the room could consider working abroad and 250 hands went up in about 10 milliseconds.
Workshop with Scania
After the talk there was some time to mingle with other students and members of Nova and then it was time for workshops.
Everyone had gotten assigned to three companies (out of like 20) to have workshops with. The companies sort of request the kind of student they want to be matched up with so that their field is somehow relevant to the students studies. The student (me) also got to make a wish-list of companies to talk to.
I got placed with Scania, Abbott and IBM.
At the first workshop with Scania we were taught Scanias 5 leadership principles.
- Co-ordinate cross-functionally but work independently – take responsibility.
- Work with details, understand the context.
- Act now – think long-term.
- Build know-how through continuous learning.
- Stimulate commitment through involvement.
Our winning score presented
Of course this is just meaningless business-speak without a proper explanation and further insight into how this is put into practice. So we got 5 problems with 3 suggested solutions each, we were then supposed to match up the problem with the right principle and rate the solution in it’s correctness. Our ratings were compared to what Scania themselves thought and the points were tallied up. We were team 2 so as you can see from the picture we won!
The second workshop was more interesting, it involved a real case. Abbott makes medicine and apparently intestinal disease is very common, there are a wide variety of diseases and they gave Crohn’s disease as an example. Every third person or something like that has some sort of curable intestinal problem.
My buddy Emanuel that had just been given a bow-tie from the founder of modefluga.se
It is however (at least in Sweden) somewhat taboo to talk about that kind of problem and a lot of people are ashamed to seek help for it and many people don’t even know they have a problem that can be fixed. Apparently a large problem is also that Swedish hospitals don’t get enough money to get the right kind of medication. So the case was to design a marketing campaign for intestinal disease; raising awareness, money and starting a political movement to give the right kind of money to hospitals to cure it effectively. I think we made a pretty good grass-roots kind of campaign.
At IBM we pretty much just discussed what the company had been up to since the 80′s. They’re doing something called Smart Planet where they try to improve life through technology so they wanted us to make a “Smarter University” somehow. Very fuzzy task so it wasn’t that fun, and most of us were pretty tired by then. We came up with some machine-learning scheme to create an AI that could react as students to lectures. You’d feed this AI data from a years worth of lectures and then teachers were supposed to be able to put in their lecture in advance and see if it would turn out good or bad in the eyes of a student. It’s all sort-of technically possible, but a pretty vague idea.
Dinnertime
After the workshops were over (we got a wonderful salmon steak lunch in between the different workshops) there came dinner. Absolutely lovely dinner with some entertainment by an A Capella group. Everyone was mixed in amongst company representatives and I got to sit down next to a recruiter from McKinsey & Company. Had some interesting discussions with her about what kind of place McKinsey is and it gave me a bit of different picture of the company than I had before.
The whole thing was over at 23:00 and I then boarded a bus toward Lund, a 7 hour bus ride. I’ve done more fun things in my life, especially since there were some very talkative loud people right where I was sitting.
One funny thing happened on the bus though, there was this guy who could speak Japanese, but he had learned it from his girlfriend who was Japanese so he said he spoke Japanese like a girl 
I really can imagine that there are more clearly defined speech-patterns for males and females in Japan than other countries. But anyway, this guy said that when he was in Japan, people had told him he spoke Japanese like a gay guy because he spoke so girlish.
I was at home at 7 AM and had at that time been in my suit for 23 hours straight. A fun and rewarding day, but the next time I’m definitely arranging some other kind of transportation.
