Annicken R. Day
Culture has become the line item every executive team claims as a differentiator and almost none can describe in operating terms. The gap between values posters and the daily behaviour that determines retention, performance and trust is where most growth strategies quietly fail. Closing that gap is harder still in hybrid teams scattered across time zones, where the informal cues that once carried culture have disappeared.
Annicken R. Day is a culture strategist and former Chief Culture Officer who helps leaders turn workplace culture into a measurable driver of growth, retention and performance.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Annicken R. Day
- She built the culture inside Tandberg, the Norwegian video conferencing company acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion, which gives her a rare operator’s view of what a high-trust, high-performance culture actually looks like at scale.
- She held the Chief Culture Officer role before the title was fashionable, so she speaks about culture as a built system, not a brand exercise.
- Her Scandinavian leadership lens gives executive teams a working alternative to command-and-control models, grounded in trust, autonomy and psychological safety as commercial mechanisms rather than soft values.
- She is a published thinker as well as a practitioner, with co-authorship of Creative Superpowers, a bestselling novel translated into multiple languages, and columns in Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post.
- She is fluent in the hybrid and remote question, having advised leadership teams in over 50 countries on how culture survives when proximity disappears.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Corporate Spring, advising leadership teams from startups to Fortune 500 organisations.
- Former Chief Culture Officer at Tandberg, the Norwegian technology company acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion in 2010.
- Co-author of Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity.
- Author of the bestselling novel Fly, Butterfly, translated into multiple languages.
- TEDx speaker and speaker at the United Nations.
- Columnist for Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post.
Biography
Most companies talk about culture. Far fewer can show the operating choices, leadership habits and team rituals that produce one. Annicken R. Day spent the formative part of her career inside that gap. As Chief Culture Officer at Tandberg, the Norwegian video conferencing business later acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion, she helped build a workplace that won repeated Best Place to Work recognition while the company became a global category leader.
That experience shaped her thesis. Culture is not the residue of value statements. It is a deliberate system of leadership behaviour, communication norms and trust mechanisms that determines whether strategy converts into performance. Her work at Corporate Spring, the consultancy she founded after Tandberg, applies that thesis to executive teams in more than 50 countries.
Her writing has reached a wider audience. She co-authored Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity and wrote the bestselling novel Fly, Butterfly. She has contributed columns to Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post, and spoken at TEDx and the United Nations on culture, creativity and the human side of business.
What sets her apart in a crowded culture-and-leadership field is the combination of operator credibility and a Scandinavian frame. Trust, autonomy and joy show up in her work as commercial levers, with the trail of retention, engagement and performance to back them up.
Key speaking topics
- Culture as a strategy for growth
- High-trust, high-performance teams
- Scandinavian leadership models
- Hybrid and remote culture design
- Employee engagement and retention
- Creativity and innovation in the workplace
- Executive leadership development
Ideal for
- CHROs, Chief People Officers and CEOs reframing culture as a commercial mechanism
- Leadership teams managing distributed and hybrid workforces across geographies
- Founders and executive teams in scale-up companies are inheriting a culture they did not design
- Boards and executive committees preparing for, or recovering from, post-acquisition cultural integration
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of culture as a system of behaviours, decisions and rituals, not a values statement
- Leadership habits that build trust at the speed required by hybrid and distributed teams
- A view of Scandinavian leadership principles, including autonomy and psychological safety, as commercial mechanisms
- Concrete examples from a $3.5 billion exit story of how culture compounded into competitive advantage
- A vocabulary for diagnosing where culture is undermining strategy and what to address first
Talks
A keynote arguing that culture, designed deliberately, is one of the most underused commercial levers available to senior leaders.
Key takeaways:
- The leadership behaviours that distinguish a culture that compounds growth from one that erodes it
- How Tandberg’s culture became a measurable driver of retention, engagement and market position
- A diagnostic for where the gap sits between strategy and operating culture in your own organisation
A talk on the team-level conditions that produce sustained high performance rather than short bursts.
Key takeaways:
- The psychological and structural ingredients of high-performing teams
- How trust functions as a productivity multiplier, not a soft value
- Practical interventions leaders can run inside the next quarter
A keynote on what global executive teams can borrow from Scandinavian leadership traditions of autonomy, trust and flat hierarchy.
Key takeaways:
- The commercial logic behind low-hierarchy, high-trust leadership
- Where Scandinavian principles translate well into other corporate cultures and where they break
- The tradeoffs leaders accept when they shift towards autonomy-based management
A talk on the leadership and culture rebuild required when proximity disappears as a default.
Key takeaways:
- What survives, breaks and needs to be rebuilt when teams stop sharing physical space
- How to design rituals, communication and feedback for distributed work
- Where hybrid models tend to fail and how to design around the predictable failure modes