To lead

and
be led

Torsten Hvidt is a key figure in QVARTZ, a management

From: DJF-bladet, #10, June 10, 2017 consulting company, which distances itself from the hierarchical
By Sven Johannesen pyramid-like structures in the industry. On the contrary, he
Photo: Ricky John Molloy believes in a version of democracy, because the best colleagues
Translation: Camilla Lykke Trumble want more than to just obey.

At first, Torsten Hvidt wanted to
be a fighter pilot, and then he did not
really want anything. Today, he has a
leading role in a consulting company
with a flat structure and widely dis-
tributed influence. The colleague of
the future does not want orders, only
inspiration, he says.
By Sven Johannesen
Photo: Ricky John Molloy
Translation: Camilla Lykke Trumble
When speaking, three things char-
acterise Torsten Hvidt. He often pauses
before answering, he swears a lot and
many English phrases are used com-
fortably amid his Danish. Maybe as a
result of his upbringing in the US and
the UK due to his father's international
career in the armed forces. Or maybe
a work-related habit from his years in
the ever growing consulting company
QVARTZ, with offices in Scandinavia,
New York and Hamburg which, in
part, owes its current strengths to
Torsten Hvidt's poor eyesight. Origi-
nally, he wanted to be a fighter pilot
like his father, who was a test pilot on
both the Draken and the F16 aircraft
and who later became Danish Chief of
Defence. "My father was my idol, and
it influenced me enormously as a child
that I went with him to work. I'm sure
many people have become accountants
because their father was an account-
ant. I wanted to be a pilot, because my
father was a pilot. It was the only thing
I desired to do," says Torsten Hvidt,
sitting at a mosaic meeting table at
the QVARTZ headquarters, situated in
the middle of Copenhagen's Norrebro
district.
"As a child I quite simply thought
it was the airplanes that fascinated
me. Later it dawned upon me that it
was the team spirit I admired. Fighter
pilots are an extreme elite. They learn
how to fly at supersonic speed in pitch
darkness with two metres between
the tips of their respective wings. This
requires that you are extremely skilled,
5 6
but also that you have absolute trust
in the skills of the person flying next
to you. And those skills and that trust
create a brotherhood, where the fact
that one person has three and the
other has two stripes on the shoulder
doesn't mean all that much when they
meet in the Officers' Mess on Friday
afternoons. What you see there is that
everyone tries to beat the others at the
pool table and that everyone buys beer
for each other. That's what I wanted to
be part of."
Unfortunately, the cockpit slammed
shut before it even opened for Torsten
Hvidt. That happened in 1986, when he
was in high school and was told that he
needed glasses, which meant that he
could not become a fighter pilot.
"The extinction of that dream was
the first completely crucial moment in
my life. It was then that I went home
and took down all the posters of Tom
Cruise and my father. And then I sat
down and looked at four white walls,
which corresponded to the mental,
reflective room inside my head.
Everything was white, and I went from
absolute certainty to doubt about my
future."
Did you become depressed?
"No, I don't think that's in my na-
ture. But, I became adrift, and in many
ways I became more alone that I'd ever
been. I suddenly had to look inwards.
And that was perhaps something I
It was extremely
old-fashioned with closed
offices, and partners
who wouldn't dream of
showing any interest
in you.
hadn't done all that much up until that
time in my life. There was no plan B,
and I really didn't know what to do."
Oddballs
This was the reason he studied
business, which was something he nev-
er became really fond of. "Either you
burn for something, or you shouldn't
waste time on it, but I didn't burn, and
still I did it. It was terrible."
Why?
"It was boring. I wasn't interested
in the economy, the law or statistics.
At the same time, an alternative to uni-
versity studies, called The Chaos Pilots,
started and I ended up spending a lot
of my time there. "Despite it all, he felt
that he ought to finish what he started.
But it was the friends and the parties
more than the books on economics
that had his attention.
"The first years we were complete
slackers. I drove a Harley, and my best
friend had a Prince Valiant haircut. We
were, without a doubt, the oddballs.
We were DJs at the Friday Bar, where
we played R.E.M. and U2 and those
kind of bands. When people asked us
to play a pop hit, we told them to get
lost."
After an exchange to Seoul, South
Korea, Torsten Hvidt started studying
a bit more seriously. Afterwards, he
was hired into one of the international
consulting firms. "If getting glasses was
All these
American consulting
houses are configured
as pyramids.
the first big shock, then the second was
starting as a management consultant.
When I got hired, I thought that, in
a way, it was like becoming a fighter
pilot. Because there are so many who
want the job, and so few who get it.
So, I hoped, naively, to experience the
same sense of brotherhood that I had
seen my father be a part of. Well, that
didn't happen, at all," says Torsten
Hvidt.
"What happened instead was expe-
riences of being called while on skiing
holiday and ordered to say goodbye
to the family and catch the next flight
home due to a client situation. Or com-
ing to work having to park 700 metres
from the office, because you were not
allowed to use the partners' parking
spaces, even though they weren't used
all day," says Torsten Hvidt. "I didn't ex-
pect them to throw rose petals, or that
people would carry me on their backs.
But the system was really far from
what I had imagined. It was extremely
old-fashioned with closed offices, and
partners who wouldn't dream of show-
ing any interest in you."
Up or out
Another thing Torsten Hvidt did
not enjoy was the consulting industry's
up-or-out principle, where people with
regular intervals are either promoted or
fired. "Obviously, this principle increas-
es staff turnover significantly, and the
consequence of that is a culture, where
people think more about themselves,"
says Torsten Hvidt.
"All these American consulting
houses are configured as pyramids and
take in a hell of a lot of young people,
who are cheap to employ and easily
billed at a higher price to the clients.
It creates enormous wealth for the
partners, but raises the question of
whether all problems are best solved
by pyramid-shaped teams with many
youngsters at the bottom. In my experi-
ence, they're not," says Torsten Hvidt.
TORSTEN HVIDT
Born 1967
Master of Business
Administration,
Aarhus University, 1993
Consultant, Coopers & Lybrand
Management Consulting
1994-1997
Co-founder, Albertsen & Hvidt,
1997-1999
CEO, Ahead, 1999
CEO, Valtech DK, 1999-2002
Founder, CoCoCo, 2002-2010
In the end, he got fed up with rigid Co-founder, QVARTZ, 2010-
structures and old-fashioned ways
of working and also of many days of Lives in Hellerup, Denmark,
travelling. While his wife was expecting with his wife, three sons and a
twins, Torsten trawled the Copenhagen daughter. Spare time is used
consulting scene only to conclude that with family and friends, on ski-
all the companies were different shades ing, running, watching soccer
of the same old colour. and occasionally on a literary
Luckily, his client relations were society where Torsten Hvidt
good enough to convince him that meets a handful of friends at
they would follow should he decide to a restaurant to discuss one of
start his own company. That happened the great works from world
in 1997. In many ways, the start of his literature.
own company constituted the third
shock for Torsten Hvidt. Particularly
due to the fact that many other people,
even families, depended on him and
his ability to run the company and pay
the monthly salaries. However, his cli-
ents did follow him, and the company
quickly grew to 35 employees. After
two years, it merged with two other
companies to form "Ahead", which was
then acquired, in the middle of the 1999
dot-com craze, by a listed French com-
pany for staggering 16 million euros.
"Today, it's completely insane that
a company would offer that amount
of money. But, back then, everything
was possible. Unfortunately, the money
was locked up in a stock programme,
and the stock plummeted when the
IT bubble burst. However, the bottom
line is that I still got out of it on top,"
says Torsten Hvidt, who started his new
company in 2002, and in 2010 did a
merger-of-equals with QVARTZ, found-
ed by Hans Henrik Beck.
 As a child I quite
simply thought it was the
airplanes that fascinated
me. Later it dawned
upon me that it was the
team spirit I admired.
Psychos, no thanks
Today, QVARTZ employs 350
people, of which 27 are partners and
four constitute the leadership team.
The clients are companies such as
Arla, Circle K, Grundfos, LEGO, Maersk,
Pandora, SAS and Vestas as well as a
number of private equity funds. "We've
tried to turn things upside-down. An
important aspect of our company is
that people are elected into more or
less all positions," says Torsten Hvidt.
Employees choose their own leader,
and seniors cannot progress and climb
the career ladder, or be elected into the
partner group, if younger colleagues do
not choose them as leaders. "There's
simply put institutionalised checks and
balances against psychos. One of the
problems in the consulting industry is
that people burn out due to 80-hour
workweeks. As a project manager, you
can shine upwards by delivering a lot of
work to a client very quickly. However,
the shine tends to fade if half the team
needs sick leave afterwards, or leaves
altogether. Psychos, who cannot con-
trol ambitions or conduct themselves
civilised, won't get far in our system."
Instead of the up-or-out principle,
QVARTZ has an ambition of making
people stay in the company for as a
long as possible. "We don't fire people
we've hired, unless there are com-
pletely exceptional circumstances. We
adhere to a Theory Y view of our peo-
ple, and will fight to make them stay,
learn as much as we can teach and
get as far as they can. The philosophy
is that a company becomes stronger
when employees feel attached to it in
a fundamental, even existential, way.
If you see your workplace as a mere
steppingstone to something else, you
don't invest in it the way you would've
if you counted on staying forever."
The effect of this principle is that only
five per cent of new employees leave
QVARTZ during their first two years
with the company, which is a significant
difference from the industry norm.
The last time I read of workers who
chose their own leaders was in a book
about the Spanish civil war, where anar-
chist militia chose their commanders at
the front.
"Right, it's not seen all that of-
ten. We believe in a principle called
"followership", which is a variety of
democracy. Today, no one wants to
obey you just because you have a title.
The top graduates from universities
and business schools won't go into a
company and say "yes sir" to some
gigantic bozo. They want to mould the
future they, more than the rest of us,
are going to be a part of. For us, it's a
matter of making sure that they grant
us their followership."
But can't a flat and inclusive struc-
ture be a way of camouflaging the real
power structure in a company?
"I fully understand your point.
However, as we see it, there are many
aspects to leadership. It's a matter of
being able to lead and let yourself by
led depending on the situation. Hans
Henrik Beck and I don't have offices,
parking spaces or fancy titles on our
business cards. We participate like
everyone else. Personally, I'm not a
great project manager, so I'm often
led by a colleague who tells me what's
expected of me, when and where. Half
an hour later, we might be in a meeting
concerning something else, where I tell
that same person what I expect of him,
when and where. You have to be able
to step in and out of the leading role
and let yourself be led by a colleague
who is 20 years your junior, even
though you've just turned 50. It sounds
grand, but the point is that we were
pretty far from such principles when I
started in the industry."
Is your ability to fluently change
between a rigid hierarchy and a flat
structure inspired by the culture you
saw in the air force as a child?
"A lot of people associate the
military with extreme hierarchy and bu-
reaucracy, so it's not an unproblematic
analogy. But, the part of armed forces,
I knew, had the ability to flow in and
out of different structures depending
on the situation. Personally, however,
I startmy cement mixer when people
say that all company structures must
become networks. I don't believe that
to be true. Good old hierarchies can
be extremely useful and relevant e.g.
when you have to conduct a traditional
due diligence for an equity fund or
when you want to fly fighter aircrafts
in a formation. Yet, hierarchy becomes
dangerous if it becomes permanent,
because it will invariably demotivate
human beings. This is why large corpo-
rations that use hierarchy and bureau-
cracy as their main management tools
are very vulnerable when faced with
new, fast and agile business models."
Check and balances
You have previously said that all
companies need to formulate an identi-
ty or a raison d'tre. What's yours?
"It sounds awfully pretentious and
borderline nauseating, but we have
always used the term civilisation. Both
as an organisational metaphor, where
we're inspired by the horizontal nature
of cities as opposed to the vertical
nature of towers. But also as a code of
conduct, because I have an unwavering
belief that all human beings intuitively we value in each of our colleagues. I
know how to behave in a civilised man- might think that Mathias is a hell of a
ner," says Torsten Hvidt. guy, because we support the same soc-
"It means that you cannot call peo-
ple and order them home from their
cer team. But if the people, who have
worked with him, are less impressed,
skiing trips. But you can call and ask
them politely for help if you messed
my opinion doesn't really count. So, in
reality, it's not all that interesting to be
something up or if a client is in a des-
perate situation. Then you'll find that a
friends with me."
If we look out into the world,
civilised way of asking, gets you a civi- structures don't seem to get flatter.
lised answer. Sure, we also have people There are authoritarian tendencies in a
who slip under pressure and say or number of countries
do things they don't normally do. The
civilised way to handle such instances "But that's not entirely true. If you
is to address them shortly afterwards. look at the most important trends over
The uncivilised way is to pretend that the last 50 years, are we seeing more
they never happened. That's not ac- or less democracies? We are seeing
ceptable," says Torsten Hvidt. more. Is there less poverty? Yes. Are
In 2016, the rating agency Vault there more people who can read and
had QVARTZ as the number one con- write? Yes there is. But of course, if you
sulting house in Europe on company look close, there are ups and downs.
culture. "Even if it's banal and sounds And right now we're unfortunately ex-
like a clich, it has really worked for periencing a damn down period," says
us to insist that relations are valuable, Torsten Hvidt and adds, "I think the au-
and that it's when relations are hard thoritarian wave and the reappearance
or painful to maintain that we show of ignorance are deeply troubling and
each other that we mean business. terrible. But seen in a longer perspec-
Relations that seem strong when you tive, this is only a dent in a fundamental
drink champagne and celebrate, but movement that only goes one way."
evaporate when the going gets tough
are worthless. They're just talk." Which way?
But even though it's less obvious, "The right way."
you must have a hierarchy. For example,
it must be beneficial for an employee to
be friends with you?
"Of course there are power struc-
tures, but they're all subjected to the
checks and balances, much in the
same way that a federal judge declared
that Trump's so-called travel ban was
illegal," says Torsten Hvidt and provides
an example:
"When we do the bi-yearly review
of our consultants, we have all the part-
ners in the same room to discuss what