We've been repositioning ourselves today. Stagis is no longer a Vesterbro-designstudio but a Central Copenhagen identity company. A rather big truck pulled up in front of the office we've been spending six years in this morning and around four this afternoon the entire office had been moved to our new location. It is quite messy now with technicians, craftsmen and ourselves trying to make our way with boxes and furniture all over the place. But we're really excited - the new place is going to be wonderful once we settle in.

Here's our new address:
Stagis A/S
Kompagnistræde 14B, 1. sal
1208 København K.

Our telephone number remains the same:
+45 33 23 13 00

We will be in a bit of a mess for a few days so please excuse us if we're slow on replying to emails or mail...

In the next edition of the management magazine Protocol Stagis will be present with this little piece of text. It's easier to read if you download it as a PDF.

During the past five or six months we've been working on the design and creation of a new website for Stagis as a part of our new corporate identity. Anne and I designed a new logo that was finalized in the beginning of June. And we've had a bunch of brave clients of ours commit themselves to interviews about projects they've made with us in order to make up for the lacking examples of our process on the website.

So now we've launched a website in beta-mode which will be finalized (if a website will ever be?) during the next month or so. You can take a look at it on stagis.dk. Sofar it's only in Danish as our main focus during the next year will be our home market defined in geographic terms. But soon there will be an English version as well. If you want to know what it says and you can't read Danish, call or email us any time!

I want to thank the fantastic people who agreed to speak for themselves and for us on the website. I have been utterly impressed with the willingness that I've met from the people that we asked to join us for a handful of films on the new site. These people are: Birgitte Gade from Novozymes, John Tønnes from Nordisk Film Biografer, Lars Hargaard from OKI Printing Solutions and John Sørensen from Movia. And then of course my dear colleague Anne Schourup-Kristensen who's done a lot of designwork on several of the cases but who is only participating in the presentation of one case, our solution for Novozymes. Obviously, I'm trying to explain everything I can possibly think of in all these films which has certainly been a learning experience. There's a big difference between telling someone what to do in front of the camera and standing there yourself.

Well, I hope you enjoy them. We are certainly all enjoying that we can now point to a bunch of cases that gives anyone who's interested in knowing more, an idea of what Stagis does. Check it out and let me or anyone know what you think!

Let me finish of by giving you one example right here. I love all of the five case stories in each their way (actually the uniqueness of each project we do is one of the things I love about my work - there hasn't been two similar projects during my entire career!). Here is a rather colourful project we did with OKI two years ago, which Lars and I explain here:

You can see the rest of the case stories on the new site or on our Youtube channel.

Vi er på udkig efter en projektleder, som skal sikre, at alle vores gode idéer og store visioner bliver til realiteter. En der kan hjælpe os med at samle trådene. Lige fra et projekt blot er en workshop og løse idéer til de bliver til konkrete resultater. Vi leder efter en, der har erfaring med at planlægge ressourcer (mennesker, maskiner, you name it), budgettere og sikre gennemførsel af alle vores projekter. Én der både vil have kontakt med interne medarbejdere, freelancere, eksterne partnere og produktionsvirksomheder, som skal udføre opgaverne. Vi udvikler kreative corporate branding-initiativer, som kan være forskellige aktiviteter fra design- og konceptudvikling til eksekvering og produktion af tryksager, websites, indretning, film og begivenheder.

Som alle der har læst denne blog ved, er jeg og resten af teamet i gang med at introducere en ny måde at tænke virksomhedsstrategi og corporate branding på. Jeg vil gerne have, at vi fortsat er et lille hold af dygtige, motiverede kolleger, som brænder for at udvikle autentiske virksomheder. Hvis du kender én, som kunne være interessant for os at vide mere om, så giv os et praj!

Spørgsmål er velkomne - skriv en mail til mig eller ring på 33 23 13 00.

Se opslaget her.

ENGLISH:
We're looking for a project manager who can make sure each and every project gets from A-Z, from distorted ideas and future visions to straight talk and reality. We'd prefer someone with experience and the person has to be fluent in Danish. So the process is continued in our home language....

To my last post I got a really interesting comment from Andrew Smart.

It is a motivating question that Andrew pose – is it really possible to talk about a collective personality or identity? Isn’t identity something that people construct so they don’t become a part of an anonymous mass? On the other hand, I believe that people today need to be a part of a community, where they develop a feeling of collective identity. This collective identity is, the way I see it, a more abstract identity that people for example find in different social groups. Work-life could be an example of a social group, where people get together around a collective identity.

The urge to express authenticity and uniqueness is a strong motivation for people, but in the same time this soul-searching and questioning about who we are can make people insecure. In my opinion identity is more a process than a position one has. Therefore, I think that it is possible to approach a kind of collective identity when you are studying a social group – which in this case is work-related.

In our work process in Stagis we value and map companies by doing observations, where we look at unwritten routines and carry out interviews with the employees. The questions we are asking concerns, among other things, the three dimensions of authenticity. By analyzing their answers and behaviour we define the core-values, and (often) non-spoken values of the company. I believe that the authentic values already exist within the company, but that these values not automatically are an explicit part of the culture of the organization. By mapping this implicit knowledge we make it explicit, which makes it possible for the company – both internally and externally – to communicate there authenticity. In this sense we are mapping the collective personality of a group and helping the company to make sure that there is consistency between the culture inside the organization and the way they communicate.

There could be many other anthropological studies of different kind of social groups – take for example the two groups that are fighting each other around Nørrebro in Copenhagen right now. What kind of collective identity dominates these kinds of social groups? In one way these social groups make the members unique from the rest of “us” and I’m positive that the members get a feeling of collective identity.

Lots of things are going on at Stagis right now. By the end of the week our creative, colourful website will be sent to the cyberheavens of websites and a new website will go online. Including 7 films about our processes, about authenticity and with five interesting client cases where managers that we've worked with explain how it all went down, the new website is the first public manifestation of our new identity that we celebrated just before the summer holidays.

I'm in Brooklyn, New York, to work on my book for a week and while I'm here my colleagues will start to pack some of our things in the office. By the end of the month we're moving offices to a new location in central Copenhagen. As of tomorrow my new colleague Anna and I will be posting a job opening in our team in every space that we can get access to. So stay tuned for news on the Project Manager we're looking for. Coming up!

A few days ago I was discussing my book (it's still in the works, my deadline is at the end of this year and then the publisher has to think long and hard, flip pages and print the darn thing for about five months before it goes to market, so much for the networked, rapidly changing world...) with a journalist from the trade magazine 'Markedsføring' (Danish paper on marketing and advertising). The changes in the world are effecting customer sensibilities towards organizational authenticity but still hasn't really hit the fan in Denmark. Yet. We discussed orthodox marketing positioning versus authentic corporate authenticity, the advertising industry and business strategy. And the changes of the world that conditions my interest in starting from within when we work with corporate brands. Did you know that more and more young people, aged 25 - 30 years, are doing geneaologo and ancester search? They lack the feeling of belonging and being part of the red line of continuity and find it in the stories of their ancestors. I thought this stuff was only for the elderly. Not any more. I'm looking forward to seeing what she writes. That same day, I stumbled on a description of a marketing case written by Danish Lars Bastholm who is now working at the NYC-based advertising agency AKQA, described one of the world's 50 most innovative companies. It was about Smirnoff and Lars' way of writing about the sensibilities could have come right out of Stagis. We're not alone in our work with authenticity and that's a good thing.

Finally, what would a blogpost from New York be without another photo for the tacky collection? Here are the shots that Karen, a friend of mine, took this weekend on a cruise... Thanx, Karen.

Femmøller Efterskole

In short, Stagis is a company focusing on the connection between the three elements; Design, Communication and Culture. My function as an anthropologist is to contribute to the Culture part.

With knowledge on classical anthropology, from my BA degree in Anthropology from the University of Aarhus, I have explored different perspectives on cultural understanding and gained an insight in the importance of dichotomies. What really interest me are the modern aspects in the field and I have studied subjects such as social psychology, social relations and culture of organizations in the modern Western world. To pursue my interest in especially culture of organizations I studied Sociology at University of Lund in Sweden. Here, I became known with concrete tools to approach the subject and performed several case studies to fine-tune specific methods.

As an anthropologist in Stagis I analyze the degree of authenticity, based on Nikolaj Stagis’ work about authentic companies, by mapping and valuing companies in three dimensions:

1. Historic and heritage authenticity
2. Reflexive and action authenticity
3. Image authenticity and presence