I couldn't get much help in developing a global company.
Denmark did not have a tradition of global industrial businesses.
We early on had some shipping lines, we had the agriculture, we had a few things,
but truly global operating companies we didn't have.
Sweden had had them.
>> Yes. >> We didn't have so
in the beginning I felt a lot of this was trial and error.
But there were some, on the other hand, very important guiding principles.
I think that I believe, I'm not a historian, but
I believe a lot of the way we have evolved has to do with the cooperative
movement in Denmark and with the so called folk high schools.
The thought, at the end of the 18th hundreds,
that it was important that everybody, no matter where they came from in society,
were given the opportunity to educate themselves,
get the education in history and whatever, going into these kinds of things.
But then also the agricultural development
of co-ops where you decided together how to run this business.
And then I must also say that I'm convinced that the size of the country
still means a lot.
No matter where you're born in Denmark, you could say that you
basically have the same teachers, the same professors, and you learn the same.
So there's a lot of uniformity and which also
the power distances here are not very, very big.
And then again, I want my friends from grade school still to recognize me
as a friend, even though I've been running a big business you know.
So all those little pressures in this tribal society
means that we've developed a special culture.
>> I think that you've drawn out a few things in [SOUND] that I'd just like to
emphasize that the cooperative, the reverence and the promotion
of cooperatives, which I would imagine requires a bit of coming together.
It requires some embracing of democratic principals,
it requires some stakeholder engagement, it requires some consensus building,
are these things that you see withing Novo Nordisk?
>> I think that what we have tried to cultivate and
not something that consultants advised us to but
to me what has been very, very important in my time at the Novo,
later on doing orders, has been to have a critical
dialog with all the people who are at the company and
with our various stakeholders.
About how we conducted our business, both to make certain
that we got all the right ideas, but also to get rid of
the impression that people at the top know everything, we don't know everything.
We need to make certain that we can create an environment where
people can make dreams into idea and
see those ideas being realized into significant projects.
And you do that by making certain that you all the time question what you're doing,
how you're doing, within certain principles, certain values,
of what kind of company you want to be.