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I O
T R I U M P H E
SUMMER 2005
The view from Stockholm Jörgen, ’93, and Debby Porter Elovsson, ’95, reflect on what it means to be global citizens today. Debby Porter Elovsson: The expatriate life Since graduating from Albion, Debby Elovsson has pursued a career in marketing communications. She worked for the telecommunications giant, Ericsson, for four years, and recently has become a managing editor/consultant for CitatJournalist-gruppen, a communications firm serving many international clients. She currently oversees a team of seven writers providing news and information for a global corporate intranet news channel.
Language: The key to culture My Albion education gave me writing skills that helped me become a strong writer and editor today. It also helped me develop sophisticated analytical and research skills. This ability to size up my circumstances and adapt quickly has come in handy just about every time I’ve changed jobs or moved. I’ve always been fascinated by language, so studying French, German and Spanish at Albion came very naturally to me. Apart from giving me tools I needed to learn Swedish fast, these courses put in perspective language’s role in a culture, which is invaluable. Learn language and you have the key to culture.
Standing out and fitting in My experiences at Albion and since my graduation have helped me form more than one view of the world to guide me, and so I truly feel like a global citizen. Recently, I even became a Swedish citizen (dual citizenship), which seemed like an obvious step, since I have started to feel as much Swedish as I feel American. Still to a certain extent, I don’t fit in anywhere except the world in general. Some of my friends feel the same way. Over time, I fit in better and better in Sweden, but I fit in best in Stockholm, which is an international city that’s big but not too big. I believe this more now than ever since we left Stockholm a couple of years ago to live in a small town up north. It took less than a year to realize that I didn’t belong there. So we moved back to Stockholm and have a newfound love for this city of islands with the cleanest air of any city in the world. The many sidewalks and bikeways connecting all parts of the city mean we can also walk or ride our bikes almost everywhere.
On writing for a living My career as a writer and editor is a dream come true. The work is varied—coordinating article ideas, editing and writing articles, planning publication, and finding ways to improve newsflow. I work with a
great team of writers, so there’s a lot of creativity flowing even if the article ideas are not always that exciting. The fun part is trying to make an uninteresting article idea into something appealing and readable. The challenge with writing telecom-related articles for an international company’s intranet that reaches nearly 50,000 employees worldwide is to make the articles appealing while striving to write in an American English style that is easy to understand for people from extremely varied cultural backgrounds. Most employees are not native speakers of English, so our job is to make sure that what we write is not filled with jargon and clichés mostly familiar to a native speaker. Sometimes this goal makes writing something that is also creative, clever and interesting very difficult, especially when the subject matter may not always be the sexiest to begin with.
Adapting to a different corporate climate I find that the biggest differences between U.S. and Swedish firms in general can be summed up by the words consensus, fika and mandatory social benefits. The latter is a positive difference, including maternity and paternity leave: you have the legal right to fully paid full-time leave (sharing 18 months between both parents). The employer also must guarantee you a job, the same or similar to your current position, once you return from leave. Consensus is a major difference, and a frustrating one for me. This is the idea that everyone should have their say before a decision is made and that the decision is a group one, if a decision is made at all. One side effect of consensus and the Swedish concept of equality is that many people don’t work too hard, because it’s accepted that hard work does not necessarily equal higher pay or better benefits. Fika is a Swedish institution at the workplace. Swedish for coffee break, fika takes place twice a day, morning and afternoon, in many places. This involves socializing with colleagues, usually over coffee with some type of sweet pastry or sandwich, and it reflects the more relaxed work environment in Sweden.
In search of equal opportunity A similarity between U.S. and Swedish companies is a common commitment to equal opportunity for all, but this is even stronger here in Sweden in most respects—except when it comes to women climbing
the management ladder. Not long ago, a debate highlighted that there are more women in top management positions in the U.S. than in Sweden. The UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2004 showed that the number of female administrators and managers as a percentage of total population was 30.5 percent for Sweden compared to 45.9 percent in the U.S.
Finding the balance The balance between work and leisure among Swedes is very different from what you find in America. Working hard and burning the midnight oil will not get you promoted or earn you more money in Sweden, so work does not dominate life here as it often does in the States. But Swedes do enjoy learning new things, such as going to an art or language class outside of work. Some of the more popular leisure activities among Swedes are berry- or mushroom-picking and renovating their homes or summer cottages. Every time we go to a home store, it’s a nightmare trying to find parking.
Staying connected with home My recipe for living far away from family and friends is reliance on technology—a lot of e-mail and phone calls. Now that I have a digital camera, I just e-mail the latest photo. It’s easier for me than it is for my family. That said, however, my husband Jörgen is my closest family and my best friend. His family also treats me as one of their own. And I have made many great friends here in Stockholm.
Jörgen Elovsson: Navigating in a multicultural world A member of the Carl A. Gerstacker Institute for Professional Management while a student at Albion, native Swede Jörgen Elovsson went on to earn an international master’s in business studies from the University of South Carolina in 1998. After working in financial management for Ericsson earlier in his career, he now runs his own management consulting firm in Stockholm.
“Made in Sweden” I finished high school in Sweden in June 1988, and decided to spend a year in the U.S. before my (mandatory) military service was to begin. As an above-average table tennis player in Sweden— the