About the book

Dreams & Details

by Jim Hagemann Snabe & Mikael Trolle

The book presents the Dreams and Details leadership model and offers specific recommendations for how you can reinvent your business and your leadership style.

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Dreams and Details

Reinvent Your Business and Your Leadership from a Position of Strength

by Jim Hagemann Snabe & Mikael Trolle

The book pulls together decades of the authors’ firsthand leadership experiences and studies multiple cases of efforts to reinvent organizations and perform at new levels. The book presents the Dreams and Details leadership model and offers specific recommendations for how you can reinvent your business and your leadership style.
The book is available both in English and Danish as a hardcover edition, e-book, and audiobook.

Order in English
Order in Danish

Background

What do winning the next season in Formula 1, creating the successful TV series “The Killing”, coaching the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, and leading a business through digital disruption have in common?

A lot, according to Dreams and Details. They all require leadership to solve the most challenging dilemma in business: How to reinvent an organization from a position of strength.

“There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment – and you start to decline.”

 – Andrew Grove 1936-2016, CEO Intel.

Extract​

Chapter 3: Dreams and Details – A New Leadership Model

In a world that is changing with ever-increasing speed and with many unknowns, there is a need to unleash human creativity to find the best solutions and the best path to fulfilling the dream.

As leaders, the more detailed plans we make, the more defensive we become, because we cannot foresee everything and can only plan based on the boundaries of current knowledge.

The Dreams and Details Leadership Model

The Dreams and Details Leadership Model is our recommended leadership model to enable continuous reinvention based on maximizing human performance. The Dreams and Details leadership model advocates for the importance of inspiring people to drive reinvention based on an ambitious dream that points to the opportunities in the future. It involves focusing on the most crucial details and developing the most critical capabilities that enable the dream to come true.  And it includes setting the right mindset and framework to unleash human potential and accelerate the transformation of the organization.

Read about the model

Testimonials

Here’s what other people are saying about ‘Dreams & Details’:

“Dreams and Details inspires leaders to replace bureaucracy with human creativity and defines a new leadership model for continuous reinvention in a world of relentless change.”
Gary Hamel
Gary HamelManagement Expert, Author, and Visiting Professor at London Business School
“Dreams and Details represents the winning formula of a true leader of consequence. Every student of succes should read this masterpiece!”
Bill McDermott
Bill McDermottCEO, ServiceNew
“Dreams and Details is a brilliant condensation of both the magic and science of building disruption proof businesses. The book describes how to create the magic of the shared dream that energizes everyone, as well as the science behind the details of managing the reinvention of the company. A must read for everyone in charge.”
Risto Siilasmaa
Risto SiilasmaaFounder & Chairman, F-Secure Corporation
"In "Dreams and Details", Snabe and Trolle set out to explain why all leaders have to combine visionary long-term thinking with practical and tactical perspectives in management. This is a difficult combination, but based on the authors' own experiences, the book provides excellent examples of modern leadership practices. A must-read!"
Nicklas Bergman
Nicklas BergmanEntrepreneur and Technology Investor
“Leaders need to be grateful for this wake up call in Dreams and Details, then take note. They have no other option.”
Nik Gowing
Nik GowingFounder & Co-Author, Thinking the Unthinkable
“It's a book that should be read by anyone working with strategy and leadership. This is true whether it is large or small companies, public organizations, and everything that's in-between. There is something for most people.”
Henrik Ørholst
Henrik ØrholstBusiness Commentator, TV News
“The leadership book of the year 2017 has been found. The “Dreams & Details” model is an approach to leadership that puts human performance at the center stage.”
Lederne
LederneDenmark's largest professional organization for leaders
“Chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe and Sporting Director Mikael Trolle have written a convincing and inspiring book on leadership in a time where we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Berlingske
BerlingskeA leading Danish Newspaper
“Jim Hagemann Snabe and Mikael Trolle have written a brilliant book on how a company gets to know its dream, focus on the details and builds a bridge between the two."
Jyllands-Posten
Jyllands-PostenOne of Denmark's major morning newspapers
Reviews

You’d like some more words about the book? Then have a look at these reviews:

Dreams and Details reviewed by Nik Gowing

Read the entire review on our blog

Dreams and Details reviewed by Den Howlett in Diginomica

The English version of the book Dreams & Details, has been reviewed by Den Howlett from Diginomica.

Howlett notes: “I’m normally not a fan of business or management books. Too often they reflect the experience of individuals who have attained phenomenal success without necessarily providing the essential critiques about what works and what doesn’t. Dreams and Details by Jim Snabe and Mikael Trolle is an exception.”

Read the entire review

Review by “Lederne”. (Danish text only)

The book Dreams & Details has been nominated leadership book of the year in Denmark!

For the full Danish article and review, follow the link

Review by Claus Skovhus in Berlingske Business. (Danish only) ★★★★★☆

Read the entire review. (Subscription needed)

Review by Henrik Ørholst in Børsen. (Danish only) ★★★★★☆

Read the entire review. (Subscription needed)

Review by Ulla Bechsgaard in Jyllandsposten (Danish Only) ★★★★★★

Read the entire review. (Subscription needed)

About the Authors

Combining the best from the worlds of business and elite sports for a common vision for future leadership and strategy.

Mikael Trolle

Mikael Trolle is CEO and Partner at Idonea, helping organizations reinvent from a position of strength. For nearly three decades, he led Volleyball Denmark, including two stints as head coach of the national team.

Today, he lectures at the University of Copenhagen and CBS, and advises organizations such as Novo Nordisk, the Danish Government, and DR.

Jim Hagemann Snabe

Jim Hagemann Snabe is Chairman of Siemens and former Chairman of A.P. Moller – Maersk. A veteran of SAP and IBM, he played a key role in SAP’s transformation as Co-CEO from 2010–2014. 

He is also a leading voice in digital transformation and sustainability through the World Economic Forum and serves as adjunct professor at CBS.