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In the novel The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, the shepherd boy Santiago dreams of a treasure at the foot of the great pyramids. He consults a gypsy fortune teller, who advises him to sell his sheep and go on a journey to Egypt to find the treasure. On his way he meets an alchemist who takes him on a journey to discover his true self and become connected to the soul of the world. Once at the pyramids he is robbed by bandits and Santiago realises that the treasure all the time was waiting for him at home, where he had his dream.
My own experiences over the past 25 years mimic the experiences of Santiago, and I cannot help but think that my journey has been a tremendous learning experience. It has perhaps not made me connect with the soul of the world, but I can say that it has made me connect with the soul of innovation and development, in a way that few people, over the course of their lives, have the opportunity to do.
I need to explain:
My quest to understand innovation and development started in 1997 as my then colleague David Lundberg and I wrote one of the first books on e-business strategy. Its title is “The Transparent Market.” We wrote in the early days of business on the Internet and the theme of the book is that companies and individuals in the future would do business and exchange information on the Internet.
As we saw it, this would change the competitive landscape for companies and our entire society, as people would have access to much more information. This access would change the way we make purchases and open opportunities to work in new ways and this would change many things in society. In the book we predicted many of the changes we have seen over the past decades, but not many in 1998 or 1999 understood Why this would be the case. Most people believed that the Internet would be a marginal tool that would be used by some for a limited set of purposes. They did not see how the access to a universal source of information could change the lives of most people on the planet, in the way David and I argued.
When the book was published, we both wanted to work at the forefront of the e-business development. We took jobs as consultants in companies that were driving the development of e-business. Then the, so called, Internet bubble burst, and the company I worked with took a severe blow. This was because in 2000 the sentiment had turned into a hype of Internet-based businesses and investors were competing to invest in the most promising start-ups with the highest burn-rate. Burn-rate is a measure of how much capital the start-up team uses in a given time period, for example a month, to build the business.
Even though I had noticed the build-up of the bubble and foreseen that it would burst and cause a recession, I could not change the fact that the consulting market dried up. I moved with my family to Germany, to work with business development as a business development manager and key account manager with one of the leading companies in the pneumatics industry.
Coming back to Sweden after two years in Germany, I considered whether to join a consulting company and practice within an established field of management consulting or develop competence in an emerging area. In 2003 I read the book “The Party’s Over,” by Richard Heinberg, about Peak Oil, the coming peak in global oil production. I then realised that countries rapidly need to transform transport systems from fossil fuels to electric vehicles and that this change will not go automatically.
The change is too complex to simply be driven by the sales of electric vehicles. Investment and implementation activities need to be planned for the development to run in synch across different sectors of society. To change to electric vehicles there will be a need to expand power grids and power production and charging infrastructure will have to be expanded on a large scale. To go through with the change, hundreds of billions of dollars need to be invested and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world will have to work with the transformation and very large sums of money will have to be invested. At the time not many had seen the complexity and scale of the transformation. I recognised this from our experiences from e-business in 1998, when few realised that most companies and people would use the Internet for all kinds of purposes.
I thought it would be a good idea to start to investigate how the change process would have to be organized and financed. The year was 2004.
I applied for financing of a first project in the field of e-mobility and started to build knowledge. My first book on the subject was published in 2009. The title was “Global Energy Transformation”. The second book came in 2012 with the title “The Business of Global Energy Transformation.”
I realised that few people were aware of the scale of the transformation and when the first book was published, I decided that I would go anywhere in the world to discuss with partners and try to build international support for change programmes. Transport systems are the bloodstream of society. We all depend on transportation to get food, clothes, and other products. We also use cars and buses to travel to work and, go on vacation, and to go shopping.
In my quest to find partners to inform about and work with the development of principles and plans for large-scale transformation of transport systems to electromobility I have been to California for meetings with potential partners, I did a presentation to professors at George Washington University and met with other potential collaboration partners in Washington DC, presented to members of the Swedish parliament, and have been to several conferences on technology management, in Dubai, Birmingham, Vienna, Miami, and Washington DC. At these conferences I presented on electromobility and the large-scale transformation to sustainable transport systems.
Over the years since 2004 I have presented my ideas to many people in countries all over the world. In the absence of partners willing to spend time and money collaborating on these topics, I stopped trying to find people to present to and discuss with. I realised that, In the early phases of a development, it is unlikely that I will be able to spot who may be interested and who may want to collaborate.
Up until December 2020, when my fifth book on the subject was published — “The Blind Guardians of Ignorance,” — it was very difficult to detect interest in issues related to the large-scale transformation to electromobility. But suddenly, a number of governments and large companies made statements, not always in favour of e-mobility. The chairman of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, questioned in December of 2020 if electromobility would be the right way forward. Toyota had estimated that the change to e-mobility would require investment of between 135 and 358 bn US dollars in power infrastructure to go through with the transformation in Japan. In December of 2020 the UK government decided to ban the sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The EU decided to make the union fossil-free by 2045 and the EU commission has in 2022 decided to ban the sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035. Volvo Cars have decided to stop producing petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and Ford have decided to stop selling petrol and diesel cars in Europe from the same year.
All these decisions may not be completely realistic, but they indicate a growing interest in electromobility.
I have written five books on the subject of large-scale transformation to electromobility, and I have for many years posted texts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, but with little effect. I have gained followers on these platforms, but few have contacted me with proposals.
In April of 2022 I started to make regular posts of articles on Medium.com and I linked these to posts on the other platforms. In these 3- or 4-page articles I have had some more room to articulate my ideas and describe the complexity of the transformation in more detail. Over two months I have posted more than 20 articles on innovation, electromobility, and other business-related topics.
Suddenly, I receive contacts from companies that want to cooperate. I am delighted and flattered to see that my posts are being read by a growing number of people and that they generate an interest in knowing more about my work in the field of electromobility. I work part time as an employee and part time as a free-lance consultant, so the contacts are very welcome as a way of generating more activity in my free-lance business.
As I look back, I find that my own life now starts to mimic the plot of The Alchemist, the novel by Paolo Coelho. Like Santiago, I spent several years travelling to find collaboration partners around the world. When I found that I was too early in the process and that few had started to realise the complexity and scale of the change to electromobility, I remained in Sweden, waiting for the development to start to unfold.
Now, interest is growing, and people are contacting me to find out if I can help them with their efforts within e-mobility, the circular economy and innovation management. Over the past few weeks, five companies have contacted me spontaneously with suggestions of collaboration: It amazes me that my articles on Medium.com attract so much more interest than previously my posts on LinkedIn used to do. The articles do not only attract interest they make readers confident that it will be worth contacting me. Still, I only have 100 followers on Medium, so the practice of posting links to the articles on LinkedIn must be the key to the attention.
This is altogether a more satisfying way of searching, than that of travelling the world. Like the shepherd boy, Santiago, I can stay at home, knowing that my treasure is where I started. Who knows who will contact me next…?
The difference between my experiences and that of the shepherd boy, Santiago, is that the world has developed towards an understanding of what I have been trying to communicate for seventeen years. In contrast, in the case of Santiago, his treasure was there all the time, waiting for him.
Mats is the author of five internationally published books on sustainability, focusing on the large-scale change to electromobility, the circular economy, and energy efficiency. His latest book is “The Blind Guardians of Ignorance — Covid -19, Sustainability, and Our Vulnerable Future” from 2020 and the first one of these was “Global Energy Transformation,” published in 2009.
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