Rasmus Ankersen

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• How to Create Hunger in Paradise

  “From a competition perspective, the iPhone is nothing but a niche product.”

  Those famous words were spoken Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo when asked if he saw the iPhone as a commercial threat, barely one year after the iPhone’s release.

  Kallasvuo’s answer came to stand as a monument to the arrogance that sent Nokia into a free fall towards the abyss. In six years Nokia’s smart phone market share dropped from 50% to 3%. The same people who made Nokia so successful also turned it into a gigantic failure.

  There is no doubt that at the heart of success lies the reason for failure. While we talk a lot about how to achieve success, we talk way too little about the consequences of success; about the complacency, arrogance and the fear of losing it all again, which often follow as a shadow of success. Success produces complacency. It happens to individuals, companies and nations. But how do you stay humble when the company cashes in record profits, and how do you provide people with the feeling that they are standing on a burning platform when there are no flames in sight? Or put it in another way: How do you create hunger in paradise?

  Over the past two years Rasmus Ankersen has travelled the world to hunt for the answers to these questions. Based on impressive and authentic case studies about Apple, LEGO, Blockbuster, Manchester United, Southwest Airlines, Restaurant NOMA and Nokia, he presents the five lessons we need to learn: by putting them into practice, we can avoid becoming another victim of complacency. Hunger in Paradise is what Rasmus Ankersen calls the cure for complacency.

  The Five Lessons

  1. Never trust in success

  2. Burn your trophies

  3. If it ain’t broken, consider breaking it

  4. Kill the illusion of perfect conditions

  5. Create a compelling WHY

• The Gold Mine Effect

  What is the reason that the world’s best middle-distance runners grew up in the same village in Ethiopia? Why are 137 of the world’s 500 best female golfers from South Korea? How did an athletic club in Kingston, Jamaica, manage to produce most of the world’s best sprinters? What is the secret behind Brazil’s mass production of soccer super stars?

  For six intense months Rasmus Ankersen, a writer and performance specialist, travelled around the world to crack the secrets of those performance hotbeds. He ran with the Ethiopian Olympic champions in Bekoji, he discussed motivation with the coach of Usain Bolt, played football in the Brazilian favelas and much, much more.

  In The Gold Mine Effect, Rasmus presents his surprising conclusions on how any business, organization or team can adopt the high performance secrets of the gold mines. No crap. No empty theories. Only real-life examples and result driven insights on how to grow world class performance.