INTRODUCTION TO NINE OF MINE

The creation of this book began with a series of encouragements from my staff, and, suddenly, it became a kind of calling for me to pass on some of the pointers I have accumulated throughout my working life.

Going back to school, I remember clearly that a teacher told me that he had never before seen the procedures I used to solve maths questions, and that there was an A+ in sight if I also contested the ordinary method, but, honestly, I could not do it the regular way. So then I realised already that I was different at this point.

Years back, a friend of mine chose to send his child to Camp True North,[3] which was developed by the former army ranger Nicolai Moltke-Leth and designed to identify precisely what competence you hold. For the theory is that everybody has a competence, whether identified or not.

The mindset is fascinating, and I think that my distinctive competence is to develop my own models – in this case, management models – which I endeavour to make comfortable to use and analytically interesting, without losing their practical footing.

My interest and my skills were strengthened significantly during my MBA education, as I not only learned a number of the most well-known and used management models, but at the same time I built some generic skills in creating my own models. The major contributors to these are my experience and my opinion, and they are based on my work with practical models in everyday life and on delivering on its goals every day, every week, every month and every year. As my personal models are not based on strategy and science, I prefer to call them management models for everyday usage. There is an abundance of strategic management models, which are vital, but the strategy they use is already written or adjusted very rarely, whereas each day tasks arise in one’s repeatability repertoire, which could benefit from a smaller model that can strengthen your leadership.

I have chosen to review the strongest of my own models, which I have used throughout my career. With this model collection, I aim to complement other well-known models, so that my models can be used as an addition to the commercial world, where it is typical to review a lot of theoretical knowledge from various business schools.

In addition to business-school models, most corporate companies have their own models, and, recently, there have been models created by individuals – such as my Nine of Mine. Together with human intuition, they form your toolbox as an executive.

One can easily manage without my models or choose to us