Living with Vikings & Scandinavian business culture

  • Why do your Nordic colleagues expect you to have an opinion on most topics?
  • How can you collaborate closely and trust people you only know professionally?
  • Why is it OK to eat your lunch at the same canteen table as your boss?
  • Why can’t you jump the queue?
  • What is Scandinavian business culture?

Living with Vikings addresses Scandinavian buiness culture and the meeting between the Nordic countries and the many well-educated, well-travelled globalists who, for a time or for good, choose to settle here. 

Kirsten Weiss examines each Nordic country in turn to illuminate the unique characters of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden that make them so distinctive. In this introduction to Nordic business culture, values, habits, and self-perception Weiss focuses on humour, happiness, trust, work life and life in the welfare societys, and touches on the aim for equality, the direct tone and the views on children, family life and divorce.

Scandinavian business culture
Dialogue, democracy, and delegation are key words for Scandinavian business culture and the Nordic leadership style. The ideals are equality and consensus. And bosses who look over their employees’ shoulders or blaze a trail as dominant loners, will not have an easy time here.

Equality is a cornerstone of the Nordic leadership style and the egalitarian, equality-loving management style that characterises Nordic organisations seems to most other cultures to be deeply exotic, and occasionally downright appalling. But as a leader, manager, or colleague in a Nordic organisation you are expected to adopt the values. The quicker the better.

The power gap
Titles, formalities and hierarchies do not play large roles. Hierarchies are informal and therefore inscrutable. Naturally, they also exist, but the power gap, i.e. the gap between employees and management, between high and low, is limited in a global context. People strive for a feeling of equality and “my opinion is as good as yours”.

Flat hierarchies
The flat hierarchies can be hard to navigate, and it can also be hard to pinpoint the power in a Nordic meeting room, where the boss is certainly not always at the head of the table. If you come from a place where leaders are used to exercising more authoritative power and making most decisions themselves, this can cause frustration

Living with Vikings is aimed at new citizens as well as stay-at-home Vikings who are intrigued to see themselves through the eyes of others.

You’ll meet the French CEO who realises that he’s swimming against the cultural tide when, steeped in French business culture and with Gallic logic, he argues that it is silly for him to be responsible for buying his own tickets – only to be told by one of his Swedish co-workers that in the North, “we are all equal”.

You’ll meet the British managager and his best pieces of advice to newcomers: Never forget how important stakeholder management is – and don’t come in October!

You’ll meet the German mangager in Norway complaining about half of his emplyees being away from the office, because of a sick child or a sick dog …, but at the same time admitting that the job is actully done.

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Interesting book and well-written with an opening up of Scandinavian culture for people from elsewhere. What’s slightly reassuring is that the author confirms my perception of living and working in Denmark. To this Brit, Danish irony is harsher and more sarcastic than British which is usually used as humorous attempts at icebreaking. Weiss articulates things I have observed but not really recognised before and from that point of view it’s a really helpful book. Buy it and read it if you are living with vikings.

Goodreads.com


I am very surprised that this book is not more well-known. I lived in Denmark for years and during this time I read many, MANY books about Denmark and other Nordic countries. This book is one of the few that actually introduce new information and perspective without just copying the well-known, implicit know-how of the region. I loved a remark from the book that equality does exist in Scandinavia, but not on a management level in companies (!). I can definitely recommend the book to those working in Scandinavia.

Goodreads.com

 


Kirsten Weiss has written a book about Living and working with Vikings – and it is a good book. Living with Vikings is a must for managers in global companies with employees from many nationalities. And people from HR , Communication and Public Relations should read along. The author refrains from making definitive judgments or highlighting any nationality or organisational form over another. It is a clever and observant book full of great examples.
Recommended!

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