This week is full of events. I just came home from a champagne reception with the SCC at the fancy members club Home House, this Monday we had an investment trends seminar at the Royal Thames Yacht Club, tomorrow we will kick the Swedish Embassy’s ass in Brännboll [ˈbrɛmːbɔlː] in Hyde Park, on Friday we will have our first own after work with the JCC* at the spectacular Roof Gardens and on Saturday I am going to a Swedish House Mafia concert. Good week indeed!
Yey! Today I finally got my bank account. I went to Barclays three times, but apparently I had the wrong papers all three times. So I tried HSBC, 30 minutes later I got a UK bank account. Thanks!
Here’s finally some words about the St. Gallen Symposium (SGS, #sgs10) as promissed.
The week before I started my work att the Chamber I had the opportunity to attend an amazing conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland. SGS, which was held for the 40th time, is a student run conference where the leaders of today meet the leaders of tomorrow to discuss questions related to the topic of the year. This year the Symposium had the topic “Entrepreneurs – Agents of Change”. And thanks to my work with YEoS and some great portion of luck I got invited to attend along with 199 other ‘leaders of tomorrow’ and approx. 400 ‘leaders of today’ from all over the world. Truly amazing people! Starting with the people in my age, some (not one, but three) started their first business by the age of 9(!!!). How is that even possible? What was I doing then? Inspiring but in the same way kind of sad.
Paul Bulcke, CEO Nestlé on stage (see speech below)
Out of the 200 leaders of tomorrow, half of them qualified by writing an essay (the other half were carefully selected/headhunted). Some skilled people there from universities like Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Stanford and a bunch from Chinese and Indian universities (which I’m to ignorant to remember the name of) to mention a few. And we were quite a few young Swedes; Erik Fjellborg, Gustav Borgefalk, Claudia Olsson, me and three others.
There were some pretty noble guests among the older participants too, CEOs and chairmans for some of the biggest companies and organisations in the world, like Nestlé, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Peugeot, the Republican Party of California, UBS, Royal Dutch Shell etc.
The 4-days-conference was really inspiring but also very challenging and it drained me completely of energy. My friends who met me in Zurich the day after the event had some good laughs to my attempts to speak English or even communicate for a while.
As you can image the event had some pretty good speakers. All of the speeches can be found on SGS website and their YouTube channel. I have posted three of my favourites below. Enjoy!
– Morten Lund (entrepreholic and one of the first investors in Skype) on the life of an entrepreneur
– Paul Bulcke (CEO Nestlé) on how to constantly adapt to new challenges in order to maintain long term growth
– Prof. Niall Ferguson (Harvard) on entrepreneurial freedom in the new global financial system
Now I have been in London for a week, and to my surprise it has only rained once, and that was today, which my colleague Hilma and I had to experience during our afternoon Tea sitting outside at a café. But yesterday the sun was shining so I took the opportunity to do some exploring and visit all the mandatory tourist traps; Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Trafalgar Sqaure, Piccadily Circus etc.
This Friday I attended my first JCC (The Junior Chamber Club for Young Professionals) event at the nightclub Raffles. We had about 150 guests, good people, good fun. From now on it will be my and Hilmas responsibility to organize the JCC events, which is something I am really looking forward to.
I have been eating a lot of crappy food (numerous of sandwiches) the last week, so now I’m gonna go for a run in Regent’s Park in the rain. Will be better next week when I move to a more permanent flat. Ciao!
