[bonus] Leadership Strengths and Shortcomings in the Balkans: The Leaders Who Care - Episode #79 with Jakob Modéer
In this special bonus episode on Productivity Mastery, Stoyan Yankov, the co-founder and co-host of The Leaders Who Care podcast and community platform, interviews Jakob Modéer, Regional Manager of the Swiss Entrepreneurship Program. Tune in and discover: ✔️ Opportunities and challenges in the Balkan region from the Western perspective, ✔️ The role of culture in the country’s economy, ✔️ Why an economic system would need plurality, ✔️ Using the entrepreneurship as a vessel to massively help, ✔️ How to practically support less developed countries, and more! Swedish by origin, American/British by education, and Balkanite by marriage and life! 30+years of living, working, failing, surviving, and succeeding in southeast Europe. Factory-owner, exporter, job creator, motivator, storyteller and now, startup ecosystem supporter with the Swiss Entrepreneurship Program. Being born and raised in Sweden, a country that scores in the top 10 of any global development index, made for a wonderful and worry-free childhood. As a teenager, with restlessness with life in a society of collective conformity and completion, Jakob applied to study for a high school year in the US, which was followed by BA studies at Lewis & Clark College out in Oregon. At the American university, Jakob was struck by the openness of the discourse, the closeness of the professors and their push for well-argued cases to improve the status quo, and the equal rejection of unsupported complaining. Graduation coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush for societal change in East Europe and the USSR. Jakob got a job in Moscow, constructing the first golf course in the USSR. The encounter with the negative effects of totalitarianism and the planned economy was eye-opening. Finding a way to operate and get a job done in a completely different culture was an incredible challenge, a learning journey that Jakob now treasures very much. Today, 30+ years later, he recognizes that those months in the Soviet capital were his watershed moment, he knew at that moment, that this is where he wanted to be – on the front lines of the re-introduction of individual freedoms, free market, and free-thinking. During the last three decades in the lands of southeast Europe aka The Balkans, Jakob has started and failed as a factory owner, succeeded as an exporter of multiple products, worked as a consultant on job creation programs, and advised national and local governments on the art of creating jobs (often in deprived geographical areas) and most recently managing a program which puts entrepreneurs first, as the primary change agents, in a transitional society. Enjoy this special and very insightful episode, and learn more about the podcast via theleaderswhocare.org!