 So good morning friends and colleagues and very welcome to Agile People Sweden 2015 and to what I hope, think, count on will be an amazing day, a full day ahead of us. It's really fantastic to be back in a sense. I had the pleasure of being here last year and these are some of the not only handsome but also very intelligent and generous people we had on stage last year. Sharing some thoughts on the topic we're so focused on. Last year we actually raised the bar quite a bit for this conference and created from a smaller event, a full day conference packed with inspiration and knowledge sharing and different people coming in and out and different forms and formats. So waking up this morning and sort of coming here and trying to up last year is quite a stressful feeling. But then again we'll do our best and we have a number of things planned and in fact we've tried to make it even better, even bigger because today we'll run, two days actually, today and tomorrow. And obviously with the lineup we have and the things we have planned for you, it's going to be even more fantastic. That's the whole idea and ambition at least. And the program for this year is a bit split. So we'll have a number of keynotes, we'll have panels, we'll have discussions, we'll have open space talks, which is a lot about interaction between you guys. Tomorrow we'll have a full day of workshops for those of you who are signed up for that, for those of you who aren't signed up for that, still possibilities to sign up. And obviously in the Agile People Sweden tradition we'll have an Agile AL mingle following today, so by the end of today. And for those of you who don't really know the story behind Agile People Sweden, this whole thing started just as an idea a few years back. Some of our friends over at Green Bullet who initiated Agile People Sweden thought we need a place where we can meet and discuss some of the topics that we care so deeply about. And we want to make sure that both IT management and HR have a place to go and discuss these things together. So we look at Agile People Sweden as the conference in Sweden at least for HR IT and management, which is a pretty odd mix. At least in most organizations and for those of you who attend conferences it's a pretty odd but exciting mix in terms of audience and topic focus. So this day was founded and it's grown from a smaller event into an entire organization focusing on this movement and we'll hear more about that in just a little while. So today then it's all about doing this. This is the theme for Agile People Sweden at large. This is sort of the mission exploring and sharing knowledge and experiences in terms of how do we actually design organizations that are fit to attract and sustain not only performing but then also happy people. So happy people performing, that's a good mix. And how do we make that happen in a world that looks more and more crazy every day every week. And this year then we'll deep dive into a very strategic and specific focus which is then organizations without formal managers. Good, bad, how do we do it, flip or flop. That's the question for today. And we'll try to dive into is it a revolution? Is it an evolution? Is it good? If it's good, how good is it? If it's bad, how bad is it? What are the risks? But how do we make it happen if we want to go along these lines? And how can it be achieved and what does this look like? Here's an idea of what it can look like and hopefully this works. I love working here at Morningstar. To me it's unlike the government, you know, we have a lot of freedom here. I love this job. I plan on working here until I retire because it's so different. Self-management is at a very, very high level, exactly the way you live when you go home from work. We just ask you to keep that hat on when you come to work at Morningstar. The Morningstar was founded in 1970 by Chris Ruffer. He was at the time a college student at UCLA. And he leased his first truck, a big rig and started hauling tomatoes into and out of factories. And over a few years of doing that, he kind of had some thoughts about how factories could be run. And in 1990, he started what was the Morningstar Packing Company's very first facility in Las Vegas, California. We've grown since 1990 to three very large facilities. Those facilities process about 40% of California's processed tomato crop. We are the largest processor of tomatoes in the world. So who's the boss? I think in a traditional organization, there's kind of a very rigid interpretation of who the boss is. We have no bosses here at Morningstar. I have no boss, so, well, everybody's basically a boss. When you come on board at Morningstar, you and the colleagues around you are expected to kind of take a time out, sit down, examine yourself, your competencies, what you have to bring to the table, the things you're trying to achieve in your career and in your life, and organize your work accordingly. And as long as you are achieving your mission and the enterprise is achieving their mission, there really aren't a whole lot of boundaries around how that works. And really what you're doing is you're working with other business units. You know, I may want to get something done on the operation side, so what I have to do is, not because I'm the so-called head of quality or whatever your job title would supposedly be, you need to go and you need to negotiate with another business unit. Maybe it's the evaporation guys, and we need to negotiate, but at the end of the day, it's what's best for the company. We don't have a structured hiring process. Here at Morningstar, as a group, as a family, we're involved, and we make those decisions together. You hire the right people, you get the right person in the job. You don't need to micromanage them. There is no micromanaging here, and it's really a breath of fresh air, to be honest with you. Politics, as a kind of concept, is probably the absence thereof within Morningstar is probably the most interesting thing that most people notice almost immediately. You know, there's no kind of trying to climb the ladder or vying for resources that are kind of scarce and being doled out by somebody. All of us are free to, you know, buy what we need to buy to do our job right. It's not that there is unlimited funds. It's simply that you have the ability to expend the resources you need as long as you get the appropriate, you know, get people involved who have expertise and are going to be affected by it. You have the ability to spend the money. If I need to spend $80,000 on a lab instrument, I buy the lab instrument. In my other company, that doesn't fly. Not only would I not get it, the process to get to that point is very difficult. Right. Pretty different setting compared to most of the organizations that we probably know very well, and I'm aware that we have all kinds in here, but still. So this is what we'll talk about. We'll talk about what this means and how we tackle this. How do we make this happen? We'll have a few examples today and a number of sort of thought leaders and experts coming in and talking about this. What are the upsides? What are the downsides? What do we need to avoid in a situation like this? Because whether it's close to your heart going this way or whether it's happening around you in your organization, this is happening right now. And we see a number of simultaneous shifts pushing this direction. A new generation of talent being one of them, new technology being a second. And then the fact that as one of these people said, we don't tend to like micromanagement. So that combined with looking for more effective and efficient models of growing our organizations and making people performing and happy is what's driving this. And as we said, it's a pretty different world. So how does this impact leadership? For those of you who work in HR here, how does it impact HR? Management, recruitment, learning and development. They said they didn't have a formal recruitment process. And when no one's the manager, who will you turn to in a sense? And what will then happen with the managers? We have a lot of probably not so great managers, but then we have a lot of great managers. What will happen to them and what will happen to the career ladders that we know people will strive to become a manager? And what are, as we'll hear from a few, what are the core drivers behind this? And we'll have a pretty packed agenda with some of the best speakers available on this topic. We'll meet with a few friends right away. We'll meet Josse Block, who's taken a community care company from four people to 9,000 people in less than eight years with lower costs, high quality and better satisfaction than anyone else. That's quite an achievement, organizing in a completely different way. So we'll hear about that. We'll also explore how to go from roles to souls. We'll do an open space session where we'll talk about how to focus on more the humanity stuff rather than the formal roles and hierarchies, etc. That's a very interactive, interesting exercise. We'll also hear from a few friends and do a safari on sort of self-managed organizations. We'll meet with Maria Food and Moe. We'll meet with Josse again. We'll meet with Jerry Williams, who says she's a geek. She's a geek manager in the CTO and she's been building organizations for many years around these principles. We'll also meet James Priest, who's a sociocracy advocate. These are the people together with Karin Tenelius, who's a serial entrepreneur and CEO. They will come in and give five different perspectives on self-managed organizations in the panel after lunch. We'll be able to explore different speed dives rather than possibly deep dives because we have a number of speed talks today as well. You'll get to meet a few new faces. We have Jessica Petrini, who's heading up HR at Sveko. We have Kajsa Lutz, who's coming in from Spotify. We have Morten Jakopi Nilsson, who's head of HR at Dustin. Interesting, fast growing company these days. We also have Katalina Linnéa, who's a student from Ericsson, coming in with an actual, very specific case on how to drive these changes within Ericsson. Then we have Mikael Göte from CRISP. We have Ronello Gionella from Race Motivational Profiles, which we'll meet also before lunch, actually. We have Mikael Göte, I think. Tobjan Gillibrin as well. We have, I think, nine or so speed talks in the afternoon. You can cherry pick the topics and the people you like the most, and then you can just leave whenever you feel like. It's not like you're tied to the seats. You can go around on your own little safari. We also have the privilege of meeting Mary Williams, more in-depth. She'll do a keynote on how to create an organization that makes space for us to be awesome. That's sort of the mission also of her micro-consulting firm in the UK. She spent 17 years with Procter & Gamble in the government and other places. She just joined Marks & Spencer, fairly a traditional company as their CTO. It will be very interesting to hear what's her recipe on this. I love that mission, by the way. The mission of making sure organizations allow us to be awesome. How good is that? I hope you find the agenda awesome. The most important component in a day like this, because we're 120, 130 plus people from all different strides in life, in a sense, we'll make sure we have ample time to interact, to mingle. We'll have more or less formalized Q&A sessions here on stage with the speakers and the panelists. So do pitch in. Who do we have in the room? It might just be interesting to know. Not only are you responsible for making some of these things happen when you go home in your organizations, but we have HR leaders, CEOs, consultants, agile coaches, development managers, tech people, and a whole range of interesting folks. You are from wrenching everything from Folk Helsan to Imagine TV to TV4, Spotify, Ericsson. We have Cybercom here. We have Svekonodia, PR consulting group, and I can go on. So it's not like there's one niche, one industry, one kind of people and kind of companies that focus on this, which is obviously great. So one of the purposes is to connect you as well, so do make sure that you do that. And please, don't turn off your phones. I mean, keep them on, because tweet what you think. So we have the Agile People Sweden hashtag and Twitter account, obviously. Works very well, posting pictures on Instagram as well. And really you can use whatever social media you want, but don't turn the phones off. And the most important information today is obviously what's the goddamn Wi-Fi. Here's the Wi-Fi. So do connect. And also, we will have, as I mentioned, we'll have an open space session later on. Also, for the very sharp people in the room, you'll be noticing that on the roll-ups and other places of more official material, we refer to an app. So you can just ignore that information. The app is no longer with us. So if you're searching around, becoming very frustrated, that's okay, because it's not there. Anyway, yeah, so that's some practical information. So I haven't met hardly any of you, I think. Well, I know a few of you. But for those of you who don't know me, I'll be leading this day, which is an honor. My name is Tommy Cowan. I've spent the past almost 10 years as a business developer, entrepreneur and consultant within HR and communication. Or rather the sort of the area in between, which is a fantastic area these days to be in. And really focused on sort of how do we attract and retain, attract and engage talent in various ways. And we realize that we share a number of common passions, me and the Agile people team. Really trying to understand how do you do this in a world that is very fast, very digital, and sometimes very complicated than the world we used to operate in, in terms of how do we manage talent. And when you go around on conferences like this, I actually had a privilege of starting up a conference a few years back that focuses on this. When you go around to conferences like this, everybody talks about talent. You go to tech conferences, business conferences, IT conferences, HR conferences, particularly the former ones. HR conferences, that's pretty natural, you talk about talent. But everywhere we go and talk about this whole movement and this change in business life and digitalization, etc., everybody talks about talent. We need the new talents to come in because they will solve the problems, they will work in new ways. They will start the businesses, the startups within our companies. They will do all these things that we need to do to become more innovative moving forward. So that's what everybody says. But no one talks about HR. And there's not a single HR person in the audience. There's not a single HR person on stage. So this is also a movement where HR is coming in now, which is really, really fascinating. And it's frankly very necessary because they are typically the ones responsible for making sure we get talent and keep them and everything in between. I know some speakers today will have a different opinion, we'll see about that. Anyway, so when I'm not doing this, I'm at a digital agency downtown. So I'll take you through today. This is sometimes the way you see me. And with that, I think it's enough about me and the agenda. So with this short introduction, I'd like to welcome up another person that is obviously super instrumental for making this happen. She's been on top of the agile community or agile wave in Sweden for, I don't know how many years. And she's actually celebrating third anniversary today with agile people. So I worked with HR talent, et cetera, for I don't know how many years. Pia Miaturian, please welcome up CEO of Green Bullets. Hello. Welcome. Isn't it? I mean, look at this crowd. Yeah. And it is a third anniversary, right? Yeah. What about now? Can you hear me, everybody? Perfect. Yeah. It's actually nice to stand over here a little bit because if it doesn't show, it's quite warm on stage. So do enjoy sitting down. Yeah, third anniversary, but starting 2012. 13. Yeah, we started in 2012, actually, because we had a conference on the west coast of Sweden in Smörgan, Green Bullet. And that was the first time when Kalle Blomberg joined the Green Bullet crew and we had this conference and we said, how are we going to do to make people happy and perform? Can we do something? Can we at least start a network? Yes, we can start a network. So what will the name of the network be? And then we said it will be agile people. That's the perfect name because then you have HR, you have management, and you will all be very, you know, you will look at IT and look at what IT is doing in the agile community and the area. And then we bring those deep values and those methods and tools into the rest of the organizations. And for that we need leaders and HR, right? So we thought it was a pretty good idea to do that. But it must, I mean, it still must be quite different. What's the main difference between when you started and now? Because not only the conference has sort of gone like this, but also this whole movement. I think that everybody has matured in a way or society has matured a bit. So it doesn't feel strange anymore to talk about agile. I don't know how you feel, but in 2009 when I became an agile master, we had to kind of hide that we were agile people because everybody thought, oh, strange. Everybody goes, yeah, I see that. Yeah, that was very weird, people thought. And now it's not so weird anymore. People started to see that these values, they're pretty good actually. And it's about people, people being able to perform and being happy in companies. And I mentioned early on that this has gone from a small event to an own organization. Yes, exactly. We now have agile people as an own entity, a company. And would you, agile people, please stand up? Who's agile people? Yeah, the network. Angela, we have Mikael, we have Tobbe, Jagge, Kalle Blomberg is over here. There we go. We have some more agile people, the organizers here today who are helping out with a conference. Nobody at the conference gets any money or gets paid for doing this. Where are you? Organizers? Organizers, and these you can also turn to... Oleberg, Alexandra, Marsha, yeah. And it happens to be that we all have small orange dots like this. Okay, yeah, so it's an own organization now. But why sort of, why do it as a conference, why do it in this way? And I think, I mean, I'll also give this to you. Well, it's the only way we can get some money because when we do the network, right? We do the network events for free. We don't charge for the network. So we have about five meetings in Stockholm, five meetings in Gothenburg every year. Where we arrange, yeah, a hot topic that we discuss. We eat something and, yeah, just hang out together. And then the conference is to really, you know, make something bigger, get some money to be able to continue the network activities. Great. So if you're not part of the network, then I guess do join. And this is obviously the theme for the network as well. So sort of a red thread, you'll be able to deep dive into this. But I also know that this is not only sort of a great idea from the sky in a sense. You have sort of a pretty straightforward idea of what this leads to. Yes, shareholder value will probably never again be the highest purpose for our organizations that we are aiming for. It has to be something else. I mean, we need money to be able to reach that higher purpose. But when we have our happy, engaged employees, it will lead to loyal, happy customers who will come back, who will say good things about our company, and they will buy again. And they will create a profitable company, which will then also make it possible for us to reach a higher vision, a higher idea if you want. And this can... I mean, we need something else. We need all the sweat and passion that we put into our work every day needs to go somewhere else than just to the shareholders of the company. Okay, so if it's one image you need to understand, it's sort of this sums it up in a good sense. But this year, you've sort of stretched the subject a bit further. This is quite still, maybe not in this room, but as soon as you exit the room, you'll notice that this topic is quite controversial. It is quite controversial. It's a tricky one. It's a burning hot topic, and we see many companies go in there. And really, it's not about getting rid of management. It's more getting rid of managers or getting rid of formal managers. Because management will always be needed. The thing is, we need to spread the management on everybody in the organization. So management is the most important thing. Even Peter Drucker said that, but it doesn't have to be in one certain formal position tied to that. Yeah, so controversial or not, this is what we'll deep dive in today. And I made a comment early on that this doesn't really apply just for the gaming industry or Spotify. No, not at all. You looked at Morningstar, tomato processing company. We have Gore and Associates, very sophisticated products that they produce. So it's in every industry. Or they're the ones making the Gore-Tex. Exactly, they're making these jackets that you have when you're sailing. Okay, cool. So very good introduction to the, not only to the day, but also to the team, then you know who to go to if you have questions. And it looks like, yeah, you can actually turn to the next. It looks like this to be very clear. So we have these with the orange. But what do you hope the crowd will get out of today? Oh, I hope you will get a whole lot of inspiration that you will bring back to your own companies and start spreading our ideas. Because I said before that the conference is only to make money, but of course that's not the case. We need to spread our ideas. That's our vision is to create these happy performing people in as many workplaces as possible. So that's the vision we have. And we hope that you can help us to spread that by being inspired today by all the great speakers that are here. Good, we'll check up on that later on. We'll see more from you, Pia Mia later on today. Thank you very much. And we need a microphone to the gentleman here. Because I thought we'd also invite up one of the other many persons that's been instrumental for making this happen, which is Emil Robocon who's heading up Informator, who's the lead partner of today. Always curious to know why you're partnering up with events like this. Hello, very welcome. Hello, thank you very much. So this is the crowd. Hello, everyone. I'm very happy to be here today. Informator has chosen to be a main partner to Agile people because we have been part of the system development movement in Sweden in some 25 years now. And many of our clients and partners in that industry, they have been trying to transform their organizations into Agile working methods and Agile lifestyle. Therefore, we find it very essential to be part of this movement as a company. So that's why we're here. There's about 100 conferences you can partner up with. What's special with this one? We have special connections with this one because Pia Mia and some of the other Agile people, they are teachers in our Agile courses. So we help each other, helping our clients with their Agile transformations basically. Because you're an education company. That's right. We are focused in software development and Agile. We have been developing the Agile portfolio courses quite rapidly the last five years. And I would say we have the broadest portfolio of different roles to address in the transformation. And it's... Again, you probably go to about 100 conferences as well. Yeah, we attend a few. Yeah, you typically do if you're in this space and do what you do. But what do you think will be the most exciting today? Because obviously, you're all jumping around together with your colleagues here, waiting for this day to kick off. I hope to hear a lot of real-life stories what has been working and what not. Because this is kind of an Agile product development for us. We need to know what kind of roles, what kind of topics we should have courses in in the future. So it's an Agile thing. It's an Agile thing. That's a good takeaway. Yeah, so Pia Mia and Ola Bari is here somewhere as well. And there are a few teachers here. You have some colleagues as well. Yeah, you can meet us back there. We have a big information behind the wall. And my director of training is here. And I will be here the whole day. So I'm looking forward to discussing with you. Perfect. And knowing you're very curious people, I mean, do go and have a chat. Yes. Thanks a lot, Emil. We'll see more of you later on in the crowd. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. See you. And, and also obviously we have a few other sponsors to thank. We have a cornerstone, Abigail RMP Nordic and obviously green bullet as sort of the mother ship from the beginning of this conference. So do go and talk to all these people. So, so that's for the introduction. Now let's kick it off for real in a sense.