Kjell A Nordström (Sweden)

Dr Kjell A. Nordström is an economist and writer specialising in leadership and strategy. He was an Associate Professor at Stockholm’s School of Economics and co-author of the hugely popular Funky Business – Talent Makes Capital Dance. The influential book delivered an early examination of many of the disruptive practices, and the agility required to deal with them, that would later dominate business and management thinking whilst also highlighting the only real advantage any organisation can have - its talent.

With the steady demise of the old world of markets, standardisation, security and stability, Kjell looks at how corporate complacency and assumed certainties have given way to insecurity, ambiguity and, ultimately, fear. In Karaoke Capitalism, Kjell looked at the new corporate structure, with the focus on talent ‘taming’ and transforming individual skills into organisational knowledge. The result being a competence-based network with knowledge that is more dispersed, diverse and but potentially less durable.

In Urban Express, Kjell considered how the dual influences of expanding cities and increasing diversity would be the key drivers of change. In Corona Express, he looked at the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic which brought about a whole new set of changes, as well as accelerating some already in place, and he asks which will survive. which will recede, and where will the opportunities lie. While in the forthcoming eye-opening book The Monkey and the Money: A History of Capitalism, Kjell will guide the reader from the beginning barter, in its simplest form of cooperation, to the big party (globalisation) where everyone trades stuff with everyone.

Kjell describes how best practice and benchmarking will merely get companies to the middle of the pack. In a consumer Europe of six hundred regions, rather than twenty-seven nation states, organisations must be first-rate versions of themselves and not second-rate copies of others.