That recognition has little to do with titles, polish, or traditional corporate signaling. If anything, Patrick believes those things can sometimes become misleading.

“A lot of people are used to structure carrying them,” he says. “Clear hierarchies. Clear ownership. Clear processes. But specialist firms work differently. The environment assumes people will move things forward without waiting to be told.”

That changes what makes someone successful.

The people who tend to thrive here are usually highly autonomous, but still collaborative. They move naturally toward responsibility. They do not wait for structure to create momentum for them.

“It’s a very grown-up environment,” Patrick says. “People are trusted to operate without heavy structures around them. That freedom works really well for some people. Others find it uncomfortable surprisingly quickly.”

Per Appelgren, who has spent years building specialist firms and working closely with founders across the alliance, believes that dynamic exists because these environments operate differently at a structural level.

“Specialist firms don’t really scale through control,” he says. “They scale through trust. The people who thrive in these environments are usually the ones who become easier to trust the more responsibility they get, not harder.”

The challenge is that these qualities rarely appear clearly on paper.

CVs can show experience. Interviews can show confidence. But the traits that matter most inside specialist firms are often behavioral: judgment, ownership, trust, and the ability to contribute without needing constant direction or validation.

Patrick describes one of the strongest signals as forward movement.

“The people who do well here tend to see what needs to happen and start moving toward it,” he says. “Not aggressively. Not politically. They just naturally take responsibility for momentum.”

That mindset also shapes how companies inside Newground work with each other. Recommendations carry weight because they are tied closely to personal credibility. People put their own reputation behind the people they bring into the alliance.

“When we recruit senior people, trust becomes the deciding factor surprisingly often,” Patrick says. “The real question is usually: would I trust my own reputation recommending this person to a customer?”

“In specialist environments, reputation compounds very quickly,” Per says. “That’s why personal recommendations carry so much weight. People are effectively lending out trust they spent years building.”

That creates an environment where trust matters more than hierarchy, and reputation matters more than internal politics.

It also changes how people develop.

“In these environments, progression becomes less about managing visibility and more about expanding responsibility.”

The people who advance are often the ones who consistently create clarity, strengthen the people around them, and make complex situations easier to move through.

Patrick believes that is part of why many people coming from larger organizations experience a period of adjustment.

“In more layered organizations, structures absorb a lot of friction,” he says. “In specialist firms, people absorb it themselves. That requires a different level of ownership.”

Per believes that difference ultimately shapes the culture itself.

“A lot of company cultures are built around managing risk,” he says. “Specialist firms are often built around enabling judgment. That attracts a slightly different type of person.”

Over time, that ownership becomes part of the culture itself. Not as a formal value statement, but as a shared expectation between people who trust each other to operate at a high level without constant oversight.

The companies inside Newground may differ in expertise, focus, and market. But across the alliance, the people who thrive inside these firms tend to recognize each other almost immediately. Not through titles or status, but through how they operate when structure stops carrying them.

A central tension throughout the morning was the balance between operational excellence and reinvention.

Successful companies are built around structures, leadership models, incentives, and operating rhythms designed for stability and predictable execution. Those strengths remain critical, while also making adaptation slower when industries begin moving faster than internal decision-making and execution models.

Transformation emerged not as a program, but as an organizational capability.

Not something operating alongside the business for a limited period of time, but a long-term capability built through continuous interpretation, prioritization, and adjustment as conditions change.

Leadership remained central throughout the conversation, particularly how leaders allocate attention, create clarity, and shape decision-making over time.

A recurring observation was how historical success can become a constraint when markets begin shifting faster than internal operating models.

“The systems that made a company successful are often the same systems that make change difficult,” Johan Rudberg noted.

The systems that once created stability and performance can also make reinvention slower and more difficult.

Structure and culture also remained closely connected throughout the talks.

Reorganizations alone rarely create lasting change. Sustainable transformation depends on leadership, incentives, behaviors, and operating models reinforcing one another over time.

Analytics and decision-making also featured prominently throughout the morning.

Businesses increasingly have access to more data than they can operationalize. The harder problem is turning information into prioritization, learning, and course correction quickly enough to matter.

Across industries, transformation is increasingly becoming part of the operating environment itself.

At Adage, data engineer Christofer Bäcklin sees that shift in the day-to-day work. A few years ago, much of the time went into getting things to run. Debugging systems, navigating documentation, resolving blockers before anything meaningful could happen.

“Before, you could get stuck for hours, sometimes a full day, just trying to get something to run,” he says. “That doesn’t really happen anymore.” What has disappeared is not the work itself, but the friction that used to slow it down.

Something else has taken its place.

“It’s a bit like being in an orchestra where someone suddenly hands out a new instrument to everyone,” Christofer says. “Most people don’t know how to play it yet, but everyone is trying. And every now and then, someone does something that makes you realize how far it can go.”

You move faster. You get unstuck. The work starts earlier. The shift is not just speed. It is scale.

“It’s not like things are just a bit faster,” he says. “It’s a completely different level of volume.” He pauses. “You don’t play a Stradivarius violin anymore. You play a thousand synthesizers.”

Once output reaches that level, the question changes. Not how to produce, but what to produce at all.

“The machine can build almost anything,” he says. “But it doesn’t know what matters. It doesn’t have a goal. You do.” That responsibility becomes clearer, not smaller.

“There is a common worry that AI will make us think less,” Christofer says. “My experience is the opposite. I have never thought as hard as I do now.” When implementation is no longer the bottleneck, the work shifts upstream.

“You spend less time on syntax and scaffolding, and more time asking whether you are solving the right problem in the first place.”

AI does not resolve ambiguity. It amplifies it. “People think it will clean things up for them,” Christofer says. “But if you start with a mess, you just get more mess, faster.” If you know what you are doing, you move very fast. If you don’t, you just scale confusion.

The baseline is moving. Things that once looked like specialist expertise are now widely available. Certain types of smartness are no longer scarce.

“When intelligence is on tap, the question becomes: What do you bring to the table?”

That is where the role of the specialist sharpens. Not in producing more, but in defining direction. Knowing what to prioritize and how to structure the work so it leads somewhere meaningful.

“The real question is not what you can build,” he says. “It’s why you’re building it, and whether it actually matters.”

The gap becomes clear. Some will use AI to build Rube Goldberg machines. Others to scale their own know-how. The difference is not in the tools, but in how the work is framed.

Most work will move toward volume. Fast, accessible, good enough. That is where the baseline ends up. The specialist is defined by what still requires judgment.

As output becomes easy, it also becomes easier to produce the wrong things at scale. The middle ground disappears.

“When intelligence is on tap,” Christofer says, “what matters is what you choose to do with it.”

For Caroline Raning at Influence, that distinction is often where execution is either enabled or diluted. After years of working in large-scale transformation environments at the intersection of business and technology, she has seen how even well-defined strategies lose momentum when they are not translated into something the organization can actually use.

“Most strategies are not wrong,” she says. “They are just not clear enough to guide day-to-day decisions.”

“The ambition to include more perspectives is often right,” Caroline says. “But it also creates a risk. The more input you bring in, the harder it becomes to maintain a direction that remains actionable.”

“You rarely see a lack of activity,” she says. “Usually, there is a lot going on. But activity is not the same as alignment.”

This is often where execution starts to weaken. Not because of a lack of ambition, but because decisions no longer point in the same direction.

Most organizations respond structurally. They introduce new operating models, reporting lines, or frameworks in an attempt to create alignment.

But structure alone rarely solves the core issue.

“You can redesign an organization in many ways,” Caroline says. “But if the direction is unclear, it rarely translates into better execution.”

Clarity has to be built intentionally. It requires making choices, setting priorities, and expressing direction in a way that holds together across the organization.

Clear direction does more than explain strategy. It creates consistency across decisions, teams, and initiatives.

“You know it works when it starts guiding everyday decisions,” Caroline says. “Not just in leadership discussions, but across the organization.”

That also changes what leadership needs to focus on. In complex environments, execution can no longer be controlled in detail. There are simply too many decisions and dependencies.

Clarity scales differently.

“Many leaders still try to compensate with more control,” she says. “But what actually improves execution is making the direction clear enough that decisions can be made consistently across the organization.”

That requires a different leadership discipline. Less focus on controlling decisions, and more focus on reinforcing direction, enabling collaboration, and building a culture where decisions can be made consistently without constant escalation.

“If the direction is clear, you can give people more space,” Caroline says. “If it isn’t, you tend to hold on to decisions for too long.”

Across Newground, that perspective is familiar. The value specialists create is rarely just expertise itself, but the clarity they bring to complex situations.

Because execution rarely fails from lack of effort.

It fails when direction becomes too unclear to act on.

Emble is built for companies facing rising complexity, relentless data demands, and processes that drain human time. Fredrik and Xiuming design AI agents that take on the work that slows organizations down. Gathering data, cleaning it, structuring it, analyzing it and enriching it. “Companies still spend so much time on repetitive work,” Fredrik says. “We help them move toward what should already be executed by agents.” These agents don’t behave like tools. They behave like teammates that require updates, governance, and continuous development to perform at their best. 

That single shift rewrites the entire operating model. “If an agent is part of the workforce, you can’t think in project terms anymore,” Xiuming explains. “Someone has to take care of it continuously.” Emble is intentionally small, using its own agents internally and measuring success by outcomes rather than hours. It’s not consulting augmented with AI; it’s a different category entirely, built around long-term value rather than deliverables. 

The Newground alliance gives Emble the structure to build at speed. High performing agents depend on deep domain knowledge and access to specialists who understand real workflows. Knowledge that sits across the alliance’s network of niche companies. It also provides the operational backbone that frees Emble from early-stage friction. “The culture fit was really strong,” Fredrik notes. “We don’t want to build a binary product in isolation. We want to build with clients, and that requires a broader ecosystem.” 

Market momentum is already proving their thesis right. “Our hypothesis has been validated,” Xiuming says. “The challenge now is guiding clients from where they are today to what’s actually possible.” With Newground behind them, Emble is accelerating that shift. One AI agent at a time. 

The Nordic CPO of the Year Award recognizes leaders who have meaningfully advanced their organization’s procurement function across people, integrity, and results. What sets it apart is how impact is assessed. Not by scale or visibility, but by what has actually been achieved given the conditions. 

“Strong procurement leadership is not about theory or frameworks. It is about what you actually make happen in your context. How you build teams, how you act with integrity, and the results you deliver over time.” 

PIR is part of the initiative as an award partner, together with EBG and an independent jury of experienced CPOs. The award reflects a broader shift in how procurement is understood and who gets to define what good looks like. 

“Procurement has moved into the core of business performance. The best CPOs today are not only optimizing cost, but strengthening resilience, enabling sustainability, and actively shaping how their organizations operate.” 

Beyond recognition, the initiative creates a platform for shared learning. By bringing together experienced practitioners to evaluate real cases, it highlights how procurement evolves in practice across industries, challenges, and starting points. 

“Progress in procurement does not come from one company or one idea. It comes from specialists with deep expertise, learning from each other and raising the standard together.” 

For PIR, this is a natural extension of how they work. Deep specialist expertise applied in real business contexts, combined with a belief that strong functions are built through both perspective and execution. 

“The strongest specialist firms do not just deliver in projects. They take responsibility for advancing their field and contributing to how the function develops over time.” 

As expectations on procurement continue to rise, initiatives like the Nordic CPO of the Year Award help make that development visible. Not by defining a single model, but by recognizing leaders who, in different contexts, move the function forward. 

Do you know a CPO who is making a real difference? 

Large transformations rarely start as large. At PostNord Sverige, what began as a focused effort to improve core HR processes quickly expanded into a full-scale transformation affecting more than 20,000 employees. Delivered in the middle of the pandemic, the program came to span everything from payroll and scheduling to workforce planning, systems, and new ways of working, all while daily operations continued. 

“What started as something quite defined grew as we began to understand the full scope,” says Petra Ehle. “It became clear that this wasn’t about improving parts of HR, it was about redesigning how the organization works end to end.” 

As the scope expanded, so did the need for different types of expertise. Rather than scaling a single team, the engagement was built by combining multiple specialist firms, each contributing depth in specific areas. 

“We didn’t grow by adding more generalists. We combined specialists,” Petra explains. “That’s what allowed us to take on something much larger and more complex than we could have done on our own.” 

The work was carried out as an integrated team, combining PostNord employees and consultants from the start. The focus was not on building a large consulting team, but on bringing in the right expertise at the right time. This was a key factor for both delivery and trust within the organization. 

Different parts of the transformation could move in parallel, while staying aligned around shared goals and outcomes. The setup made it possible to expand the engagement without losing focus or quality. 

That way of working proved critical in a transformation of this scale. Beyond systems and processes, success depended on leadership, cultural alignment, and the ability to create trust across a large organization spread across the country. Psychological safety became a prerequisite for progress, enabling people to engage, take responsibility, and actively contribute to the transformation. 

“The real strength wasn’t just in the individual expertise, but in how well everything came together,” Petra says, pointing to the interplay between structure and culture as a key factor behind the outcome. 

The result was a program delivered on time and within budget, with strong adoption and a fully realized business case. The work has also been recognized externally, with Petra and the PostNord team sharing the journey and outcomes on stage, reflecting the impact achieved and the trust built. 

The case illustrates something fundamental: combining specialist firms does not only increase capability, it changes what kind of engagements become possible. 

“If you look at it from two perspectives, the individual’s and the company’s, you can start to see what it brings. From the individual’s perspective, it provides an incredible foundation that develops quickly. It’s a mix of generalist consulting skills and rapidly built niche expertise.

Equally important is the personal growth. You see these individuals become confident in highly uncertain situations in a very short time. It’s impressive to see, and something they themselves highlight as a positive. From the company’s, or rather, the alliance’s perspective, it also delivers immense value.

Finding the right people and building the right skills isn’t easy. We probably succeed best when we do it through the Bloom Program. Especially when we get the chance to help shape and build from the beginning.”

“The real question is whether you can get kickbacks, right? When you help someone bring in a new client or a new deal. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the daycare story, about parents picking up their kids late. If you have a problem with people being late, you introduce a fee. Say, if you’re an hour late, it costs 300 kronor.

Suddenly, a lot more people start showing up late. Because now you’ve put a price on it. Before, the social cost, the embarrassment of being late, was much higher than paying 300 kronor. And the problem isn’t just short-term. The problem is that if you try to roll it back, people remember it. So they keep showing up late, because it was “only worth” 300 kronor anyway.

That’s why it’s extremely dangerous to introduce overly explicit incentive models in a complex business like ours.

If you look at it from the client’s perspective, if they know we get a kickback for bringing in one of our colleagues, that creates a very uncomfortable feeling. It feels like we’re pushing something. And that’s exactly what this is not about.

Our profession is not about opening the door for our colleagues. It’s about opening the door for our clients, to give them access to the capability, competence, and knowledge within one of our alliance companies. And that’s something you can’t put a price on.”