The LINK, Issue 332, September 2016

THE SWEDISH CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FOR THE UK SEPTEMBER 2016

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The Link ISSUE 332

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THE CONNECTED CITY

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The LINK ABOUT

The Swedish Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1906 and is a not for profit membership organisation aimed at promoting the exchange of ideas and experiences, networking and trade between Sweden and the United Kingdom. Today, the Chamber is one of the largest foreign Chambers in the UK, with approximately 400 Member companies. It is also one of the most active Chambers, hosting approximately 70 events per year.

EDITORS OF THE LINK

THE LINK MAGAZINE: 37 YEARS OF LINKING ANGLO-SWEDISH BUSINESS

The LINK celebrated 30 years in 2009 and its 300th issue in June 2011. The publication is distributed free of charge and the readership includes business executives and other staff (incl.

MDs, CEOs, Directors and Managers at various levels) at our 400 member companies, prospects, general contacts, other Chambers of Commerce in Sweden and the UK, Swedish Consuls and diplomats, journalists, correspondents and other members of the press. Members of the Young Professionals are also included in the readership. The LINK is edited by the Anders Wall and the Investor Scholar.

JOHANNA BJARSCH FOLLIN INVESTOR SCHOLAR BJARSCH@SCC.ORG.UK

FANNY SILTBERG ANDERS WALL SCHOLAR SILTBERG@SCC.ORG.UK

The LINK is an invaluable tool for companies wishing to promote their products and/or services to a unique target group of professionals and key stakeholders within Anglo-Swedish trade and business. If you are interested in advertising, please contact Rebecca Martin; Communications Manager (martin@scc.org.uk).

YOUNG PROFESSIONALS OF THE SWEDISH CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FOR THE UK The Young Professionals of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce for the UK (YP) is a sub-organisation of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce.

Founded in 1994, the Young Professionals boast around 250 Members aged 25 to 35 years. The organisation is dynamic and includes an agenda planned to meet the Members’ interests.

It has become a well-known networking organisation for young professionals with an interest in Sweden and the UK.

NOT A MEMBER YET? Visit www.scc.org.uk or contact the Secretariat on +44 (0)20 7224 8001/ email info@scc.org.uk MIKAEL ANGESJO ASSISTANT DIRECTOR ANGESJO@SCC.ORG.UK ULLA NILSSON MANAGING DIRECTOR NILSSON@SCC.ORG.UK

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EBBA WIBERG EVENTS MANAGER WIBERG@SCC.ORG.UK

REBECCA MARTIN COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER MARTIN@SCC.ORG.UK

ELIN HAMMENFORS LUND UNIVERSITY SCHOLAR HAMMENFORS@SCC.ORG.UK

PETER MCNAMEE ACCOUNTANT MCNAMEE@SCC.ORG.UK

LOVISA BERGSTRÖM INTERN BERGSTROM@SCC.ORG.UK

STEFAN WESTMAN STENA LINE SCHOLAR WESTMAN@SCC.ORG.UK

GUSTAV OLSSON INTERN OLSSON@SCC.ORG.UK

APPROXIMATELY The LINK FEATURE

RIGHT HĂ…KAN WINBERG ON ALIGNING

YO U R N U M B E R S W I T H YO U R B U S I N E S S WORDS: Rebecca Martin

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QUICK QUESTIONS

What professional achievements are you most proud of?

Having been part of a team that was able to grow and develop Securitas from a Swedish company to a world leader in its field and keep my job and position throughout that journey.

What are your favourite moments in your career so far?

Photographer: Peter Phillips

Being able to take part in a second journey, in the security industry, in India. It is like being given a new life with endless opportunities. Of course the fact that Securitas established itself in the USA in 2000 and doubled its size to more than 60 BSEK in sales was a very proud moment. This could not have been made without a strong corporate culture and a set of core values.

What does the future hold for you?

Right now I am involved in the listing of SIS on the Indian Stock market. And I am also involved in a few small start-ups in the UK, Sweden and India. And I will of course continue to support the Swedish Chamber in the UK.

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The LINK FEATURE

If you wait for everything to be perfect, you get nothing done.

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hen Håkan Winberg was little, money was always rather tight. His father had gone bankrupt about the time Håkan was born. The family didn’t have much choice than to save where they could. This has had a major impact on Winberg’s life and set him on a career path in finance spanning from auditor at PwC, EVP and CFO at security services giant Securitas to EVP and CFO at leading healthcare company Capio.

Today, Winberg is self-employed, with proprietary interests in, amongst other things, the Indian company SIS Security and Intelligence Services. He is also one of the most well–respected and well-liked people in the Anglo Swedish Business community. His new book Approximately Right: Aligning your numbers with your business, which will be published this autumn, summarises some of what he has learned over the course of his career.

“What I try to get across in my book is that, whatever your business, strong value based foundations have to come first. Not numbers and financial wizardry,“ Winberg tells The LINK.

be based on substance and details – or it becomes just words.”

One important concept in the book is the toolbox, something that he has witnessed as instrumental to Securitas growth and success. It is a wooden box full of tools used as a platform for Securitas management training.

“It helped to build a culture based on core values, a flat and clear organisation and to keep finance simple. We wanted the culture to be focused on providing services based on values first – and when we did that – make profit. The toolbox was our training kit. In Securitas, managers trained managers and in the end of every training the participants got a pin with an inscription in Latin that read: “we don´t talk bullshit – we stand in it,“ says Winberg.

“In the year 2000 – one year after buying Pinkerton in the USA, we had a management conference in Barcelona.

We decided to give everyone a toolbox.

It was a spectacle watching more than 1000 managers each carrying 6 kilograms of wooden tools in a wooden box through the airport security”.

According to Winberg, thinking that you can run a company just by focusing on and analysing numbers is a bit like trying to drive a car by looking in the rear-view mirror from the passenger seat: it doesn’t work.

Of course numbers are important for any business, but they are not the only factor. Instead, one must get one’s business and one’s numbers to align.

To do this, one has to lay strong-valued foundations and make sure everyone is on board.

Winberg believes that culture starts at the top. Leaders, he writes, must “walk the talk”. What that means is very clear to him.

The book is built around four thoughts – letting core values show the way, focus in order to drive development, building a flat – not fat organisation and keeping finance simple enough for everyone to understand.

The book is first and foremost aimed at university students and young people starting out in business, but will also cater for businesses that wish to evaluate their organisation.

“Remember that keeping it simple is not so simple. And what’s simple must

“To get things done. That in the end reality matters, not fancy talk and perceptions. To keep finance simple in a flat organization is a very good way to stick to reality with accountability.

And the need for leadership and management is sometimes underestimated”

“My idea is that any business, not only students, could spend a day or two see how their business and numbers

measure up to my thoughts. And maybe also in these turbulent times a few politicians, a certain football organisation leader and some charities might have a thing or two to learn about building culture and nurturing values before talking about finance.”

Winberg always wanted to write a book. Recently, new links to his old University in Lund and the fact that he think service businesses needs more attention in society were important reasons that it happened now.

“When I first started my career as an auditor with PWC in 1981, I always wanted to write an article in Balans, the audit magazine in Sweden. The article never materialised. But the book did,“ says Winberg.

A driving force in his career has always been his roots and what he picked up at home during his childhood.

“Money was a big topic at home.

I learned early that if you are too much in debt you are not free. My father went to church regularly and developed a very strong faith in a deep way over time.

But I remember my mother saying that ‘better to be at home thinking about church than in church thinking about being home’. So she stayed home and took care of my two brothers and me.

And she had a very big heart. So I grew up worrying about money but with a strong foundation based on values and love. In some ways I had a little fist in my pocket with a strong desire to prove I could make it myself.”

The title of the book says a lot about Winberg’s view of success; that getting it approximately right, is more effective than the effort of trying to be perfect.

“If you wait for everything to be perfect you get nothing done. Better move step by step in the right direction. In some ways it is a recipe for making decisions – instead of making you wait for decisions.”

Approximately Right is published by Ekerlids Publishing House and is available for purchase on www.adlibris.com from 15 August.

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I N LOV I N G M E M O RY O F

Annika Goodwille 1955 - 2016

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hen the news reached us that Annika Goodwille had passed away, there was a sense of disbelief and profound loss among the Swedish Community, including the Swedish Chamber and the Swedish Church. Annika Goodwille had a strong personality and was full of life and beauty, with a strong impact on those who met her. Annika was one of the most popular and colourful members of the Council of the Swedish Chamber and also of the Swedish Community.

Swedish start-ups as members. As long-standing chair of the marketing committee, Annika was relentless in looking for ways to attract younger members and thereby rejuvenate the Chamber.

Annika left Sweden as a young woman and her sense of adventure and curiosity took her to France, Switzerland, the US and Iran where she met her husband Angus. Later on she also spent a few years with her husband in Dubai when it was still a small town in the desert.

Another of her passions was networking and sharing her networking skills with others. She felt that Swedes did not always know how to “attack” a room full of strangers at a reception and would give advice on how to make conversation and how to engage people. She excelled at it and as a result had a very large network in the UK, Sweden and other parts of the world. I think that it was her curiosity and generosity that made her so attractive to many people. She loved to invite people to her office in Kensington Square or at home for debates and wonderful dinners.

Annika loved to talk about her time in Iran and in particular a story she told me when we first met, about when she met the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. It was in 1981, when Olof Palme was visiting Teheran to take part in negotiations in the war between Iran and Iraq. As they were leaving the capital to fly back to Stockholm, Annika, who worked at the Swedish Embassy at the time, received a phone call from Stockholm with an urgent message to stop the Prime Minister from flying back as their plane was under threat of being shot down. She managed to catch him in his hotel. She liked to say that this is how she saved the life of Olof Palme.

I met Annika in 1989 when we were both stay-at-home mothers. She was busy looking after three lively small boys but was restless and thinking of what the next step in her life would be. A few years later a fourth boy was born, making her house even more boisterous, full of life and happiness.

Her next step was to enrol in college to study to become a “company secretary” and she used to laugh, saying that she was not a secretary but helped companies with legal and taxations issues. She quickly set-up her own company, Goodwille Ltd in 1997, which grew rapidly. She helped many Swedish companies coming to the UK as start-ups or subsidiaries with the nitty-gritty of setting-up in the UK. She was very generous with her advice, which went far beyond understanding UK laws and regulations.

Annika always insisted that it was difficult to get to know and understand the British people and their way of doing business.

To know the language was not enough, Swedes had to immerse themselves in British culture and language sensitivities, understand that “interesting” should not always be taken at face value and instead could mean “terrible” or “with potential”.

Her sense of humour was contagious. She always came to Council meetings with a big smile and a bright scarf and immediately transformed the atmosphere in the room.

During meetings, she fought for small companies and always reminded us that the Chamber needed to do more to attract

She was passionate about the new economy and immersed herself in social media after a trip to the US. She was always a step ahead, nagging the Council of the Chamber to learn to tweet and generally make use of all social media outlets to communicate.

Despite spending over thirty years outside her homeland she never lost her accent from Skåne when she spoke Swedish.

Born Annika Åman, she was very proud of her origins and of Landskrona where she was born and raised. Her father had been a successful entrepreneur who instilled in her a sense of independence. She was always self-reliant and original in her thoughts.

One aspect that is maybe less known outside the Chamber is that Annika was a philanthropist. She helped several causes in the UK and internationally. She was always looking for new projects to support and we had many discussions on social enterprises and charities.

She also loved culture, the theatre/arts and was an avid reader.

Again maybe this aspect of her was not always knows because as a proper Swede she remained “low-key” despite her successes.

Annika lived a full life and this is how she will be remembered.

As she said on her home page at Goodwille: “I am an inquisitive person always interested in discovering new things, and I soon get impatient if I don’t have lots of balls up in the air at the same time”.

Ten years ago, Annika successfully battled a first cancer, while looking after her husband Angus who was also ill. In her last decade Annika never lost her smile and curiosity of the world and people. Her greatest joy was to spend a lot of time and holidays with her four grown-up sons.

On behalf of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce to the UK, I would like to extend my deepest condolences to Alexander, Nicholas, Marcus and Oskar. We will always keep the memory of your mother alive.

Beatrice Engström-Bondy Chairman of the council, Swedish Chamber of Commerce for the UK

Annika’s family has set up a fundraising page for a cause that was particularly close to her heart, The Microloan Foundation, aiming to enable women in Africa set up businesses to help work themselves out of poverty. If you would like to make a donation, please visit: https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/annikaaman-goodwille

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THE FOUNDERS OF LIFESUM, REMENTE AND NATURAL CYCLES TALK ABOUT THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL HEALTHCARE WORDS: FANNY SILTBERG

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The LINK FEATURE

The advent of digital health solutions has enabled people to walk around with a personalised healthcare system in their pockets. Everything from Fitbits to dietary planning apps are changing the way we take care of ourselves and our bodies. At any given moment you are likely to be no more than an app away from finding a way to lose weight, practice mindfulness or get an overview of your diabetes. We met up with the founders of three of Sweden’s most prominent companies in the field, to discuss a day in the life of a digital health start-up.

How it all started

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couple of years ago, entrepreneur David Brudö was battling exhaustion. The stressful life of starting new companies was taking its toll and the traditional healthcare system seemed to answer none of his needs. The answer instead, came in the form of Remente - the company he went on to found in an effort to encourage mental wellbeing. Developed together with psychologists and personal coaches, the Remente app is supposed to work as a tool for personal growth and mental strength in order to prevent what happened to Brudö himself - exhaustion, depression and poor mental health. In July this year, the app boasted 100 000 users, a 400% increase since the start of the year. The demand, in other words, is big and Brudö explains that despite the stigma often surrounding questions of mental health, society is slowly waking up to the realisation that something needs to be done.

time, became Natural Cycles, a company that today has an annual turnover of 1.8 million SEK and whose app is used by over 100 000 women. The app enables the user to determine fertility during their menstrual cycle, information that can then be used either to plan for a pregnancy, or the other way around, to plan for extra contraception in order to avoid one.

In January 2014, everyone who solemnly woved to start leading a healthier life on New Year’s Eve could find a new offering in their app store. The previous month, Henrik Torstensson, Martin Wählby, Marcus Gners and Tove Westlund, had decided to launch Lifesum - a weight loss app promising to do more than just count calories. Rather than only controlling food intake, the app was meant to encourage a healthier lifestyle overall.

“Knowledge is the ultimate power”

“Recently we have seen a big shift and increased interest in what we do from consumers, businesses and the healthcare sector, as the negligence for our mental wellbeing has become one of the costliest burdens in society”, he tells The LINK. Brudö explains that three out of four people will directly or indirectly suffer from some sort of mental illness in their lifetime and in addition to that, the number one reason for sick leave in Sweden also stems from mental illness.

Around the same time that Brudö was struggling to find his bearings in life, Elina Berglund Scherwitzl was dealing with a personal challenge of her own. She and her husband was planning to extend their family and Berglund Scherwitzl was looking for a way to monitor her menstrual cycle while letting her body recover from 10 years of hormonal contraception.

“After doing some research on the topic, I discovered that the basal body temperature changes throughout the cycle and that it is therefore possible to detect ovulation in this way. I then started to write the first version of our current algorithm to use on myself.”

And so the solution, although unbeknownst to her at the

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“We wanted to create something to support and encourage people to improve every aspect of their wellbeing”, co-founder Tove Westlund tells The LINK. The concept is an appreciated one and since the launch some years back, Lifesum has been a worldwide success with 15 million users currently registered around the globe.

Natural Cycles and Remente grew out of personal needs and a conviction that the results could truly change people’s life.

“What we aim to create is a life management system, to help you lead a great life, which is not a small or trivial task.

But that’s exactly why we are doing it, because somebody needs to”, Brudö says.

Berglund Scherwitzl touches on the same subject.

“What we provide is really a tool for women to gain insight about their bodies and fertility. With this knowledge they can then choose themselves what they want to do with it – do they want to get pregnant or do they not? Knowledge is the ultimate power.”

Westlund echoes the thoughts of Brudö and Berglund Scherwitzl and sees Lifesum as a part of a wider transformation in how digitalisation of health leads to personal control.

The LINK FEATURE

“There is a massive shift going on within healthcare, moving from reactive to proactive care. We are seeing consumer health technologies empowering people to take control over their lives”, she says.

Westlund also underlines another benefit of the digital development in healthcare.

“Apps are a fantastic way of educating people – by learning more about what exercise people can do and what nutrients they should consume more of, their lives can be changed for the better.”

The Challenges

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ven though the market for health related apps is booming, being at the forefront of a new industry has its downsides.

At Remente, the taboo around mental health is a daily challenge, but the biggest obstacle of all has proven to be changing people’s habits for the better. Brudö explains that the inherent desire for a quick fix in all of us, often trumps the dedication to create a long term change in behaviour.

“We want to be less stressed but are we willing to work for it and challenge ourselves to make it happen? This is something everyone in this space are struggling with, we are putting a lot of effort into solving this at Remente. We can blame the shortsightedness of the human being, but this is the reality, and we have to find ways to motivate our users so that we don’t become another must do self-improvement app.”

She explains how for Lifesum, that means continuously working on new updates for the users, and creating designs and interfaces that encourages continued use of the app.

The Future

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atural Cycles is the only fertility application that is approved as a medical device in Sweden, and according to Swedish tech site Breakit. se, Remente is teaming up with the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions for a new pilot project. In other words, both companies are slowly moving away from the tech start-up field and towards the general health sector, making a telling example of how digital solutions are integrating more and more with traditional healthcare as we know it. Both Berglund Scherwitzl and Brudö believe that we have only seen the start of digital health solutions in society as a whole.

“I think digital health is really the future. It can cut a lot of costs for the government and at the same time give both better quality and much more personalized health care”, says Berglund Scherwitzl.

Brudö thinks that digital health solutions can substitute traditional health care in due time and that, as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, machines will most likely be able to give better treatments and diagnosis than what man can do today.

“Digital health has the potential to make healthcare more preventive than reactive, which is its default state today, and also more available and affordable. I think we’re just seeing the beginning of a digital transformation in healthcare”, he explains.

The people at Natural Cycles on the other hand, face a different problem. As is often the case where digital progress creates disruptive markets, the legislative bodies have trouble adapting. According to Berglund Scherwitzl, understanding governmental regulations has been one of the most challenging elements in developing their product, and it also makes up for an uneven playing field.

Tove Westlund agrees, but sees digital solutions as a complement to traditional healthcare rather than a substitute.

“If the regulations are unclear there is a risk that some products don’t comply. In turn, that poses a potential risk for the consumer, as well as an unfair competitive advantage for companies that choose to ignore the regulations”, she says.

And it seems that neither three of the founders are far off in their predictions. The digitalisation of healthcare is evident in both Sweden and in the UK. Here, the NHS is developing the NHS Health App Library where patients are directed to NHS approved applications based on their medical needs.

In Sweden, the first completely digital health centre, Kry, launched last year. At Kry, patients throughout Sweden can schedule a doctor’s appointment online and then carry out the whole consultation from home. All that is needed is a working internet connection and a webcam. The future, it seems, is already here.

For Lifesum, the drawback of a booming market, is the boom itself.

“A challenge of developing Lifesum in general is the sheer size of the health market – there are constantly new apps and innovations hitting the space, so the challenge is staying ahead of the game”, Westlund says.

“There is a clear distinction between healthcare and apps that help you improve your health as well as your general lifestyle. I would say that digital solutions can definitely enhance healthcare but not replace it”, she tells The LINK.

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