My new playground

Since mid-April, Telenor Serbia is my new playground.

Change in function
Before coming to Telenor Serbia, I imagined working here to be quite different from Global Coordination in Telenor ASA where I spent my first module. Two months down the line, I can say that the two jobs are definitely worlds apart. But more than in diversity of national- or organisational cultures, I think the difference lies in the pretty drastic change in functions. I used to work with group-wide strategies within Operations, and now my job is local and hands-on business-as-usual in the Marketing department. There is definitely a difference in culture between the two!

I agree, but…
So far I have been surprised by how similar the organisational cultures seem to be in the two companies. OK, so Norwegians in Telenor ASA usually say “I agree, but…” when they mean “you know what, I don’t agree at all”. People in Telenor Serbia tend to say “well actually, I don’t agree” when they mean “well actually, I don’t agree”.  But, as much of a cultural giveaway as this might be, from what I’ve seen the two companies have more things in common than not, and it was easy for me to feel at home here. Across atleast two of the companies I think there really is something that can be called a ‘Telenor culture’.

Coordination in reality
I work with mobile broadband, which is a relatively new area in Serbia but where OpCos in more mature markets such as the Nordic countries and Hungary have a lot of experience. After six months of learning in theory about the benefits of coordination between the companies - the objective of Global Coordination is along the lines of ‘utilising group capabilities to contribute to local competitive advantage for Telenor’s OpCos’ - it is really cool to see it in practice, as Telenor Sweden and Pannon share their experiences with us so that we can be better than our competitors within mobile broadband in Serbia.