Copenhagen: Flat Danish Management
TL;DR:A memoir of joining a Danish company in 2004 — flat culture where sales and developers sat in a circle each morning without ceremony. Introduced CI, unit testing, incremental refactoring. The pattern repeating across assignments: arrive, revamp, make impact, move on when the adventure turns into business as usual.
Today watching the clouds as I am flying in to København, I remembered my first flight to Denmark 🇩🇰… year 2004.
I was just hired to lead an to-be development office of a Danish digital assets management software company. Pre-cloud era.
As a life-time skier, guess what was the first thing I did when learning about my assignment in this country? Right, go and check the map. The country appeared to be completely flat …
… as its management culture. Next morning in a small city of Odense, full of overrated H.C.Anderson’s portraits, I saw the first all-company meeting in my life. There were not doing Scrum yet (it would take me another 7-8 months to seed that idea), but in a style of a super-flat org, they just sat and talked each morning about their business.
What really shocked me is that they didn’t greet each other with their favorite “hej” before they got mugs with coffee and sat in that circle. In comparison to my previous assignment in Alcatel, en Bretagne, where you would literally need to go through the multi-level office building and kiss each other cheek to cheek before you open up your laptop. And then it is already time for lunch. And if Friday with wine.
Ok, so the Danish did say “hej” eventually to sit and talk about the business: sales people, developers, founders, and me…
And me? On my second day in the office, I was granted code access and dag into it. I wanted to quit right away…
But instead, ended up spending next a couple of years with great folks like Mykola Gurov on refactoring it.
That taught me a powerful lesson: you cannot (and should not) refactor everything. So we did it bit after bit. Smartly and safely. The kind of adaptive expertise that comes from doing, not from reading about it.
Trying to remember those times, 20 something years ago, I almost remember writing the first unit test and configuring the first build server with CI on it… I did that many times in other companies too during my employment career. Is there a pattern?
I quit ~3 years later (embarking on my Zurich journey) when my org revamping impact was declining and the wonderful adventure was slowly turning into a steady business as usual.
I ain’t no do usual. I do impact and move on. That’s probably a pattern too — a kind of agile transformation that won’t be televised, because it happens through doing, not through slide decks.
Happy to bring back to this country what I have been learning since then — the pain and pride, the ups and dows and the privilege that goes with helping the orgs to improve.
Cheers to all my old friends from that era.
(The old Kastrup airport hasn’t changed a bit since then. That is an unfortunate find.)