Firstly, Sweden has been socialist for a long time. Not only politically, but mind set wise as well. There is even something called the “Jante” law, which is easily summed up by “you shouldn’t think that you are special”. Great stuff, huh?

Secondly, the tax pressure practically mandates that anyone who makes obscene amounts of money must move away. All our sports stars are in Monaco, for example.

Thirdly, there is no understanding for the added pressure of a job at top international levels. That a CEO with responsibility for 10000 people makes 10 times more than a person on the floor is simply not feasible.

Now, I do not think that I am in a situation where I can change the socialistic mind set that has smitten my fellow Swedes for so long. I also deem myself incapable of quickly and dramatically changing Swedish tax pressure. The third point, however, is something that I feel passion for. I, for myself, know that the CEO of Ericsson has a job that is, when done well, worth 10 times more than the person on the floor (when his or her job is done well).

The first thing I think we must come to accept is that CEOs are differently able at their jobs. Simply put, a CEO matters. If a CEO does his or her job particularly well, a business might blossom in good times, or suffer relatively little in poor times. If a CEO does his or her job poorly, a business might still do well in good times but perhaps collapse in poor times. I argue that this is true for almost all companies in almost all open and free markets.

I do not think that the difficulties with accepting high CEO remuneration is based on ignorance around the fact that CEOs matter. It must be something else.

Maybe it is a non understanding around what a CEO actually does? Do they sit in their corner offices, smoking cigars, counting money? Do they laugh, whiskey in hand, and decide who to fire that day?

Of course not. Your average CEO has the immense pressure of qualified decision making, policy creating & enforcing, and corporate image upholding on their shoulders. This is no small task. And I think that the average Swede understands this as well.

So what might the problem be? I think it deals with the fact that there is gross misunderstanding around the skills needed to perform these tasks. But think about it this way: compare your average CEO with your average tennis player. Clearly, the top paid are the top historic performers, and with each individual great performance comes great reward. Those who get to this great reward are only extremely rarely there by luck. Most are there because they have worked like madmen for a large portion of their life. They have fought to get into the best schools, fought to graduate with the best degrees, fought to get the best internships, fought to do their best to build a career, all while sacrificing many other parts of their life the rest of us take for granted.

So, when a tennis player who has clearly sacrificed his or her whole life to stand as the winner of the US Open, does he or she deserve a reward? Does he or she deserve a bigger reward than the guy or girl who strung their racket, or massaged their backs between sets? Is it “fair” that the winner gets a bigger reward than the person who placed last? And, more to the point, should the US Open reward size depend on performance in the next tournament? To me, these questions have but one answer. I will not force them upon you.

But this boils down to the question at hand. Today, we have companies in Sweden who are performing poorly. During 2009 their market cap has slid dramatically, along with sales and overall performance. People are being let go. No issue here, really. But at the same time, some companies are paying out bonuses to the top management. Big by Swedish standards, a joke by international standards. (By the way, there is no form of payment that is as heavily taxed as this type of bonus. The hungry tax monster will lose lots of money if they are removed.) Many of these bonuses are based on great overall years in 2008. Should they be paid? Of course they should. They are completely separated from layoffs in 2009.

What would happen with the US Open if the rewards were removed? Well, none of the top players would play the US Open, because there is more reward to be had elsewhere.

What would happen if every job paid exactly the same salary? Well, there would be no incentive to sacrifice body and soul to make it to the top, so no-one would. We would become dumber and less educated with each generation.

What would happen if Sweden somehow (people are actually trying) removed the opportunity to pay top management bonuses? Top talent would move, and Swedish companies would suffer. With suffering Swedish companies, Sweden would suffer.

And we simply do not want that. Right?

My fearless prediction here is that this is the future of the SMNR - simply a function in the corporate website as natural as an image gallerly or document archive. This is likely the beginning of the end of the hosted solutions offsite, and I think that this is the way to go. Previously, reasoning around hosting the SMNR offsite has been mostly, in my experience, political. For some odd reason, it had to be built in one of any blog tools, and therefore clashed with the often Microsoft based web environments of many corporate setups.

With the integration of the SMNR technology and functionality in the corporate web space, so much more is won. We see many additional sources of information being able to be pushed in automatically. Contact information, financial results, and new documents for dowload rather than simply the flow of press releases and Flickr imagery.

I see other wins as well: SEO. We will be building link value for the main corporate domain, rather than a sub domain of some service provider.

In the future, we might even see the SMNR take the place of all press sections of the corporate website. I sure hope so.

Congrats, H&H, for a job well done!

Firstly, a Swedish policitian has been called out and critisized because he is letting people rent his house and apartment at a very high cost. Oddly, he is a Social Democrat, and maybe that is why the whole left wing is going nuts. It is like they think that him placing a high weekly price on his apartment somehow steals money from the poor, or that him letting people rent his nice house at high cost will dictate rent for low income families everywhere. Well, the whole left wing is wrong. And dumb. If the price is too high, he will not get it rented. “Supply & demand”, market economy, and all that - you know?

The second media storm is TV based. TV has shown a reality show called (freely translated) “The Diplomats”. Turns out, Swedish diplomats are filthy drunk pigs. Does anybody smell a rat? Do you think they have selected only portions of the lives documented? Of course. And my brother thought of two additional things: firstly, getting local politicians drunk and happy might in reality be highly effective diplomacy. “Diplomacy through insobriety”, as it where. Seondly, this might be a great PR trick to create a queue outside diplomacy school. Can you see it? The kids seeing the supposedly glamorous and champagne infested lives of diplomats in third world countries, thinking “that could be me”.

So, in summary:

1. Yay capitalism.
2. Things seen on TV aren’t always the whole truth.

Obvious things to some, but clearly not to many of my fellow Swedes.

Please, dear Boeing, take care of this now!

Now, the people behind the site have been through some exiting drama in the past; hatred in all its forms. That, together with the general downturn in spending, made me feel rather unsurprised when I got the first of a series of emails explaining that they were shutting down. They had made enough money, and they were tired of the hate. They even extended the deadline for a while. I imagine that few things create action in the shopping carts more effectively than a “you wont be able to shop ever again”.

Now I got another email. The shutting down was simply another spoof. They claim that this was there way to respond to the downturn, this was their “stimulus”. They fooled us all into spending money.

And I love it.

Expecting anything else, I now realize, was dumb. They were clever. And there is a lesson here for all in eCommerce. Urgency is powerful, create it you too!

But it is not a whole job when you run your own small show. And likely it is not a job with major corporations during a recession.

I sort of figured this out a couple of years ago, and started focusing more on moving the ideas from a piece of paper or document into some sort of reality. My first approach was to spend money. If I was financially invested in the idea, I thought, I could do nothing but move forward on it. So, I started buying domain names.

Not much else happened. I have lots of domain names, but very few services launched.

Then, I found RentACoder and TemplateMonster. I was under the impression that if I specified an idea technically, and provided a design, I would have a service ready to launch. This has worked, but only to a degree. As a result of this approach some of my ideas are actually live and running.

But there has always been something missing. The love and the dedication, and the long term attention by all aspects of a team (design, development, marketing). I have been stuck here a long time. At one point, I almost gave up.

Today, however, is a new day. And one of my great old ideas is on its way to real true reality. How, you ask? By people, and people with skills. In my office we will in 2 weeks be four people. Two developers, a designer and myself. We will focus on a relatively small project (10 week time budget) and hopefully launch a fully fledged piece of awesomeness when the time is up.

This one dude said to me once, “ideas are a dime a dozen, kid. It is the commitment that separates the men from the boys.”

And this time, I am committed. Together with a team of great people. I will keep you updated, right here.

He just made it.

After that, we had four eyes focused on the road ahead. The road that was visible, that is: each time a car passed in the opposite direction, there was five seconds of complete blindness. Some idiots were driving like crazy, putting all other lives on the road at risk. If I for but a split second let a tire leave the narrow semi plowed lanes between the snow piles, the car would wobble and pull toward the ditch or the oncoming traffic.

When we finally got home, our icy hill beckoned. I drove as fast as I dared, but we still did not make it. Ella and Kristina quickly got out of the car to avoid certain (slight exaggeration) death. After a while I got into my driving shoes to have full clutch control, to no avail. I slid backwards as soon as the foot was off the brake, and I started sliding backwards towards the cliff. I finally got the car to a standstill, after which I took my good time caressing her down to the bottom. Once there, I shook, scared to the core, for minutes.

Now I am regaining my composure. With some help from my favorite captain. His name is Morgan.

The gods are already smiling on us - we are in a gorgeous new Audi A6. Sitting in this car it is easy for me to understand why Audi broke sales records when the competition broke loss records.