20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
You know, days go slowly and years fly by”.
I wasn't that keen on children to begin with, but once we couldn't have one I got actually very keen and life is what happens while you're making other plans. And suddenly I have 4 children.
I've been on the boards of maybe thirty-forty companies in the past fourteen years.
To be perfectly honest, I was really tired with the pregnancies, and the babies, and the work, and the travel. And so I decided to try to be a board member for a while and I was very lucky with timing, because Norway had just introduced quota equality.
Retirement in the sense that I don't have to force myself to work for money, I guess I'm already doing that, I'm done.
ON BOARDS: “I was actually an element of frustration in that Board.”
The biggest change is that boards have professionalized from being a kind of a gentleman's club, “male, pale and stale”, to being more diverse in terms of backgrounds.
Boards are becoming both more strategic, but also more responsible and there is a huge amount of regulation that gives you a very serious amount of responsibility.
Many people both would like to be on a board and should be on a board. It's an experience more in leadership than really in business, or in finance.
Nobody needs a board member so they could educate the board member, they want a board member that will help them change their game.
Very often the biggest mistake I've made on boards is that I was really good in digital transformation and disruption, but I was very impatient. I have learned how to work with the organization and with the leadership, and with the board so that we push the process and the agenda, but it's not just my agenda, it's the board's agenda.
This idea of having women on boards, that's very old news in Norway. Now it's about having age diversity.
On TECH, AI & JOBS
I think that technology companies have spent way too much of their money and the best heads in the world on making money from digital ads and I think there are so many interesting health problems, polarization problems, education problems that could be solved by this tech.
The development of technology in the last twenty years, and in the last five years, and in the last one year has been exponential. We had this breakthrough with deep learning algorithms that make it possible to work efficiently in a way that the theory was there, but the practice wasn't possible.
It's this exponential development on data algorithms, computing power and network that make AI suddenly surpass human ability when it comes to analytics and prediction.
AI is a tool that will shape every industry and every country and there'll be a lot of politics, and there'll be a lot of money, and I really hope that more people than just 5 big ones get in on the game.
The biggest political problem we have with AI and with all the development is the jobs situation. Jobs are not disappearing, but they are morphing.
WHY GIVE
I love INSEAD, because I think it has diversity at a level that I haven't seen anywhere else.
And so I think we need to help INSEAD keep developing and that costs a lot of money. The way I see this fund (the 03’D endowed fund) is actually safety, security, a financial kind of backing so that the school can continue to attract really cool professors, that it can develop the professors and that it can continue to develop.
References, mentions:
The Gap & the gain; Who Not How (Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy), AI Superpowers (Kai-Fu Lee Mikael Naramore), Mariana Mazzucato, Joseph Stiglitz, AI (artificial intelligence), Deep tech, INSEAD