Together with analysis firm Sustainable Brand Insight, we are launching Sustainability Engagement Mapping. Our study identifies and ranks the most important digital influencers within sustainability and the companies that they like.

The best-ranked influencers are those that their followers find most credible and are most likely to engage with in social media, instead of the more traditional ranking by number of followers and level of activity. As Whispr Group´s Data Science Manager Mattias Östmar said, “What others think of you is more important than what you think of yourself”.

The best-ranked companies are those that the influencers perceive to be the best at sustainability. We also look at these brand assessments against what regular consumers think.

Our results will be published on November 12 at 08:00 CET. A seminar will be held at Sjöfartshuset in Stockholm at 08:00–09:00 CET. Click here to register!

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Life has moved on pretty quickly since I got back from my trip around the world in March. I guess that’s how it is: life just pulls you in. I now feel it is imperative to take control so that I am in the driver’s seat and not someone/something else. This is my life, so how do I want to live it?

As a follow up on my previous story on updating my life plan and disconnecting for 2014, I’ve divided this post into two different stories: first are the lessons and take-aways from my trip and second, my thoughts about having a larger scope on my life plan to make it holistic and also include my business and its culture. This is what I call “My wise culture”.

The decision to travel

The decision to take a break from life and work did not come easy. I got the idea a few years ago, not exactly sure why or how, then after my grandmother passed away last year, I began to really think about how finite life is. Sadly, today all of my grandparents are now deceased. Looking back, I realise that they never said “my life lesson to you is to maximise working and/or do something before you build a family, when travelling and taking a break is more appreciated (instead of right after high school). Travelling for a bit after high school is pretty common in Sweden.

I love to work and believe this is an important part of my life. For seven years I worked hard to build a company. Although I always had tons of ideas from networking, reading, etc., I just never had enough energy to connect all the dots. Take the time to sit and ponder – who can realistically do that? I thought travelling would be a good way to disconnect from my fast-paced life. And I needed to break the creative rut I was in while building Mediapilot. Was I sure my trip would be the solution, absolutely not. I just knew I needed it.

I had allowed myself to become too dependent over the years on Mediapilot, which I guess is natural for an entrepreneur feeling very strongly about his or her first company. While I tried my best to prepare for my departure, there were tons of problems to solve beforehand. Not to mention all the admin with renting out my apartment, selling my car, etc. Leaving was a big decision for me, and even more so for the people I directly impact. The majority was positive, but that was mostly regarding my private life. From a career perspective, the feedback wasn’t as rosy. I couldn’t prove or promise that I would have the drive to develop new business ideas while out travelling, so the trip was decided to be strictly private, even if I envisioned it differently originally. It all worked out in the end, and yes, things came right down to the wire. I read countless around-the-world how-to’s and guides, but not one mentioned how stressful detaching from life it would be. Needless to say, while driving to the airport, I knew I absolutely earned this trip!

What I learned on my break

My first lesson from taking a break is how wonderful it is to have no strings attached and very few things taking up your time and energy. I made sure I cleared as much as possible in my life before I left. The general feeling I have looking back is that I pretty much eliminated 95% of my life as I knew it. Friends, family, work, chores, etc. This change was very tricky to deal with during the first month of my travels. Reading books, sightseeing and chatting with the locals is something I enjoy on holiday for a week or two. The weeks following that were a bit tough to deal with, as I was lacking conversations, both with myself and to some extent with my wife. But as time moved on I found myself easing into the quiet and new energy appeared. This was one of the more creative times I’ve had in my life. Ideas just came to me. I didn’t need the internet, just a pen and a paper and I was creating magic. One of my strongest memories of just this was on a beach somewhere in Thailand 6–7 weeks into the trip, when I sat on a fairly empty beach for a few hours doing nothing. I didn’t force myself to do anything, I just let my mind go free and after a while I wrote down a great business idea on a piece of paper.

Conversations changed from simple day-to-day chats about weather and food, to deeper topics; who knew this was just lying there waiting to be let out? I knew this trip would be an amazing experience for me and my wife, but had no idea in what way. Sure, you will have issues hanging out with someone 24/7 for this stretch of time. However, the arguments had a completely different tone then what I’m used to at home. Life doesn’t move in the same way, and because neither of us had a busy work week in front of us, we had tons of time to talk about emotions and feelings regarding a specific matter. Issues were worked through in a deeper sense. I think we both got to know each other a lot better during the trip, something that will hopefully help us out in the future.

This is my biggest take-away from the trip: excess time created an amazing feeling of freedom. Sure, being in the best shape of my life from almost daily workouts and eating super healthy (minus daily gin & tonics), plus a great tan is something I appreciated as well. I have since made a promise to myself that I will take a trip like this within five years. Looking back I feel as if it’s crazy going through life without taking creative breaks when you have a relatively demanding job.

I’m writing this post on a plane on my way back from San Francisco and I’m amazed by culture of people barely any vacation in the US, let alone any thoughts of going on creative breaks to seek new inspiration. One movement that is acting as a counter weight to this is the Wisdom 2.0 conference, started by Soren Gordhammer (Norwegian decent). A lot of leading entrepreneurs are catching up to this trend, so it will be interesting to see if it will ever go more main stream. My strong belief is that this would make the US (or any other country for that matter) excel to an even higher level and further increase productivity and happiness.

Going forward

Something I’m working on at the moment is how to preserve the creative feeling I have from my break. I have taken many small and big actions, but it is really hard when the world around you is constantly pulling you back; it takes massive personal stamina and control. Actions I’ve taken and added to my life plan are among others: adding one day a month spent fully by myself doing what I feel is inspiring, weekly yoga and pilates, fruit salad every morning, one perfect day a month with my wife (a day spent doing exactly what we imagine a dream day to be), and so on.

But my biggest challenge ahead is to tie this together with the bigger picture. My vision is to create a model that can be applied in my entrepreneurship as well. I envision spreading this to colleagues, customers, friends and family. This is what I call My wise culture.

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com

https://notegraphy.com/m_wettergren/note/1017008

Is it even possible to start and run a business without any footprint on the environment? Is sustainable prosperity possible? This is what I have found so far.

One core aspect during my trip has been to find and identify a framework for sustainable entrepreneurship. I have seen quite a lot of ideas and actions targeting this, but most of it is only a small part of the solution, or as many larger companies humbly brag in their advertising, “a small step”. Think Starbucks with 36 % of recycled paper, which is a long way from 100%.

I’ve felt as if I want a model that takes a bigger bite and redesigns how we do business in the modern age; a holistic model with no footprint whatsoever on the environment. Is it possible? Just by blogging about this I have had some really amazing people reach out to me. One thing I started reading about was Circular Economy, and I quickly heard about the Ellen McArthur Foundation. It has a great quote on its homepage that sums up exactly why I want to start my next venture based on this platform from the start. Ellen sailed across the world and that’s how she starts this story. “When you’re out there on the ocean, 2,500 miles from the nearest town, when it would take someone five days to reach you by boat — helicopters can’t reach you — you have to have everything you need with you on the boat. It’s very concrete and finite. And you begin to understand what finite means. When I reached the finish line, I translated that into the global economy. Our economy today is built around taking something out of the ground, building something with it, selling it, and then ultimately it’s thrown away. We have three billion new middle class consumers coming into the world and there’s more and more pressure to find out how to manage these resources.”

All I can think when reading this is that it has to change fundamentally, from the ground up. There won’t be anything left to sell and throw away otherwise. Cutting 10% or even 50% of emission is not enough. It’s not even close. The fundamental mindset is not aligned with what our planet has given us, our finite resources. So, let’s start from that mindset. What would a business look like?

This is a huge challenge of course. I am in the process of making my own model for a circular economy business, which I will implement from the ground up in my next venture within Mediapilot. It will be my pledge to all my stakeholders, and foremost to the generations following us and the planet itself.

The next couple of weeks I will be in San Francisco. It would be amazing to meet anyone with input on this to help me along the way. Let me know if you know anyone and don’t hesitate to give me feedback on how to build a circular business. To be continued.

Some interesting links on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/01/is-your-company-ready-for-the/

http://bit.ly/1iB7Bhf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOMVZKQYZYU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCRKvDyyHmI

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com

A few years back I went to a networking event with Founders Alliance in Stockholm. One of the sessions I signed up for was something called Life Planning hosted by an entrepreneur named Andreas Granstedt. At the time I was going through a tough personal time in my life, so this sounded like something that would suit me. This turned out to be a life changing hour for me as I later decided to follow up on this and write my own life plan. So what is a life plan? It’s the same thing as a business plan for your company but you translate it to yourself and your plan moving forward. Vision, short and long-term goals, values — you set the plan yourself.

The first thing I started doing four years ago when I wrote my first life plan was to rate the state of my life divided into five different categories: family & friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. You can choose whatever categories you want but key is that they are constant so you can compare over time. It was very obvious what areas I needed to change in my daily life. Some of the categories I rated very high and others almost rock bottom. I started listing activities for the coming year that would help improve these areas and this resulted in a two page document that I have used as my personal life plan, which I update at least annually.

I won’t bore you with the details in my plan for 2014 but will focus on one area which is the challenge of living life in the present and not being connected to social media and other tech apps constantly. I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t got the solution figured out and I’m not even sure what my goal should be, I just feel that being constantly connected is taking too much energy from me. Here’s a few of the activities I think will help me in my search for the right level of “unpluggedness”:

· As you can read on my blog, I am currently travelling around the world. This in itself has been amazing as most of the remote places in Southeast Asia do not have wifi. This led to some really inspiring disconnected time, which I will look to recreate back home. One of my most creative days during the trip was alone with pen and paper. Being a busy body, it always takes a while to get over the first boredom of not doing anything. But after an hour or so I started coming to peace with my thoughts and that’s when really creative thoughts came to me. Of course it helped being thousands of miles from home and no sign of internet, but I think the basic fact of just actively putting myself in this situation more often will help me free those inner thoughts that I sometimes struggle to bring out.

· I love to be inspired by others so I can copy/paste the ideas that I feel would suit me. For instance, I’m looking into a conference in San Francisco in February called Wisdom 2.0, which I think sounds amazing. For 2014, I plan to look up another event like this that brings up new topics within mindfulness, meditation and creative thinking.

· Speaking of meditation, I have done some yoga on my trip and it has been a real breath of fresh air to my soul. I play tennis a lot, which is super to relax the mind as well, but yoga is different as it’s not as physical and gives more room for other thoughts rather than focusing on the next shot. This is a big one for my life plan, but I have decided to sign up for a yoga class once a week. I will do this with my wife, thus getting more quality time together.

· On the same topic, but a bit more extreme, I am really curious to try Vipassana. I am still a beginner in yoga and meditation, but I want to practice this more. The ultimate test or experience is a 10 day Vipassana class. The schedule is extremely rigorous with no speaking allowed from 4am to 9pm. This may sound completely bananas to some, but don’t you want to take a look deep down inside yourself to see what’s in there. I do and I think this might be a good way.

· This fall I started scheduling time for myself but didn’t really carry it out full heartedly. This is something I want to do on a regular basis now. I will set aside two half days a month with time only for myself. Take a long walk, have breakfast by myself, read, etc. Anything that doesn’t include internet and other people.

These are just some of the ideas I have for 2014 onwards. But all input is welcome! How do you disconnect?

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com

The long and short of it, Sweden’s roots are in trade. We flourished during early industrialism and went on to found huge global companies, an amazing feat for being such a relatively small country. For some 70 years we have lived prosperously. The downside of this, however, is our big organizations with, in some cases, destructive corporate cultures. To put it mildly, some are just too fat and lazy. What’s more, media tends to focus on these companies’ order books as if they are largely controlled by external circumstances such as the economy. This is partly true, but we’re missing a larger issue here: selling.

Eight years ago, after returning to Sweden from my studies in America, I had no idea where my future career would lead. Most of my friends went into popular traineeships or started at the bottom of major consulting firms. Working in sales at the time was not something to aspire to, at least this is what Swedish society and schooling taught me, so I figured I’d work in purchasing, a job with much more status, they said. But this was too dull for me, certainly nothing I felt passionate about, so I went my own way and landed a job (only commission based though) with a PR agency. I luckily met Fredrik Båge here, my future partner in Mediapilot, who told me straight away that I would be great at sales and with his encouragement I stuck with the job and later founded Mediapilot. In seven years we have created 100+ jobs, none of which would exist had I taken the safe route and not started my own company. Are there more people out there like me? Absolutely.

So, how to turn Sweden into a global contender on the entrepreneur stage? First, start with the vision and leadership to reach this goal. We need a leading politician to embrace this change and set a goal to reach it by, say, 2025. We also need to create one of the most innovative and inspiring schools in the world.

Our leaders, their vision and initiatives

· We lack leadership and need leading politicians to take this role and set the vision.

· I recently read a post from leading entrepreneur Johan Stael von Holstein asking if anyone in his network has sat down for a one-on-one with our prime and/or finance minister. No one said yes. The top management of our country must take ownership in this matter and show the way.

· The government needs to hire people with a background in corporate life and preferably successful entrepreneurs.

· Create a group whose prime reasonability is to analyze and create a plan for how to reach the goal of number one in the world. This group would ideally consist of people from the aforementioned background. This group would also be responsible for carrying out this plan and reporting directly to the prime minister.

Bet on the teachers

Salaries and status must be improved and why not take this initiative from the government by increasing the budget. The best teacher I had was in the US, 50 or so years old with experience from corporate life, entrepreneurship and had a PhD in business. I believe most of the teachers I had in the four universities I attended in Sweden had 95% of their experience in theory and basically no practical background. Tough platform to teach entrepreneurship from.

Less theory and more learning by doing

I gained a broad education from my five years at university, but there is very little of this that I can actually make use of today. Plus, back then the book by Philiip Kottler was obsolete. Just a couple of ideas to make this happen, all across the line:

· Mandatory internship annually from the age of 13

· More case studies and less exams aimed at reciting 1,000 pages of corporate nonsense

· Annual mandatory real case start up from first high school year

· Add debate class, problem solving, presentation practice, sales and communication to all types of programs

· Allow private universities: copy paste the Norwegian University BI, which will be their only hope when Norway’s oil runs dry (sorry Norway). I’d be happy to join in this venture, but who wouldn’t be?

Our merchant, trading and win-win mentality has been diluted during our time of prosperity and we now need to reinvent to stay on top. It’s time to go back to basics. Let’s do what we do best: business. When starting your own company you will quickly notice that if you want business you have to go out there and get it. Sweden’s start up scene is red hot at the moment. It’s time for the politicians to take the lead and show the way. Left or right doesn’t matter to me; we just need someone to take this on.

There are many inspirational videos and books on what makes entrepreneurs successful. However, I find them fairly generic and hard to apply, as we all have very different traits. Instead, I will try to open up and tell you about how I have applied these theories in my life. I wouldn’t have said this 10 years ago, but I think it’s very important to take in new ideas from reading, asking questions and meeting new people. Don’t ever stop this. I won’t bore you with my favorite reads list, see below if you’re interested, but I generally like books on psychology, inner discovery and stores about putting life on the line.

Mingling leads to ideas — be a pro networker

Starting up Mediapilot at age 26 was my first real venture, besides running college nightclubs. If someone asked me if I had the correct background to start up a company, I would say no. It’s not in my blood; there are no entrepreneurs in my family. However, my Dad’s father was wildly energetic, which I take after. He was full of ideas and knew how to bring people together, an art in many ways that I think people don’t fully utilize. An extremely social man, he loved walking through the neighborhood summer camp in Sweden, chatting up people from all over the world, and mingling with locals at a village my grandparents frequented in Gambia. I think his ability to never be afraid of seeking new connections is something fundamental in being an entrepreneur. This trait definitely helps me. I also think my grandfather’s love of meeting new people led to his constant flow of ideas. For me, networking presents new dots to connect: problems, needs, etc., or other successes that can be applied in other industries.

Take matters in your own hands — after failing school

A lot of books and entrepreneurial reads say being pro-active is essential. I found this to be one of my key abilities sometime after high school, when life got real. One of my favorite memories is scoring dream digs with a mate at Karlstad University. It was impossible, so they said, but after baking delicious treats and bringing my adorable golden retriever for a visit, we managed to charm the officials and had our place a couple weeks later. Taking matters into your own hands can get you a long way. I think not performing well in school forced me to think differently. I’m certainly not endorsing poor marks in school, but it led to my skill in looking for alternative solutions, which I use daily.

Mix up business and pleasure

I have a really hard time being creative and inspiring at set times, so I don’t follow the trend of separating work and free time. Struggling with finding real energy and peace for the typical 9-5 workday, I try to find time where and when I feel the lust and energy to work. This might be on an airplane, on my couch late at night with a gin & tonic, after a workout or on vacation. Basically, I found that it’s important for me to break the daily routine. I also think having a plan for the short and long term is really effective and structure for how to move forward. Check out the “Life Plan”. I have been doing this for more than three years now. I structure, dream and plan all the major things in my life such as family, finances, health, personal time, and especially thinking about how I want to look back at everything. One product of my life plan is the trip I am currently taking, travelling around the world for four months. Visiting various paradise islands in Southeast Asia has been a huge opportunity for me to mix up business and pleasure. So far I’ve connected with creative people in Saigon’s start up community and started on a new model for sustainable entrepreneurship. And maybe the most important, I have time to contemplate on all of the dots that I haven’t had time or energy to connect in the last seven years of running Mediapilot.

Last but not least, be persistent! Yes, this is the biggest cliché of them all, but it’s true. Better yet, be persistent with all of the points above.

Some books that I like are:

The Four Hour Workweek

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Surviving the Andes

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_st_john_s_8_secrets_of_success.html

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com

Koh Rong Samloem — a tiny island of the Cambodian coast with some great sustainability work

Being sustainable doesnt have to be that advanced, proved by this local entreprenur.

Now this is how local sustainability is really done. We met Susan who lives in this tiny little fishing village and also runs The Fishhook Restaurant, which is based on her front porch with four tables. She tells me the story about how she started with sustainability in her daily life. It came from wanting to save money by reusing resources. And secondly it was for a greater good and helping the planet. There are many examples of this just looking around her place.

Flower pots are made out of old plastic water bottles cut in half; cute and at no cost for a pot for your flowers. They also made decorative flowers from the tops of the bottles. All of the furniture in the restaurant was made from stuff that Susan’s husband found while out fishing — think beachwood. This place could easily fit in to Carmel, California’s artistic community. All fish is locally caught. Power is only used between 6-11pm. This is powered by generators, but they would like to use solar power. “It’s just too expensive”, she says. There are volunteer workers on the island who help out collecting trash, monitoring the sea life in the surrounding bays, and teaching English at the local school. They are all given a discount at the restaurant. Susan tells us that the village was one of the first to start recycling, which is done by sorting plastic, metals, etc. Overall, a breath of fresh air in a country struggling to make ends meet. P.S. the food was amazing! Try the fried fish and fruit pancakes.

Well, that’s it from this island. As I write this I’m on my way to the next destination.Wont have access to twitter while there though and cant share my posts so please share and care. Good morning, Vietnam…See you there!

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com

What if all trash could be given a value. Say that any type of plastic has a 5% premium baked in. At the end of this value chain plastic could be collected and given a 5% refund if recycled at a proper center. This would create an army of volunteers looking to earn a few pennies and at the same time doing a world of good.

After spending some time in Sihnoukville, a beach town in southern Cambodia, I can’t say that I can see much sustainability work. Overall, the town has a lot of trash on the sides of the streets, especially near dwellings, and people don’t seem very interested in keeping their surroundings clean. I watched as people, living in what the Western world would consider shacks, let their cattle graze in a field full of litter. I mean, we’re talking more trash than grass. I then watched a man fish for what I assume would be his family’s dinner that evening, in a pond with trash floating in the water and covering the banks. I want to point out here that this dwelling was no less than 100m from a beach that Westerners have starred to exploit; in fact, you have to pass directly through this poverty stricken, littered dwelling to get to the beach, where you’ll find bungalows, beach bars, sun chairs, hammocks, the works. And guess what else you find here…trash. The ads don’t tell you that you actually have jump over a line of trash to get to the water. After a few days of seeing this same thing throughout Sihnoukville (and the country side), I realized this may be because most people are busy fighting for their daily bread. Recycling comes in second place. However, there are some people collecting anything of value on the streets, like glass bottles and cans. Plastic bags, bottles and other unusable plastics are left behind on the side of the road or in a pile next to their home. This made me wonder about the incentives for keeping clean.

Humans, being simple in nature, work for their basic needs in respectful order, at least I do. First comes food, then water, shelter and so on. Properly disposing one’s trash doesn’t rank highly in this hierarchy. So, what if all the littered items had a value, a built­-in value. Metals and cans have a given value for recycling use. What if all the other trash could be given a value too? Say that any type of plastic has a 5% premium baked in. At the end of this value chain plastic could be collected and given a 5% refund if recycled at a proper center. This would create an army of volunteers looking to earn a few pennies and at the same time doing a world of good. Anyone heard of a city or country with something similar implemented?

Another fun picture I took was along the “highway/road” between Thailand and Cambodia where we stopped at a road house that offered drinks, fresh fruit and simple local food. At their house they had chickens, dogs, cats and cows walking around freely. The locals had collected the waste from the fruit and vegetables, which was greatly appreciated by the cows who ate this as their after dinner snack. Talk about full circle.

At the same stop they also had a gas station, but they didn’t only offer gas. The cars that pulled in when I was there all went for natural gas. I haven’t done any research on this, so if anyone knows the environmental effects, fill us in. Is it friendlier then gasoline and diesel? How is it produced in this part of the world?

Locals doing what they can to contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle.

So, our trip has begun. We left Stockholm on Saturday last week and then spent two days in Bangkok before heading over to the island Koh Chang and the extremely remote Island View Resort on the south east side. Personally, I wouldn’t call it a resort, but it’s a great start to our trip away from the hectic life in Bangkok. Haven’t seen much of sustainability yet; a little sad, I think. But I wanted to share some photos of everyday sustainability that I’ve noticed so far.

I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel, or something like that, talking about how to save world hunger and the development towards 10 billion people on the planet. One of the solutions they brought up was insects and bugs as one of the more reliable sources of food given the enormous amounts of them. They certainly don’t have an issue with eating roaches and similar in Bangkok; this inviting buffé was sold by a local street vendor. Maybe we need to change our habits in the western world before other resources run out? I can’t imagine that the production of insects for food would be anywhere near live stocks’ environmental impact.

The resort we ended up staying at on Koh Chang turned out to be surprisingly aware of their part in the global environment. This note was the first that met us in our room. And unlike many of the bigger chains, they really did live accordingly to this. All rooms and areas of the hotel that were empty had the lights turned off, just like the note said. And sheets — what is the point in having them changed on a daily basis really? I never do this at home, so why here? Saves energy, detergent, the dishwasher, fabric, man hours, fewer pollutants, etc. Also, the small community that we live in seems to live on a very basic level with no real amenities, but they still find the time and will to recycle plastic containers. However, we have seen a lot of trash in the waters around, which is sad given the damage it causes the local wild life. Not sure if this is caused by tourists or the locals.

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com

It’s been about 6 1/2 years since i started Mediapilot, a media analyis company based in Stockholm. The media landscape has developed vastly since the start bringing new challenges which have been amazing to tackle. To keep developing myself and the company I have decided to take a creative break and travel the world.

On November 1st I will embark on a personal journey to clear my mind for the future challenges that I plan to take on next year: starting a new business within MediaPilot — my Start-Up journey! While away, I will have the opportunity to relax and experience new cultures. I will visit southern Asia, Australia, New Zealand and California, among others, and I look to be inspired, to exercise and change my mindset, to learn new things; simply put: I am seeking an active holiday, mind, body and soul.

One thing I have decided is to find innovative entrepreneurship, innovation in the sense of sustainable entrepreneurship. The background to this is that I do not have alternative models of growth, i.e. models not based on constant growth (GDP) as the primary key. This project is still in development, but I plan to share what I find under the hashtag #startupquest. I see this as an important part of my Start-Up journey, as I myself want to develop in this area.

If you were to take a similar trip, what would you want to see and experience? Or if you have in the past, what did you do? I’d love to hear all about it!

More about life in Marbella @ martinwettergren.com