Today we started our day at Skapa, a content and business to business marketing firm just a few minutes outside Gothenburg’s central station. Before this, a car that I had never seen before rolled by. I managed to take a picture. It was a Chatenet, a microcar made in france.
On the way there I got a nice picture of the canal in the city.
There, we met Erik Ekholm the CEO Of Skapa. Erik is a very impressive figure, with an Masters of science and a career as a naval architect making up his background among other credentials including positions at Volvo Trucks and Stena AB. He had a nice breakfast laid out for us including coffee, tea, sparkling water and most importantly some of the cinnamon rolls that I mentioned a few days ago.
Erik jumped into some information about Skapa and told us about a few of their clients which included Volvo Penta (this is the industrial piece of volvo, and is not owned by the chinese company Geely unlike Volvo Car) and CAT. One of the big things I took away from his presentation is that content, like blog posts, needs to be customer focused and engaging. This is one of the things that hit me right away. While I don’t know if I will ever write blog posts again after this trip, I will certainly develop content that will need to follow those guidelines to be effective. He also answered some of our questions in a more causal setting after he had finished talking and he had some interesting things to say yet again. His wife also works at Skapa and someone asked him a question about how that was. He said that he had been told that it was a bad idea when he first started out but it had ended up working really well. Erik and his wife have 2 kids and he was speaking on how it was nice that one of them could take some time off if needed, knowing that the other would be there to support and help out the other.
We thanked Erik and walked back to central station where we hopped on public transit to Gothenburg University. We had lunch in their cafeteria (chili with rice) and met with 2 of their professors. The first, Claes Alvstam, taught us a bit about Sweden’s economics. He also gave us some background information about Sweden as a whole. Sweden has around 10 million inhabitants, in an area of 173,000 sq miles. He also told us, much to my suprise, that Gothenburg’s latitude is about the same as southern Alaska. He then dove into some information about some of the multinational corporations (MNCs) within Sweden. He said that about 22% of Swedes are employed by MNCs. This was really interesting. Just as I began to wonder if this was an issue, he began to say how this may be a problem if these companies get acquired, like several others had. When companies are acquired, they often move headquarters leaving employees the decision to move or find new employment. The next professor, Martin Oberg, spoke to us a bit more about the city and University.
The University of Gothenburg is much larger than I thought. The school has around 40,000 students and the business school has 3,900 alone. The school also has something called Triple Crown Accreditation, meaning that they have been accredited by the 3 largest and most influential accreditation organizations in the world. First, The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, United States). Second, The Association of MBAs (AMBA, UK. And finally, EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS, EU). This triple crown is held by less than 1% of all business schools in the world. There are only 90 schools worldwide holding this crown. There is only 1 in the US, the Hult International Business School and this is the only one in Sweden. After the presentations, we had an event where we talked to some Swedish students. They were very nice and we chatted about public transit. I asked them a bunch of questions about things to do around here and they asked about our semester. It turns out they take 4 classes a semester, but only one at a time (similar to our J Term, which is what I am in now). They seemed to be shocked at the idea of potentially having 4 finals. I really enjoyed my time with them. After this we left and walked to a few shops and back to the Hostel. On the way back, Alex (my roommate for the trip) and I stopped and had a Crepe from a street stand.
Daily Reflections
I like how both presentations had a “timeline” at the beginning where they told us exactly what they were going to talk about
They seem to want to talk about US politics but are aware that it is a touchy subject
This trip is fun but exhausting
Swedes are quieter than we are
Sam's Trip to Sweden 