The 26-year-old super talent was a self-made expert on social media strategies and digital market analysis. Already at high school, she had worked part-time for companies and helped them reach new target groups with impressive results. Instead of continuing to college or university, she had gone straight into work. After two weeks at her new workplace, she was thrown into a project with the company’s largest customer. Other members of the project team consisted of highly educated academics and senior experts who had worked for many years on similar projects. Nobody asked for her opinion and when she took air time and presented her suggested ideas, she was met with comments like: “well, how do you know anything about this, you don’t even have a proper education?” After being treated like this repeatedly, she left the organization.

A global company, headquartered in Sweden, wanted to increase the proportion of its international employees and increase internal mobility within the company. Through targeted internal recruitments, the company managed to temporarily increase the proportion of employees from its other country offices moving to Sweden and work in the Swedish organization. When these employees’ temporary employment contracts expired, however, most of them moved back to their home countries. Naturally, the company wondered why this was the case. The answers they received had a clear pattern: “nobody had asked them to stay, encouraged them to seek other jobs, or tried to extend the jobs they had, so the Swedes had assumed they would return home”. Although some of the non-Swedes wanted to go back, most of them wanted to stay longer.

A partner-owned advisory agency wanted to “break the whiteness norm” and worked especially hard to find candidates for the summer internship who had different backgrounds to existing employees. They found two foreign-born Swedish students at one of the country’s universities. The students had great references and good grades. If the students did well during their internship, their internships would become full-time positions. In this case, the two students excelled at being loyal to the company and performed exceptionally well during their summer internship. However, some partners at the agency were concerned about the students’ “coarse language” and despite their achievements, the students were not offered jobs because the partners were worried about what clients would think.

In surveys and focus group interviews, a consulting company had seen that as employers they did not look at new parents in the same way as they looked at other employees. The perception being that it took too long for employees who had been on parental leave to get back up to full speed on their return to work – even though having been away from work for an extended period made many new parents especially eager to get back to work. To maximize the profitability of people returning to work from parental leave, the company wanted to draw up a kind of financial statement for such employees – before and after parental leave. The statement would serve as a reminder before employees returned to work after parental leave. Once back at work, a performance interview would be held when the employee and their superior would jointly create a new development plan that considered any new skill sets and needs of the employee. A fantastic routine! But when the new male parents asked their bosses to draw up such a document, they were met by deaf ears: “what do you mean, parental leave? This initiative is for our female employees.”

The consumer company established itself in the Asian region. Sales did not go as planned. There were many reasons for this, of course, but the major reason had to do with price and quality – and with the product developers’ prejudices. They believed that Asian customers liked cheap products and it was fine to compromise on quality. But in reality, excellent design and high quality were what was in demand in the Asian market