'Transforming the way we do business' Norden CEO on diversity strategy.

Shipping as an industry has had an image problem in trying to appeal to the new generation of talent. Sometimes accused of being old in its ways, male-dominated and too accustomed to recruiting lookalikes from within its own ranks, the business of conveying freight by ships looked frankly unexciting compared with other links in the trading chain.

let me tell you about a conversation I’ve had recently that took such an image and smashed it to pieces.

I was at Hellerup in Denmark, visiting the corporate HQ of global shipping company NORDEN to talk to its CEO, Jan Rindbo. By the way, Jan himself is not from the conventional mould of a Danish shipping captain. Just 47 years old, he’s returned to Denmark after spending most of his career to date working in Asia and the United States. His outlook is far more international than national.

When Jan Rindbo came on board at NORDEN in 2015, his first task was to turn the ship around in terms of its balance sheet. Along with many other players in the maritime transport business, he now recounts, the company had been enduring quite some P&L pressures when the market did not bounce back as expected after the international financial crisis that broke in 2008.

A return to healthy profitability is one marker of the progress that Jan and his team have made in the past six years. But our recent conversation also revealed an equally fundamental change. Under their watch, NORDEN has transformed from a traditional ship-owning company into a trading-oriented service provider.

Our purpose is about enabling smarter global trade

This started from his early decision to take NORDEN’s existing mission-and-vision statement and simplify by adding a purpose. “Our purpose is about enabling smarter global trade,” he declares. “We sit in the heart of global trade. Everything that happens around us has some relevance for us.”

It’s a new direction in mentality for a shipping operator that celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2021. “We are still here a hundred and fifty years later because we are agile, because we can adjust,” Jan told me. “One of the key values that underpins our work is flexibility. Here that means our ability to adjust to the world around us. We adjust constantly. Ours is a trading business where things move fast and we respond to that.”

One of the key values that underpins our work is flexibility. Here that means our ability to adjust to the world around us.

If that already sounds like a departure from the staid image of ship operators, then stand by for the CEO’s insistence during our conversation that the shipping business is becoming a more rewarding, interesting and diverse place to work. Quite a claim, we’d probably all agree, for a business which has not so far embraced diversity in particular very well.

How is this now different? Listen as Jan recalls the journey at NORDEN. When he joined, all its regional offices were headed by Danes --- actually male Danes, he notes ---- whereas the current leadership is much more diverse. “Today, 31% of our leadership team is female, four out of nine board members are female. We have two international board members. All of this has changed in the last five or six years.

Today, 31% of our leadership team is female, four out of nine board members are female

“So we are bringing diversity. As an industry we have been ignorant for way too long about the benefits it brings. You know, we can see it in our results, in our performance and in the discussions we have. Yes, diversity is great for business.”

Diversity itself is diverse, he continues. Of course it’s about gender, but also about age, background, international versus national, among many other aspects. “Diversity brings better decisions, better decision-making processes. When I sit down with my leadership team, I want diversity in the opinions. My question is, are you hiring people who look like you because they will confirm your own opinions or do you hire people who can productively challenge what you think and the way you make your decisions??And I think that's where diversity is really powerful.“

When I sit down with my leadership team, I want diversity in the opinions

According to Jan Rindbo, it heralds a sea-change for perceptions of the shipping industry by those looking from the shore. “What we see once we sit down with people and talk about the business, suddenly they open up and discover this is a really inspiring place to be. It’s somewhere where you can actually make a difference. We talk about the impact of what we do and our purpose, how they can join us in changing global trade.

“That means today, we're hiring people who are not from the traditional sources for this industry. For example we are hiring a lot of data scientists to speed up the whole transformation that we’re going through. It's really about combining the intuitive with the analytical. We talk about these as categorising the various intelligences that are represented, to include the emotional intelligence along with the analytical intelligence.

we're hiring people who are not from the traditional sources for this industry

“And it's really a powerful conversation, which, again, is about diversity. Because we’re not saying we don’t want anything out of the historical skillsets. We still need them. But retaining these while adding different skills from outside our industry, that combination is very interesting. And that we can see is transforming the way we do business. It has really made us much better.”