TANDBERG: The Culture School I Didn't Know I Was Attending

Every now and then, usually after spending a day with a leadership team discussing culture, trust, engagement, or why the latest transformation initiative didn't stick, I find myself thinking back to a company called TANDBERG, which is perhaps a little surprising considering it's been nearly twenty-five years since I joined the company and sixteen years since it was acquired.

Since then I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of organizations across industries, countries, and cultures. I’ve seen and learned a lot. Yet the further away I get from my TANDBERG years, the more I appreciate how extraordinary those years actually were. And I've come to realize that TANDBERG wasn't just a company I worked for. It was the culture school I didn't know I was attending.

I think what made TANDBERG so special was that I found myself surrounded by leaders who understood something many organizations are still trying to figure out today: culture isn't something you work on in addition to the business. Culture is how you build the business.

In TANDBERG, culture wasn't an HR initiative, a communication campaign, or a set of values hanging on a wall (even though we had those as well.)

It was the operating system behind everything we did.

Looking back, I can see the seeds of many ideas that would later become the Corporate Spring Model™. Purpose. Identity. Trust. Growth Mindsets. Passion and Joy. At the time I wasn't building a model. I was simply observing what happened when these things were present in everyday work. It became the laboratory where I learned what actually creates a high-performing organization.

A Pioneer in Technology and Culture

TANDBERG was a true pioneer, becoming the global leader in video conferencing years before video calls became the new normal. What started as a small Norwegian technology company grew into a global market leader and was ultimately acquired by its largest competitor Cisco.

Ask almost anyone who was part of TANDBERG during those years what drove the company's success, and I suspect you'll hear the same answer: the culture. A culture founded on the belief that if we hired wildly talented people with passion, warm hearts, cool heads, and a healthy dose of creative madness, then gave them the trust, freedom, and support to thrive, remarkable things would happen.

And they did.

Much has been said and written about culture. Often as a theoretical idea or as an ideal practice. But the most important things I’ve learned about culture didn’t come from books or theories. Instead they came from doing, testing, failing, learning – and living it in practice.

I was fortunate to learn from and work alongside people like Jan Chr. Opsahl and Per H. Kogstad, two of TANDBERG's founders and the architects behind the culture that made the company so special. They were pioneers of culture-led business long before culture became a boardroom conversation, and I am so grateful for everything they taught me – even the lessons that stung in the moment.

Fun & Profit

It all started in 2002, when a headhunter called me about a role as Chief Culture Officer, or "Culture Minister" as she called it. For a second I wondered if someone had lost their minds, considering that there is a Minister of Culture position in the Norwegian government. But then she explained that this was a technology company called TANDBERG whose chairman wanted someone to "look after the corporate soul."

It felt like the job had been created for me.

A few weeks later, I found myself sitting across from the chairman during my first interview. At one point he leaned back, looked at me with genuine curiosity and asked a question I hadn't been asked since I was a kid.

"So, Annicken, what do you want to do when you grow up?"

Without giving it much thought, I answered exactly as I had when I was six.

"I want to have fun."

He smiled.

"Then you've come to the right place."

It was such a simple exchange, yet somehow it told me almost everything I needed to know about the company I was about to join.

For years I had carried around a suspicion that many workplaces made things unnecessarily complicated. I had seen managers who believed fear was motivating, organizations that confused control with leadership, and workplaces where people spent enormous amounts of energy protecting themselves from one another rather than helping each other succeed.

TANDBERG felt different from the beginning.

There was ambition, certainly. The company was growing quickly and had big aspirations. But there was also a deep belief that people did their best work when they were trusted, included, challenged, and allowed to bring their full energy to what they did.

One of the company values was literally Fun & Profit. Not fun after profit. Not fun when we hit the numbers. Fun & Profit. As in fun generates profit.

I knew then that I had come home.

From arguing with professors at university to rebelling against managers who seemed to think their job was to make employees miserable, I had always believed that when people enjoyed what they were doing, they did better work. Yet whenever I pointed this out, there always seemed to be someone ready to explain why work needed to be more serious.

At TANDBERG, nobody seemed interested in making work more serious. They were interested in making it more successful, and they genuinely believed that having fun was part of how you got there.

The Round Archive and the Crystal Ball

The first few months of my new job became quite an education.

Like many enthusiastic newcomers, I arrived determined to prove myself useful. I created plans, organized systems, caught up on administration, and generally did all the things I believed were required for the job.

One morning, when I was buried in paperwork, the chairman stopped by my office, looked at the stack of paper on my desk and asked what it was all for. I told him it was some government requirements that needed to be filled out. He then picked up a handful of forms, rolled them together and dropped them into the trash can.

Then he looked at me and said, completely matter-of-factly: "If it is important they’ll come back. Until then, these belong in the round archive."

I didn’t know what to say.

"This” he said, and pointed at the stack of paper still lying on my desk “is not why I hired you."  He continued: "We will become the market leader in video conferencing one day, mark my words. But there’s one thing that can stop that from happening" he continued "and that is if we lose our culture on the way."

He then nodded to a group of people standing by the coffee machine. "Culture is not created inside your office. It’s created where the people are."

The lesson became my guiding star for the years that followed.

And that was not the only lesson I learned in my first few months.

A few weeks later I met with one of the other founders, sharing my carefully crafted one-year culture plan. It contained goals, activities, milestones, timelines, and all the things one would expect from a competent professional determined to demonstrate that she knew what she was doing.

He glanced at it for a few seconds, then looked up and said: "So, Annicken, do you have something the rest of us don't have?"

I’m sure I must have looked confused.

"Do you have a crystal ball?" he asked.

I laughed and shook my head.

"Then why on earth are you making a detailed one-year plan?"

That lesson has stayed with me for more than two decades.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

TANDBERG was ambitious, disciplined, and incredibly focused. But they understood something many leaders still struggle with today: there is a difference between having direction and believing you can predict the future.

The company was growing rapidly. New people, opportunities, and challenges appeared all the time. Markets changed. Technology evolved. Competitors moved. Customers surprised us. Some initiatives succeeded brilliantly while others didn’t.

Trying to predict every step wasn't the point. Building a culture capable of responding intelligently to whatever happened next was.

Looking back, I think this is when I really understood the meaning of the famous phrase, credited to management thinker Peter Drucker: "culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Strategy is ultimately a set of assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. Culture, on the other hand, determines what people actually do when reality inevitably refuses to cooperate with the plan.

And reality has a habit of doing exactly that.

In TANDBERG that philosophy showed up everywhere.

In recruiting, where we cared as much about people's values, energy, and aspirations as their professional qualifications.

In onboarding, where every new employee travelled to Oslo for a three-day cultural immersion and quickly learned that "change is the only constant" wasn't just a slogan, it was an expectation.

And in leadership, where living the values, and caring about people as much as caring about results was built into the fabric of our leadership culture.

Common Sense, Really.

One of the things I think back at is that there was remarkably little management jargon. Nobody talked about employee experience, psychological safety, employer branding, culture transformation, or any of the other expressions that regularly fill conference agendas today.

The thinking was sophisticated, but the language was simple.

In truth, most things came down to common sense, really.

Now, after having spent fifteen years helping other organizations build stronger cultures, better leadership, and high-performing organizations, I have come to appreciate how uncommon that common sense often is in the business world.

What Stays With Me

TANDBERG eventually grew from a few hundred employees to nearly two thousand during my years as Chief Culture Officer, and during those years we became a global market leader, achieved extraordinary business success, were repeatedly recognized as one of the best workplaces in Europe, and ultimately delivered a $3.4 billion exit when Cisco acquired the company in 2010.

Not bad for a Norwegian startup founded on the philosophy of Fun & Profit.

I'm incredibly proud of what we achieved. But when I look back now, what stays with me isn't the market share, the awards, or even the business success. It's the trust. The energy. The creativity. The laughter. The sense that people genuinely cared about what they were building together and about the people they were building it with.

And the unwavering belief, starting at board level and flowing throughout the entire organization, that business performance and human flourishing were never competing priorities.

Today, after hundreds of culture projects, countless leadership conversations, and years spent refining models and methodologies, I still find myself returning to the same lesson I learned during my TANDBERG years.

Culture was never the soft stuff. It was never separate from the business. It was the business.

TANDBERG understood that long before most organizations did.

And perhaps that's why, all these years later, it remains the culture school I didn't know I was attending.