About Mats R. Larsson
Mats R. Larsson
Founder and President of Global Energy Transformation Institute
Mats R. Larsson has worked for almost twenty years as a consultant within business strategy development, technology management, and change management. In his recent book “Global Energy Transformation,” Mats develops a number of high level principles for the large scale transformation of national and global energy systems. He is an enthusiastic presenter, an engaging leader within the area of sustainability and the originator of a new philosophy for business management and economic growth that is based on the application of market based change and change management in combination.
He has specialized in the analysis of emerging technologies and challenges, and also in the development of strategies and the principles of change management that are necessary for companies or society to apply in order to take advantage of arising opportunities or mitigate in the face of challenges.
Education
Larsson received his education at Lund University in Sweden, studying International Business Administration.
This included courses in German and English, with an emphasis on business language. He also took additional courses of English, including the study of English and American literature.
Career
In 1990 he started to work as a strategy and organization consultant with the Sweden based international management consulting company SIAR-Bossard. This company had been founded in the 1960′s by Professor Eric Rhenman, who was a guest professor at Harvard Business School 1974-1976. At SIAR-Bossard, Larsson learned the principles of “The SIAR School of Management” that had been developed by Rhenman and his colleagues (among them Professor Chris Argyris of Harvard) during the 1970′s. SIAR based its ideas on the theories of “Organizational Learning”.
Apart from his experiences within business strategy and organizational learning, he also acquired some insight into the development of health care systems and operational improvement in industrial companies. Rhenman had, during the 1970′s and 1980′s, developed ideas for improvement of Swedish health care administration, based on the US system of “managed care”, represented by Health Maintenance Organizations. After strong initial resistance, several Swedish “county councils” became favorable to the principles and started to implement them in different ways.
More successful were the early attempts to make operational improvements in industrial companies, through the application of Time Compression, Capital Rationalization and other early methods, that later were replaced by the more developed principles of Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR), Lean Production (Lean) and Total Quality Management (TQM). In 1993 SIAR-Bossard purchased the consulting firm in the field of operational improvement, Crescentia, and Larsson participated in some projects together with the new colleagues with this background, and managed to learn some basics of operational improvement.
In 1995 Larsson accepted a position as management consultant at the Malmö, Sweden, office of the large France-based IT-consulting firm Cap Gemini. As a strategy consultant for five years, he had realized the importance of IT in the formulation of business strategies and operational decisions of the future, and he wanted to learn more about this. At SIAR-Bossard he had also participated in the early development of this company’s own methods of BPR that were based on ideas that had been developed by American consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy. While SIAR-Bossard had only started to develop this methodology, IT-consulting firms like Cap Gemini saw the potential earlier, and made stronger efforts to establish themselves in the emerging field of operational improvement. BPR emphasized the use of advanced IT solutions, for the improvement of business processes. Cap Gemini had developed the “embryos” of three different methods, Business Process Management, for small change of processes, Business Process Development, for medium scale change, and Business Process Transformation, for large scale change.
At Cap Gemini Larsson worked with the mapping and change of business processes in several industrial companies. He also worked as a project manager, and sub-project manager, with the implementation of new business systems at the largest Swedish dairy company (Arla), and in the maintenance division of the national rail company SJ.
Through these projects he built on his early experiences
of driving change in large systems and organizations, which he had started to build through his involvement in change projects in the health care sector. In the last of his IT systems implementation projects at Cap Gemini, that at SJ, he worked together with consultants from the sister company Gemini Consulting, that offered change management services in the form of large scale projects.
At SJ there were at times 15-20 consultants from Gemini Consulting and Cap Gemini, supporting the organization to adapt to market conditions, prior to the divestment of the maintenance division from SJ. Larsson was responsible for the implementation of the business system IFS at the largest maintenance center north of Stockholm, and the according process changes that would follow from the implementation of the system. This was made difficult by the unfortunate choice of a production system for the maintenance operation, a choice that had been made before he came into the project.
During his last year at Cap Gemini, Larsson, together with colleague David Lundberg, wrote the book “The Transparent Market,” which introduces the area of e-business and e-business strategy.
The years from 1998 to the present break down into two different periods. The first (1998-2003) represent “the e-business strategy years.” This period actually started in 1997, when Larsson started to write “The Transparent Market” together with David Lundberg. It includes the turbulent period of “The Internet Bubble” and its aftermath until 2003. The second period started in 2004 with the writing of the book “The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth”, and its publication in November of that year. It concerns the development of the ideas presented in “Global Energy Transformation,” and the work with the development of a consulting and research area in the field of change management in energy related sectors.
The e-business strategy years (1998-2003)
After the publication of “The Transparent Market,” Larsson wanted to work in the field of e-business strategy. At this time the market for e-business services was not mature and most of the early attempts involved developing sites without a strategy. Therefore he became a self-employed consultant under the umbrella of InterPares Konsult and was located at the office of this company in Malmö.
During the two years that he worked at InterPares, the market for e-business strategy services remained immature. He participated in a small number of small scale projects, but worked mainly with traditional business strategy and organizational issues. He also lead a risk analysis of the mitigation activities for Y2K (“the millennium bug”) of the Skåne county council, which is responsible for providing health care to one million Swedes in the southernmost part of the country. This was his first experience of the analysis of technology risk.
In early 2000 the market for e-business strategy services was maturing rapidly, and Larsson accepted employment with the rapidly growing consulting firm Acando. This company had been started by the investment company Custos, and the top managers of Acando. The CEO of Custos was a former McKinsey consultant in Sweden, Christer Gardell, and one of the other founders of Acando was another former McKinsey consultant, Lars Wollung, who later became CEO of Acando. At Acando Larsson became a leading business, and e-business, strategy consultant, responsible for the development of methods and tools, and an organization among the business consultants. There were some 40 business strategy consultants at Acando, and the company had rapidly grown from zero to 450 consultants, most of them in systems development and implementation roles.
The idea of Acando was that the company should be able to accept large scale change management projects for large companies, in which Acanco consultants could become responsible for all relevant aspects of change, from the analysis of business needs, to the implementation of new business systems and improved business processes. This was the type of assignment that Gemini Consulting had had at SJ, and where Larsson made experiences from large scale change management. Acando had the explicit goal of only employing the best consultants from each field in Sweden.
At Acando, Larsson participated in a number of analyses of business opportunities, systems implementations and preparations for change management projects. Several clients, such as Ericsson, had spent large amounts of money investing in new business systems, without experiencing any substantial business improvements from this. After analyzing the situation, it turned out that these companies had replaced older systems, but they had not changed operational routines. They were, in essence, working in the same way as they had done before the systems change. The consultants from Acando made transformation plans that showed in detail how cost could be reduced or revenue could be increased, and took on the task, together with the client, to implement the new business processes.
In 2001, just after the follow-up book in Swedish “Den transparenta ekonomin” had been published, the Internet Bubble burst. This was the start of a recession that would last for more than three years. Larsson worked at the Malmö office of Acando, which had not yet managed to develop a strong foot-hold in the local market of southern Sweden, but he worked mostly on projects for Stockholm clients. When the market weakened, the Malmö office was reduced in size and later closed, and the consultants were made redundant.
Larsson found a new job as a business development manager at the English firm IMI, that was about to start a technology and business development office in the Stuttgart area in Germany. At this company, Larsson worked with technology development and management issues for two years. He worked closely together with major customers of IMI in the automotive and packaging industries.
The energy systems transformation years
In 2004, he returned to Sweden and worked as a free-lance consultant with change management projects in small and medium-sized companies. He considered whether to go back to a large consulting company, as a supply chain management consultant, or if he should develop his competence in a new emerging area, the nature of which, in early 2004 was not clear. He decided to remain a self-employed consultant and, after the publication of his second internationally published book “The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth” which contains some of the ideas that were later developed in “Global Energy Transformation,” he identified energy transformation as a key competence area of the future. He decided that he, for the long term, would develop a unique concept in the area of energy systems transformation.
One of his largest customers was the development company for small businesses in the Skåne region, IUC Skåne.
Under the umbrella of IUC Skåne, he did a small number of small projects in the energy sector that gave him the ideas and material to write the book “Global Energy Transformation,” which was published globally in the summer of 2009. Following publication of “Global Energy Transformation,” Larsson founded the institute “Global Energy Transformation Institute” with the purpose of working as a consulting firm with the further development and implementation of the ideas presented in “Global Energy Transformation.”
The Transparent Market
This book appeared in Europe, published by Palgrave Macmillan in the UK, in 1998, and almost a year later in the United States, published by the same publisher. Larsson’s contributions to the book were largely based on his experiences of business strategy and organizational learning at SIAR-Bossard and of IT-systems implementations at Cap Gemini. In the book Larsson & Lundberg analyzes the opportunities for operational improvement offered by electronic business, but they also analyze the strategic challenges for companies that were to be expected as markets became increasingly global and transparent.
Global Energy Transformation
After publication of the book “The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth” in 2004, Larsson became aware of the ideas of Peak Oil. Around this time he read the book “The Party’s Over” by Richard Heinberg, and also contacted him to initiate a dialogue. He visited Heinberg in Santa Rosa, California in the summer of 2006. Early in the contacts between Larsson and Heinberg, Larsson put forward the idea of writing a book on the subject of change management and economics in the energy sector.
In 2006 Larsson, led a project that analyzed the impact that an increasing price of energy would have on business in southern Sweden. This report was published in Swedish after the summer of 2006. The primary result of the work was a number of analysis models and tools for structuring the area of change management in the energy sector. During a visit to a conference (IAMOT 2007) in the United States in 2007, Larsson developed the idea for the book.
The first working title was “The Third Wave of Business Development,” arguing that the first waves and second waves were related to innovation and strategic dominance of global industries. Later, the structure of Global Energy Transformation was developed into its present form with Part 1 presenting and analyzing the problem of Peak Oil and an increasing dependence on fossil fuels, Part 2 presenting the tools that are necessary for large scale change management in the energy sector, and Part 3 presenting analysis of the differing situations in six different areas of society:
- Transportation
- Industrial processes
- Energy production and distribution
- The built environment
- Agriculture
- Behavior and work life change
In this book Larsson argues that the market forces will not be able to provide the incentives or the strong and precise signals to provide guidance for business and financial decision makers. Instead, large scale planned and managed change efforts will become necessary. Larsson describes change management in three large scale innovation and transformation programs in history: The transformation of United States’ industry to war production during the Second World War, The Marshall Plan and The Apollo Program. In these examples he identifies many of the necessary tools and structural aspects that will become necessary in a large scale energy transformation project.
Larsson argues that four steps will be necessary in order to develop and run this type of program:
1. Analysis of the situation and transformation opportunities
2. The development of a transformation strategy
3. Development of plans that are based on the strategy
4. Managed change of the program
While Larsson sees a need for planning of the program, he argues that the type of planned intervention and the level of planning could only be determined during the analysis phase. The strategy needs to contain elements of managed change and it also needs to identify the areas where the market forces will be able to handle technology development and implementation with a minimum of project management activities that oversee the process.
Larsson repeatedly refers to a book by the late Professor of Economics Vernon W. Ruttan, “Is War Necessary for Economic Growth?”, in which Ruttan analyzes the development of a six complexes of “general purpose technologies” in the past. These are the American production system, airplane technologies, space technologies, IT, Internet technologies and nuclear power technologies. He finds that in all cases, large scale and long term government investments have been necessary in order to speed up development. In the absence of government investments development would have taken substantially longer and in the case of nuclear power, this technology may not have been developed at all without financing from the government.
Larsson argues that the exact nature of government involvement in different areas, remains to be determined through analysis, but he strongly believes that the conclusions of Professor Ruttan will be valid for the sustainable general purpose technologies that we need in the future. Government investment and project management will be necessary to speed up this development.
He elaborates substantially on the ideas of Ruttan. Ruttan primarily focused on the financial aspect of investment, which means providing resources and paying for development. Larsson identified the need for change management on the part of government, which is a much wider concept than providing financial resources.
Throughout Global Energy Transformation he elaborates the different aspects of change management in the energy related sectors of the economy and develops his argument that different types of change management and intervention will become necessary.
He argues that planning and management in this type of endeavor has to focus on scarce resources and planning must be based on these:
- Time
- Money
- Competence
- Raw Materials
- Land
According to Larsson, success, in the global energy transformation, depends on that we make the best use possible of all of these.
Mats R. Larsson is available for related consulting projects, speaking engagements and panels, authorship and other areas where he can contribute his knowledge, perspective and experience.
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Mats Visits GWU June 21
