In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Friday Wrap-Up: Leadership Longevity and Nicolai's biggest regret

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

In this week's Friday Wrap-Up, Marthe Skaar sits down with Nicolai Tangen for a debrief on the podcast episode with the CEO of John Deere, news about the fund and the markets, and what's on Nicolai’s agenda for the weekend. Nicolai reflects on what surprised him most from the conversation wit the CEO of John Deere: how far AI has come in agriculture, and what it takes for a company to keep reinventing itself over nearly two centuries. He also opens up about a personal regret that has stayed with him over the years. Tune in!Listen to In Good Company with John May, CEO of John Deere: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/john-deere-ceo-farmings-future-autonomous-tractors/id1614211565?i=1000787298658The Friday Wrap-Up is hosted by Marthe Skaar, Chief of Communications and External Relations, together with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, and produced by Isabelle Karlsson. New episodes of In Good Company air every Wednesday, with the Friday Wrap-Up following each week to break it all down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone and welcome back to In Good Company. I'm still Martes Gaur. I'm Nicola Tangen. And what we'll do today is this is a short 15 minute chat where Nikola and I cover greetings highlights from this week's main episode, what's going on in the fund and the markets. And then we will talk about what you will do in the weekend. Absolutely. It should be fun. And this week we're heading into the fields. Absolutely. We have had a podcast with John Deere, which you may recognize for the green

tractors and wow, what a company. Have you learned anything new this week? I just didn't think, I just hadn't taken on board how far AI has come in agriculture and how important it's going to be. And interestingly, Bill Gates wrote a letter recently also where he talks about who the main beneficiaries are going to be. Number one, healthcare, number two, agriculture. And having listened to John Deere, you see how important it is for, you know, having gone from like a field-based treatment of everything from like fertilizers, how you put the seeds in the ground to now going like, you know, plant by plant, fertilizers, all these kind of things. It's saving them just so much money and energy and it's good for climate and productivity. Yeah, I agree. That struck me most with the episode as well,

because when I talk about John Deere, I must admit, I think about tractors and green hats. But this is a company that 190-year-old tractor making turned into a technology company. No, it's very, very impressive. You see, you know, the service business is really growing. There is a lot of, there's a big cloud element to it, more and more autonomous, driving, tractors, harvesting. Just huge productivity gains going on there. Yeah, and talking about that, because he also talked about, like, this computer vision, which I thought was really fascinating, where they kind of, you can tell a weed from a crop.

Yeah. And then, you know what to spray. So how important is it for companies to be able to innovate? Oh, it's totally key. It's basically what differentiates the winners from the losers. Interestingly, next year at the investment conference we have in April, that's what we're going to focus in on. So we have a lot of the best leaders in the world, the leaders in innovation.

They are going to come and tell us how they do it, how they're structured the companies, and what kind of process they have. That would be very interesting. And you also touched up on driverless, because they have had driverless. because they have had driverless tractors all the way since 2022. What do you think about what I'm making and kind of the timeline when they also look into US corn production that they really want to automate by 2030?

Yeah, no, it seems to be totally feasible according to what we know. We, of course, see it from many different industries that automation is coming really, really fast. You know, you have it on the car side, you have it on humanoid robots. This is just really, really fascinating. I have to say, I went to drive a tractor this week

because you have to check out the kind of things you do. And wow, that was fun. And it struck me also you have tractors coming at all these different sizes. And I'm just wondering whether you have the same kind of vanity problem as you have for most vehicles that, you know, you're on a farm, you made a lot of money, you want to show the neighbor guy, you know, a woman, that you made more money. So therefore you just kind of up to size of the tractor a bit,

because they are huge, some of these things. They are really huge. You learned how to back up as well, right? I did back. I drove both forward and backwards. I have to say they had capped it kind of on 20 kilometers an hour because they were a bit worried that I was going to destroy the whole thing. But hey, fun.

I mean, Lamborghini, the Italian tractor maker, started to make racing cars. So let's see, perhaps in the future we'll have a fast green racing car from John Deere. Yeah, there might be. I also was really fascinating about how kind of the role of farming is changing. And one thing is that these tractors are super offensive with instruments and everything. But what also struck me is he talked about data and the cloud and how they look into it. For me, it sounded like there were analysts in the sovereign welfare. Yeah, I think they, well, there's just so many commonalities now in terms of working. in business and industry compared to working in a financial company. It's the same way of analyzing data. You use the cloud.

You use business analytics. It's a lot of the same things. One thing that struck me was just like how long the CEOs have been in place at John there. So the company is 190 years old and they've had 10 CEOs, 10 CEOs in 190 years. It's very rare to see that type of situation. I mean, we have a similar, well, not that. long actually, but in Laurel, in France, you've had six CEOs in 100 years. I mean, in this fund, I'm CEO number three in 30 years.

So no, longevity is just an interesting concept. Do you see that as a positive to have a long tenure? I think on average it's positive. It can be too long too, because if it's too long, you basically will hold back change, I think. and so that's bad. But at the same time, if you shift too often, that's also not very positive. And often you shift because you need a change and because the previous one hasn't worked out, in which case it's not good.

And then, of course, you have the next thing, which is do you recruit internally or externally? So on average, it's better to recruit internally and to have that kind of continuation because people who worked in a firm, they have a better idea of co-opaculture, you know, how you do things around there and so on. Whilst if you need change, if something has gone wrong, you sometimes need somebody from the outside. Moving into to talk about the markets and what's going in the funder last week, I also want to start out by talking about tenure because the average tenure of a company at the S&P 500

had actually fallen from 33 years in 1965 to about 15 years today. And so given that everything we heard from Jandir about how to reinvate a 190-year-old company, how do you think about that, the average turnover in our portfolio? No, I think it's, it raises a lot of questions, of course. It tells you how difficult it is to pick the winners and to actually make sure that the winners remain winners. because the technology change is so fast that you can be obsolete very, very quickly. So that's, of course, one danger.

And then you also see some of the competitors from China and we've done some podcasts with Chinese companies recently, which are going to be released quite soon. Some of these companies have had a lifetime of six to 10 years and they've already revolutionized their industries. So it's just really, really fascinating. But for sure, things are moving faster and faster. Do you think the best performance stock of 20s,

40 exist today? No. No. So interesting, we actually asked our employees the same question at a town hall in London this spring. And 87% answered no to the question. So, yeah, I guess it's a signal of how fast things are moving. And on that note, talking of fast moving.

Because we have been to Tronheim this week, which is kind of like the city that have a university called Entenno. They have what we must call the leading tech university in Norway. And we met some brilliant students. We met the faculty. So a feeder, it's in a way, it's been a feeder university number one lately because of the technology people we have hired. Yeah, it sure has.

Why is it so important for you to be kind of so hands-on in recruiting? Well, because the people we recruit, they are going to be the key to the success. of the firm going forward. So that's the one thing. The second thing is that the competition for the best brains is very high and you need to be there and you need to make sure they understand what a great job it is to work in this fund. And then in particular the type of people we recruit who are both in finance and also often in technology. It's difficult to get great women. And we have as a goal to have 40% women. We are now at 35 or 34. And so that continues to be to be a goal for

And so we have, we made some great initiatives to improve that. And indeed, Marta, you were behind one of the initiatives, which is called Women in Finance. So what is that about? Yeah, so it's called Women Investment Club. And it was initiated by us, but it is a student-led initiative. And they have clubs all over Norway, but also all over Europe at the different universities. And the whole idea is just to have somewhere. where the female students can discuss and get really interested in finance.

And we come and we can give lectures, but also a lot of other companies do. And I think it's super important. But I also think when you add on the whole technology layer where we see that, okay, maybe it's even harder to recruit enough females, we really need to push on this going forward. They're also a separate club for kind of women in AI. Yeah, they have that as well. But before we go on to that, like Nicola, in your opinion,

Do we still need juniors? Oh, absolutely. I think that we'll end up in a situation where you have people at the top. You've got fewer in the middle, and then you got more at the kind of starting levels. But the type of people you need there would be what we call high agency people, people who use technology to the full extent, who really leverage up what they do. And high agency people, they are just people who get stuff done. And we see that if you are in command of technology,

you are just turning into like a superstar, a Whiskid, you know? So part of our message is that we still want to hire juniors, but we need them to be techie. We need them to learn AI at uni. We've done some research on what we think that unies can do a little bit different going forward. Absolutely, because we do think universities are behind the curve in teaching students, AI.

When we interview young people but also other companies in Norway, we see that they want to have more frequent curriculum updates, faster cycles. They want the universities to work more with practitioners and have more real-world assignments. So just more contact with industry. Should also be mandatory AI courses, which is not the case now, strangely enough, more project work. And then also a kind of two-track assessment. So one track which is without AIDS, where that kind of makes sense. And then one track, which is with AI. So you can kind of see both things.

One, how they control AI, also what they actually know. And then some of the deep knowledge, topics must still be preserved, like statistics, algebra, foundational computer science and so on. So we think the universities have quite some way to go here. So it's a combination of both holding on to what really matters and also like critical thinking is super important going forward. But they must learn them how to use these AI tools. Okay. Wrapping this up because John got personal in his episode too and he talked about his biggest regret was not having enough patience earlier in his career.

Do you recognize yourself in that? I probably wasn't too patient and you know what that probably leads me to kind of my biggest personal mistake because I think you said last time you're going to ask me about that and I've been thinking a bit about it and I think it's just to

forget all the languages I spoke when I was young because I had spent two years studying Russian I was quite fluent I did speak French at the time and German and now I hardly speak anything I hardly speak English and so I just wish I had been better at, you know, practicing those languages because I think language is just one of these incredible things.

And I'm quite surprised, actually, when I see all these CVs and I read hundreds of CVs, very few young people that I really develop language skills in a lot of different languages. And I think it's important for the way you learn, how you understand cultures, just the way you connect with people. So it's a personal regret for me, and I think it's something that more people should be focusing in on. You think you would have been a better CEO if you still had these languages? I think I would have had more fun in life, you know. Okay, and talking about fun in life, what are you up to this weekend?

Oh, hey, now this is going to be so much fun because I'm going to what is called F.T. in the Park, for National Times in the Park. And this is in Kenwood, in North London. They have laid out a whole day on Saturday with just all types of different things. So everything you read about in the weekend edition of Financial Times, be it kind of art, food, wine, politics, you know, economics, business. They have this incredible lineup of people who are coming there to talk, to be interviewed. It's in a beautiful setting, in, you know, lots of different types of tents, food trucks, all that kind of thing. I mean, it's just like paradise for a curious person.

Festival of learning. Totally. Very cool. Okay, happy weekend. Happy weekend.