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From left: Sven Knutsson, Thomas Gustafsson, Mikael Helmerson
THE BOARD’S MOST IMPORTANT JOB
“In my view, the board has two primary jobs: to make sure the
company has a relevant and updated strategy, and to appoint a CEO
and ensure they work in accordance with the strategy decided upon,”
says Sven.
“When you see that a company’s management team isn’t getting the
job done, the board’s most important task is to resolve the situation that’s what happens,” says Mikael. “In turn, the CEO selects their
as soon as possible,” says Thomas. “Management teams don’t always
develop in the direction we’d prefer, and that’s when we have to take company, and we can provide them with a sounding board for that. It’s
over and replace the management team.”
“There’s no good response as to when confidence in a CEO begins
to sway. You have confidence in them until one day, that confidence
is gone. In general, we have some really good management teams
that get the job done. This has been put to the test at a number of
companies during the pandemic.
“It’s important for the CEO to be able to make decisions and
stand by them,” says Sven. “Some CEOs are data-driven and want
their decisions to be well informed, but working to the 80/20 rule
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will usually suffice. You simply can’t wait until you have a full set of
information, because there’s new information coming at you all the
time. It’s better to get things almost right than to definitely get them
wrong, and the worst thing you can do is wait too long and miss the
opportunities available to you.”
“Having the right CEO for a company is absolutely crucial, and as
owner representatives and board members it’s our job to make sure
management team and sets the agenda for the development of the
no more complicated than that, although in practice things might not
always be quite that simple.”
“We don’t have a template for what we do, there’s no one way of
getting the job done. You have to be independent and have integrity,
and you have to be flexible and not guard your turf jealously. We all
have the same objective, after all: to make sure our companies go on
developing positively.”