Reflection

The descaling

A couple of years back I walked 800 kilometres across northern Spain in five weeks. I didn't plan what I'd think about. I didn't document it. I just walked.

On the first day I met people who became friends. We walked together, talked a lot, found each other in bars in the evenings in small towns whose names I've already half-forgotten. That part surprised me: how quickly real connection forms when you remove the usual scaffolding of professional life. No titles, no agendas, no performance.

After enough days the rhythm takes over. Walking becomes the default state rather than the effort. And when that happens, something quieter starts. Your mind, freed from the constant production of decisions and positions and responses, begins to settle. Not empty. More honest.

I'm a tough businessman. I've been told so often enough that I believe it, at least in part. But toughness is partly armour, and armour accumulates. Years of difficult rooms, difficult decisions, difficult people. You calcify around them without noticing.

The Camino descaled me. That's the only word that fits. Not softened, not changed. Returned to something closer to the original. The warmth I know I have but don't always show. The curiosity that got me into this work in the first place. The person my family knows rather than the one my colleagues think they know. I came back the same person. Just less encrusted.

Product

What great products do

Spain will break your heart and restore it the same afternoon. I've sat in restaurants with food that made me close my eyes, served under lighting so cold and acoustics so brutal that the meal felt like an interrogation. I've found the opposite too: a tortilla at La Marucca so precisely right it needed nothing else, or a mezcalita and taco at Solito where you sense immediately that someone has thought about every detail, including which customers they're not trying to impress.

The Fundación March in Madrid is one of the most quietly extraordinary cultural spaces I've been in. The originality, the standards, the sense that whoever built it was completely indifferent to compromise. Then you walk five minutes and find a flagship brand store that ticks every box and does absolutely nothing to you.

A winery in Bierzo. Mom in the kitchen. An unlabelled bottle of wine, a table in the shade, no agenda. That's it. That's the whole experience. And it's perfect. Then Marbella, scorched concrete, expats performing wealth where everything costs more and feels like less. San Lúcar de Barrameda on an autumn afternoon, a manzanilla and a plate of salmonetes on the beach, the Atlantic light doing things light shouldn't be able to do. Constantly back and forth between extremes.

What Spain keeps teaching me is that experience design is not about polish. It's about intention. The places that stay with you share one quality: the balance between intention and execution is perfect. The cold lighting and the bad acoustics happen when nobody made that decision, or when the decision was made by a committee optimising for the wrong things. It is not a matter of how big a budget is spent or whether it ticks the latest trend. It is about being true to who and what you are, building from that core, and knowing when your skills are stretched and you need to bring in some experts and friends to help.

Strategy

Knowing when to put it down

I didn't go to business school until I was in my forties. By then I'd already built LEGO Star Wars, created a franchise that peaked at 2 billion DKK in annual turnover, hired and fired and worked across three continents. The MBA didn't change what I knew. It changed how I understood the people around me.

Every organisation I've worked in runs some version of the HR wheel. Twelve months, 20 checkpoints, three overlapping evaluations, calibration sessions, three annual reviews doing the same but different. Workshops that take the best people out of the work for days at a time. Everybody hates it. It took me a long time to understand why it exists. It's not because it works. It's because it can be measured, reported, and presented to a senior management team as evidence that leadership, management and people development is happening. The framework isn't serving the organisation. The organisation is serving the framework.

I saw the same thing when I asked a creative team to set quantifiable KPIs for early-stage explorative work. I didn't ask because I thought it was right. I asked because the system required it. The team looked at me the way I deserved to be looked at. And I've watched organisations hand down a headcount reduction number, cut the tail, fifteen percent, without anyone stopping to ask which fifteen percent. The model produces the number. Someone else executes it. Judgment never enters the room.

The MBA helped me see what these situations have in common. They're not failures of intelligence. They're failures of context. The frameworks themselves are often sound. A structured performance review is valuable. But every framework has edges, the conditions under which it stops working, and most people who learned them in school were never taught where those edges are. The education rewards applying the framework correctly. It doesn't reward knowing when to put it down.

For me, coming to it late was an advantage. I picked up frameworks as tools, not as doctrine. I could see what they were for without being captured by them. The toolbox is genuinely valuable. Knowing when to open it, when to adapt what's inside, and when to close it again, that's the judgment that can't be taught in a classroom. It can only be learned by getting it wrong enough times.

People

I am a great leader and a terrible one

We are all the same at the end of it. Getting up in the morning, doing the work, building something we can be proud of, taking care of the people we love. Whether you're a Danish designer, a Chinese factory manager or an American VP of sales, the underlying thing is the same. Scratch the surface, the culture, the varnish, the professional armour, and you find the same person. Someone who wants to do good work and be recognised for it. I've led teams globally across cultures and that's the most important thing I learned. Start there and most of the rest follows.

I've had direct reports who said working with me changed how they think about their work. I've had managers who, I suspect, dreaded Monday mornings. Both are true and I've made peace with that.

What makes me good: I connect human to human. I see people clearly and I care genuinely. When it works, it really works, the kind of feedback that stays with you.

My weakness as a manager is pace. I move fast, I decide fast, and I lose patience with people who need more time to arrive at the same place. That's a leadership failure, not theirs.

I've made decisions that ended careers. Restructurings, redundancies, performance exits. I don't pretend those were easy or that everyone landed well. In a professional context we are not family, whatever the posters on the wall say. Both sides of the table have obligations. I tried to meet mine. I didn't always succeed.

I can be elitist. Not by intention, but it comes through. And I'm physically large, direct, and not easily read, which some people experience as intimidating before I've opened my mouth. The Iron Giant was built to be formidable. He just wanted to be something else.

If you've managed me: I'm sorry, and thank you. It couldn't have been easy.