By Jens Frederik Hansen, CEO, A2SEA

There’s an old, wise English saying: “Charity begins at home”. I believe it is equally true (although less poetic) to say that “Leadership starts in the company”.

That’s why at A2SEA, the largest player in installation and market leader for over a decade, we have now begun leading the way toward a new level of industry achievement – starting with ourselves.

The offshore wind energy market is a dynamic one. Changes often sweep through, challenging established ways of doing business and initiating waves of improvement in innovation and cost-effectiveness. As in any other maturing industry, the offshore wind supply chain must continually adjust, implementing a steady flow of changes to deliver exactly what’s needed at all stages of the market’s development.

In answer to recent developments in our marketplace, we must work, both individually as companies and collectively, to come up with better solutions, exploit new synergies and move even closer to our customers.

For A2SEA, the past five years have been particularly strong, and we have been able to pick and choose among projects to take those that best suit our capabilities and our ambitions. Now we are well-positioned to use our knowhow and experience more broadly. And we aim to more closely connect customer priorities, preferences and initiatives with our own to arrive at increasingly better solutions.

Overall, it’s a good time to review our organisation, focusing on simplication, teamwork and leadership styles, in particular. In concrete terms, the changing marketplace calls for a more focused approach to tenders and contracting, and the encouragement of a more comprehensive network that can support working together in the industry.

We need to make sure our people can easily operate across the organisation, quickly accessing resources to ensure the right approach to each project opportunity. And we are examining ways to heighten attentiveness and adherence to our customers’ expressed requirements.

Finally, driving these changes – and maintaining A2SEA’s market leadership – demands highly committed management teams at all levels of the company. To this end, we have defined seven leadership principles that will strengthen the ability of our managers to guide us forward.

At an industry level, we aim to more strongly support wind farm developers with their efforts to plan and implement projects, enabling us to package our work to optimally serve the bigger picture. There’s plenty of installation knowhow still untapped in developer planning processes – and leveraging that knowhow is key to reducing time and cost, and ensuring more sustainable solutions.

I strongly encourage everyone in our industry to think not just about what is best from a developer, manufacturer or installer point of view, but to consider the collective advantages we can achieve by streamlining processes between developers, suppliers and installers.

And I also encourage the removal of barriers to such cooperation built up during times when each company thought mostly about sailing its own ship. Everyone needs to be part of improving the future.

 

 

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