Rasmus Ankersen

Rasmus Ankersen is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, speaker on performance development and a trusted advisor to businesses and athletes around the world.

In 2012 Rasmus published The Gold Mine Effect, in which he explores how some countries and cities develop a disproportionate amount of top talent.

In 2016 Rasmus published Hunger in Paradise: a book about how successful organisations can remain successful by eliminating complacency.

Rasmus is also the chairman of FC Midtjylland, his childhood football club in Denmark, and a director of the English club Brentford FC. Both are known as some of the world’s most innovative football clubs, especially recognised for their use of big data to drive decision-making.

Over the past few years, Rasmus has been hired to share his research on high performance cultures by global brands like LEGO, Google, Boston Consulting Group, IKEA, Google, Facebook, Hitachi, Roche, Ernst & Young and many more.

Rasmus Ankersen is a highly experienced keynote speaker on the topic of talent and high performance cultures. He has been hired to teach by well known global brands like Facebook, Google,  LEGO, Boston Consulting Group, Microsoft, Roche, Astra Zeneca, Coca-Cola, Cisco and many more.

His keynote speech topics include:

The Gold Mine Effect:
Why are 137 of the worlds 500 best female golfers from South Korea? How did one athletic club in Kingston, Jamaica, succeed to produce most of the world's best sprinters? What is the reason that the world's best marathon runners grew up in the same village in Ethiopia? What is the secret behind Brazil’s mass production of soccer super stars? How has one village with 500 inhabitants in Sweden managed to produced the best skiers in history?

For six intense months, Rasmus Ankersen travelled the world and literally trained and lived with the world's best athletes and their coaches in these six gold mines of talent. In his speach Rasmus presents surprising conclusions on how any business, organisation or team can learn to dramatically improve their ability to identify, grow and motivate talent by understanding the secrets of the gold mines.

Hunger in Paradise:
"From a competition perspective, the iPhone is nothing but a niche product" The famous words belong to Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo when he on the 17th April 2008, barely a year after the iPhone’s release, was asked if he saw iPhone as a commercial threat.

Kallasvuo's answer came to stand as a monument to the arrogance that sent Nokia into a free fall towards the abyss. In six years Nokia’s smartphone market share dropped from 50% to 3%. The same people who made Nokia so successful also turned it into a gigantic failure.

There is no doubt that at the heart of success lies the reason for failure. While we talk a lot about how to achieve success, we talk way too little about the consequences of success. About the complacency, arrogance and the fear of losing it all again, which often follow as a shadow of success. Success produces complacency.

It happens to individuals, companies and nations. But how do you stay humble when the company cashes in record profits, and how do you provide people with the feeling that they are standing on a burning platform when there are no flames in sight? Or put it in another way: How do you create hunger in paradise?

The BIG DATA revolution:
A couple of years ago Harvard Business Review published an article with the title: “The sexiest job of the 21st Century is a data scientist”.

The article captured the big data revolution and how analytics is now providing us with insights we could only have dreamed of 15 years ago.

Rasmus Ankersen is the Chairman of FC Midtjylland and the Co-Director of Brentford FC: two football clubs driving the big data revolution in sports.

Based on intelligent use of big data the clubs have produced spectacular results, which have made the international press name them “the Moneyball projects of football”.

In his speech Rasmus will explain:
- How data can override cognitive biases
- Why data without context is meaningless
- How to choose the right metric
- Why you should start with the questions, not with the data

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Clients often ask about purchasing books for giveaways and delegate packs. Below you’ll find a selection of products by Rasmus Ankersen. Click the images to view on Amazon's website. For bulk orders, please speak with your Booking Agent.