Talk Title: Digitalization breeds unpredictability - How do we handle it

Date: April 27, 2018

Location: Lindholmen Science Park, Conference Center, Lindholmspiren 5, 417 56 Göteborg

Speaker: Thom Birkeland

Talk Summary
“It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right”.

In an ever-changing world, we are brought to redefine the meaning of Peter Drucker’s words.

How should we act in order to ensure we are doing the right things?

A way of working in which we often check whether or not we are on the right track is a success factor.

Actually, the reality is not as simple as a model, but with diplomacy and smart thinking, we may come a long way even in an organization with plenty of wasteful processes.

Thom Birkeland shares some valuable experience and lessons from the work on Agile organizational development at Volvo Car Retail Solutions AB. He gives important hints that might be directly applicable to other organizations’ journeys towards agility.

Speaker Bio
With 20 years of experience in the IT industry, Thom Birkeland has acquired a wealth of experience in agile leadership. Still, the thrill of developing the craft and continuously gaining a deeper understanding of value-oriented product development organizations is a strong driver.

Over the past decade, Thom has been involved as a senior leader of fast-growing organizations that thrive on innovative product and service development, pushing the digitalization envelope.

Today Thom leads a 110 people strong software engineering organization at Volvo Car Retail Solutions AB (a fully owned subsidiary of Volvo Cars).