← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
What leaders can learn from the Norwegian success mentality
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello marketers and SEOs. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Anders Inset who is a world renowned philosopher, keynote speaker and best selling author as well as a deep tech investor. His leadership and technology initiatives have established a global presence in various sectors including leadership development and many more. He is pioneering innovation and fostering growth in the tech industry. Today, Anders and I are going to discuss what leaders can learn from the Norwegian success mentality. Okay, here's my conversation with Anders Inset, world renowned business philosopher and keynote speaker. Anders, welcome to the Voice Search podcast.
- [01:28]
Anders Inset
Thank you for having me on, Jordan.
- [01:30]
Jordan Cooney
So I'm excited because we don't get a lot of speakers like yourself on our show and I want to start off because you did share this in kind of our prepping for our episodes that you have a background in the SEO industry. So this isn't entirely as they would say here in America. From left field you have a connection to the people who are listening to our show and our core audience. Give us a little bit of background on that and how you got into SEO and then maybe we can go into the more important topics which is where you are today.
- [02:01]
Anders Inset
Yeah, sure. Well, I actually spent a year in Benedict, Nebraska. I had seven students in my senior high school year and I had time. We did football, basketball, all that stuff. But I also had Home Ec and I was introduced to the Internet back in 1994. I started to write code and I was very interested. We added the image code and Yahoo came out and we listed the public school in the archive. And it was very interesting to me because I've always been curious about learning new things. And fast forward 10 years, I was in Germany. I founded my first agency, set up the first online print house, one of the first online print houses in Europe. And within the agency we started to develop e commerce programming, web shops and obviously then as the SEO SEM agencies started to kick off, I was very curious to see how that evolves with development, moving from keeping customers on the site by displaying ads to organic search, and also then obviously into Google Ads and focusing on attribution, clicks and optimization. So I follow that. And I was interested to see how the US companies were doing in all the fields that I've dug into over the years. I've always been one looking under the kind of sort of into the engine and trying to figure out and trying to understand, at least for myself, what this is about. So, yeah, I used to be a hardcore capitalist. I've set up companies. I was in the agency industries. So that was the short dive into my background in the field of marketing.
- [03:43]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, that's awesome. But today, now you've obviously evolved and taken those experiences into a new direction. Right. And so now you're obviously doing a lot of business philosophy. You're looking at topics that are maybe a layer or two higher than a Google algorithm and trying to connect how technology, leadership, our history, and how those connections lead into the way we want to do work and the way we evolve as humanity. Right, yeah, sure.
- [04:14]
Anders Inset
I mean, a lot of the time I spend anticipating future scenarios, looking at the past 80 years we have had exponential growth in technologies. And what do I see as the plausible future for humanity? How do human beings behave? Drawing from thoughts and reflections in philosophy. So when I moved to Germany, I wanted to dig into Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche and the German philosophy to understand the essence of what it means to be a mensch, a human being. And having invested in quantum tech companies, and obviously my initials are AI, so I was very early curious about artificial intelligence and I've written quite a bit about that. So today I spent a lot of time about thinking about the implications of exponential technologies. And on the one hand, I'm a very strong believer in the power of human beings to unleash the potential that we have and the conscious experiences that we have that still distinguishes us from a machine. That is something that is essential to me. The vitality of life, the experience of our experience, the qualia as we refer to in philosophy. How does it feel like being something? And on the other hand, I'm also very, very curious about progress in technology to see how we evolve from optimization and putting all the knowledge we created into a machine, giving us literally infinite free access to knowledge, how that draws us back to the essence of understanding which we are like kind of sort of in the middle of now, understanding that we have created large language models, we have created AI, and now, you know, what is next. So, yeah, I do spend a lot of time on that. And I write quite a bit. And obviously being inspired by philosophy, that's something that comes in hand today.
- [06:10]
Jordan Cooney
That's amazing. And I mean, obviously tomorrow we're going to talk a little bit more about AI and how this all connects to not only where the SEO industry is, but just largely where the tech and the business community is at with the introduction of AI. But for today, we want to talk about this Norwegian mindset. And so obviously a big part of our audience is US based. Some of our fellow Americans may not be familiar with where Norway is, so we might need to give them a little bit of background on what is Norwegian and what is the Norwegian mindset. So tell us a little bit more about this. Let's go beyond the brown cheese and what really is the Norwegian mindset.
- [06:49]
Anders Inset
Well, I'm surprised you picked the brown cheese. That's the only, I would say, cuisine or food that we can relate to as something cultural. When it comes to something to eat from Norway, I'd say from maybe the salmon. But yeah, I mean, I think now in the recent days and the events at the US election shows us a little bit about the mentality that I have written about in my recent book called the Viking Code. So basically what I look at that is the modern Viking mentality of a culture that unites collectivism and individualism. It's a high performance culture that is deeply rooted in values. And you can take Tim Waltz as an example, basically coming out of nowhere from the state of Minnesota, the state of Norwegians, the Vikings, you know, as an example, and there's a lot of talk about that collectivism. There is a terminology in Norway called dugnad. So dugnad is as known as in Norway to the Norwegians as the Danish hygge that went around the world as a term of joyfulness and lightness. We also have joyfulness, but we also have that very strong belief that if we strengthen the community, if we put our effort into building stronger communities and the people around us, and if I then have an interest, intrinsic motivation to grow myself, I will strive even higher. Because like in a team, if all the team players are performing better, I can rise even more. So it's kind of sort of like a reinforcement learning model where I uplift my community or my team players. If you look at an organization and I said everything around me are doing better, if we can come together and build something greater than the sum of its parts, then obviously if I have the motivation or aspiration to have an individual achievement I will grow even further. So the input into the collective serves as an ethos for an individual journey. And that is what I've been looking at over the past years. How it came to be that my small home country, with only 5 million people known for being born with skis on their feet, all of a sudden rose to all this great achievements in particular in sports that have nothing to do with Norway and winter at all. You could take Viktor Hovland in golf, Kasparud in tennis, amongst the best in the world. Even in the us you have seen Haaland, who is a soccer player but is now signed as one of the prime figures at Nike, next to LeBron James as the goat and the Viking in the campaign. So we have these crazy achievements. And if you look at education, politics and business, you will see similar figures and personalities that have risen above what was normal in Norway. And I wanted to take a closer look at how is that? How did that come to be? What is it that makes this Viking Code, this ethos of Norwegian high performance, so special? And that's why I wrote this book, the Viking Code, in order to create a global philosophy on how to activate the vitalism of life. How can we build a high performance culture that is deeply rooted in values?
- [10:23]
Jordan Cooney
I got a million questions now for you, Anders. And like, this is especially important for myself, and not only myself, but the purpose behind the Voices of Search podcast as well. Like, the whole drive behind building this podcast is to build community, a community around a certain group of individuals who support an industry, a mindset, a knowledge area that is Search. Right? And when I set out to do this with Ben, who's one of the co founders of the podcast, it was not to make money, it was not to become famous, it was none of those things. It was to genuinely build and provide for this community. And my question for you, sharing with us what this Viking Code is and the nature of it and the purpose of building high performing teams, my question for you is, where does this start? How do you begin?
- [11:16]
Anders Inset
Yeah, and that's a very good question. So in today's world, we are always comparing to an extrinsic goal. So we rise above to have some kind of huge, gigantic vision. And it's okay to have goals and visions, but the micro ambitions, the micro ambitions that we put into the daily task that we set, they are the essence of a high output. So if your input of the next step that you take is of high quality and you continue that path and you experience the progress that you have on that Micro ambitious journey, then it has the same effect as compound interest. It compounds into a gold medal or some kind of achievement. So the essence of your vitality or your experience of progress is the essence of the output you will have much later on. And I think this is crucial for building lasting businesses. So if you look at the past 50 years, we have had an optimization society, the art of being right, which boils down to zeros and ones. Your opinion, My opinion. And it led to division. And it was a part of this algorithmic optimization that started with a very binary way of rewarding people in terms of likes, shares and money. A thumbs up and a thumbs down society. Immediate reaction turned into a monetary or some kind of success in terms of followers. So that was how we started to communicate. We started to communicate in terms of reaction, not in reflection. And that when you speed that up, performance becomes exhausting because we are continuously reacting to outside impulses. We are extrinsically driven to optimize the past. Whereas if you have an intrinsic motivation, as in your example to find, set up a podcast that emphasizes quality as input, then you can compound into a great output and then you can as a human being, put in the effort. So it's an active statement. You act and you perform, you don't react and optimize. And that's a difference between a high performance culture where we have infinite possibilities as in comparison to just reacting, which wears you down, leads to depression, leads to division, and also of course, to an inactive society.
- [13:55]
Jordan Cooney
Right. And I actually want to add one to that, which is anxiety. I think that's one of the greatest causes of not only business, but in many cases, the challenge that community has when we're constantly chasing that next reaction, whether it be a, like, whether it be a promotion, whether it be a pay increase, whether it be all these things we're chasing after that don't actually reflect on our own needs to provide for our own inputs, and then how those outputs manifest themselves and how we show up. I'm curious about another area you brought up in terms of this Norwegian mindset, in particular, around the way that you've established what this is and that is this concept of community. Community is, I believe, largely lost in most of Western societies. We've lost what the definition or purpose of community generally is. And I'm wondering what you learned or found from that Norwegian mindset and that Viking code that gives us a new blueprint for community.
- [14:59]
Anders Inset
Yeah. Again, I would take this as a reference to our being caught in our absolutism of Old systems. So today's world is about localism and globalism. So the nation state, as such, it has some kind of organizational purpose and it's good for patriotism that we can see today. But on an individual level, you relate to your local community. It is not a declaration of independence, it's a declaration of interdependence that you buy into, right? You are defined by your local identity or your interest group in terms of a network or a digital entity that you buy into. And then you're a part of a global community. And we as human beings, we can only relate be a human being in relation to other human beings. So I am, because you are. And that dance requires an interaction and that is the interdependency of our species. And again, coming back to the reaction mode, if we are triggered by comparisons, and as you talked about before, the anxiety or the Angus of that comparison, you are detached from that individual aspect. You are living in a world of comparison. I used to live like that. I didn't feel success even though I built my company. I was a professional athlete, but I was just striving for that comparison to the outside world. And regardless how successful you are, there is always one that is better for most of us. And therefore this becomes very exhausting, which means you are continuously striving towards a moving target. And I think that it's good to have those feelings and reactions and the dopamine sparking. But the actual feeling of life as in comparison, to get the feelings gives an active statement where you act and you can influence your little cosmos in your world, which is local and in an interdependency to global. So I think that this is in the Norwegian community. Coming back to your question, I grew up in a small town in Norway and I had to do all the sports, I had to do handball, the team handball and football, soccer in Norway and skiing and everything. Because if I didn't show up for the others, they didn't have a team and they wouldn't show up for me. And I didn't have a team, so I could not do my sport. And I also saw that when I lived in Nebraska. And this community spirit is something that needs to be reignited. And once you do that, people are like, yes, where did this get lost? And it's not about naive optimism, it's about a collective possibilism where we together can achieve something. And I think you saw that Harrison was entering the election and coming in with that exact message. Say that, okay, we put in the effort, it's not about that, you know, esoteric ideology, society, we have to do the work, you know, that's the message. But we do it together. And if we together, you know, activate and you have different opinions, that's okay. But that's what the core of progress. But you get some kind of identity back where you say that I can at least influence my own individual journey. And I think that is very present in the Norwegian culture where we tie into the dugnut, the collectivism. But we also are respected for our different opinions and to have our own life and careers.
- [18:48]
Jordan Cooney
I want to tie this into something that I think is incredibly important, because this entire conversation, in large part, to some degree, what you've already alluded to from political leaders like Harris Walls, and the reality is that leaders in many instances are drivers towards how we show up in these scenarios. You mentioned early on when you first described the Viking Code, that it's many of the small things we do that lead to the big things we want to get the results that we want to have. It's the way we show up at practice in sports, it's the way we show up in meetings at work. And those small things then lead to the big results that we want to have as individuals and as professionals and as athletes or as parents. How we show up every day for our kids leads to a better result, which is better children for this earth. I'm really curious how leaders can develop environments that drive the Viking code in their organizations, in their households, in their communities.
- [19:54]
Anders Inset
I think that's a very good and relevant question, Jordan. And I think if you look at the structure of an organization, you have management and you have leadership. So in previous eras, there were managers that delegated messages and oversaw people. Today that is put into technology. So an agile organization is agile when they can speed up, which acquires very stable processes. That's the technology part. So we need more optimization. And the question is, when are you optimizing for finite results and when are you leading and creating for infinite organizational structures? So you have, in comparison to sport, you have the finite game where you play two teams against each other and you have a result those you also have analogies to business. There are things where you have to perform. There are actions like flying into an airport. You don't want to have a lot of playfulness and creativity and stuff like that. In open heart surgery, you don't want to have a disruptive doctor that practices new errors and tries out a lot of stuff. So you have to distinguish, just like in sport, when are you in the final, the last minute, when are you in the game where you tie into processes and structures and then you have the pitch, the playful, the playground where people come and explore. And there has been a lot of emphasis on failure cultures. And I think that's very, I think it's not a good analogy because we don't want to have failure culture, we want to have celebration of problems, progress. Because everything we as a human species have is that we were gifted two opposable thumbs that we can create tools to improve our lives, right? So we have an infinite potential to create better explanation and that is progress. It's never finite because we don't solve problems, we make better problems. And creating better problems requires a much better understanding of the problem than to strive for a rapid solution. The question for the organizations become when are you focusing on management, which is stability, and when are you focusing on leadership, which is sometimes also creative destruction or interruption to processes and innovation and all of that. Those two things, if you can draw that analogy to your organization, say okay, we need to have structure, we need to show up, we need to, to perform. But then we also have where we strive above our services. And it's not about making errors, we all make failures. But it's unleashing the potential of the human being to go beyond previous paradigms or previous achievements. And that is where you create the pitch in the organization. And that is why I emphasize to celebrate progress and not to enable failures. That is why I think that getting the trust into the entities where people can have healthy discussions on different opinions, basically getting friction and trust together, which obviously lead to progress. Prior to the pandemic, we had trillion dollar industries that no one had created on purpose. It happened by chance, the coffee machine, where people bumped into each other, right? And they were in a trusted environment because they work for the same company and they had different opinions. But the coincidental bumping into each other for a conversation had that particular creation spot where new ideas were born. That was friction and trust leading to a spark of a new progress. And that type of thinking has gone lost in a world where it has become very, very much about optimization and trying to be right and trying to live and practice the art of being right as in comparison to digging into the philosophical path of the art of being wrong.
- [23:58]
Jordan Cooney
And that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. A huge thank you to Anders Inset for joining us in part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Anders and I will be going over the concept of Bridging the gap between humanity and AI. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Anders, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can also contact him on X, where his handle is ndersinset, or visit his company website andersinset.com okay, thanks to.
- [24:33]
Ben Jschab
Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is JT that's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.