This morning started with a fika (lucia bun and coffee), at 9:15 am.
At 10:15 am we had our weekly project meeting. As always, there was fika (fudge cake and coffee).
The project meeting was followed by lunch. The lunch was finished off with a fika (gingerbread and coffee), around 1 pm.
And just now, at 2 pm, we celebrated an important victory with fika (gâteau and coffee).
This is starting to wear me down.
SAAB is about to roll over and die, and the Swedish papers are full of people throwing blame at each other. Whose fault is it, when a business is shut down? Is it the the owners’ fault, for not designing the right strategy, or is the management team who lacks in excecution? Or should we blame the workers, for not working hard and smart enough?
None of the above, according to many Swedes. Instead, it’s the governments fault. It’s the government’s responsibility to secure work for their citizens. The reasoning goes that SAAB should be kept alive by the government, so that the SAAB employees could have a job to go to. SAAB has been run at a loss for the last 20 years, and other countries and businesses are obviosuly doing a much better job at building cars, but so what – it keeps people occupied.
This is article 23.1 in the Universial Declaration of Human Rights:
“Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”
To me, this doesn’t mean that anyone should be guaranteed a job, just by being a citizen. It means that everyone should have the right to employment, if they’re qualified to do the job. The government’s role is to offer education to everyone, but it’s the each person’s responsibility to go to school.
Lending money to poor people in developing countries is old news, but growing in importance. “Microloans” is gaining momentum. Startups and established investments banks are looking to help people out of poverty, and make money while they’re doing it.
1.6 billion people do not have access to electricy today. This is mostly due to the high costs of building an electric grid in rural and isolated areas. As cleantech develops, and the costs of locally produced energy get lower by the day, a gigantic business opportunity is emerging.
Just as finance institutions are looking at setting up businesses in developing countries, energy companies (like my own mothership Göteborg Energi) should start looking into using their knowledge and technology to bring clean electricity and energy to new markets. There’s a bunch of humanitarian reasons to why we should do this, as this report show. We now need to figure out how to make the business case for microenergy to look good.
