At the age of just 16, Soren Toft departed his native country of Denmark towards the end of his secondary education, spending a year at a high school in the USA. This bold decision, self-funded through summer jobs, reveals much about an outward focus and high motivation that he has maintained throughout a stellar career in the shipping and logistics industry.
After completing high school, he joined the Danish shipping giant Maersk as a management trainee. The lure lay more in the opportunities than in the particular sector.
“I did not join Maersk, or shipping, when I was 20 years old because I was infatuated by shipping. I was infatuated with wanting to see the world.”
He has always been on the move; in a career in transport, and restlessly seeking to enhance his abilities. In common with many who have studied at IMD, the personal development has been at least as important as deepening business and geopolitical knowledge. The experience reinforced in him a commitment to lifelong learning.
“We are continuing to learn until we are no longer here: learn about life, learn about leadership, learn about yourself.”
Soren was to stay at Maersk for 25 years, gaining successive promotions. Prior to studying for the EMBA, which he completed in his mid-30s, he had been promoted to a senior management role, overseeing a department with 1,000 staff, at a young age. He had adopted a directive style, based on a culturally imbibed notion that you had to be “know-it-all, tough, decisive, assertive” to be a manager. He adds: “To the outside, I was probably all of that. But behind the shirt, there was a lot of self-doubt.”
With the help of coaching, and the timely intervention of the EMBA, he learned a more mature and effective style, which involved becoming more self-aware, learning to read the room and listen more, while letting his true personality show.
“We are continuing to learn until we are no longer here: learn about life, learn about leadership, learn about yourself”
“If you were to ask people, How is Soren? They will say he’s very driven, very ambitious, very demanding. And I think 15 years ago people would have stopped there. But today, they will say, but he’s also fair, he’s a good human being, he listens.”
From his IMD years, he recalls deepening his learning about organizational intelligence, for example from Professor Phil Rosenzweig on the limitations of data, and how different narratives can be spun from the same factual material.
This helps significantly in understanding the true organizational dynamics. The quest to keep on developing his abilities and his career led him to depart Maersk, where has was COO and Executive Board Member, after 25 years to take up the role of CEO at its great rival Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC). This represented a challenge in several ways. For example, he was the first non-family CEO at the Genevabased company, which is owned by the Aponte family.
The succession was carefully planned over many months, but while he was on garden leave from Maersk in early 2020, about to begin the new role, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The MSC cruise business was effectively shut down. Essential trade by ships had to be maintained, with crews observing social distancing and quarantine rules.
Shipping is a sector that is capital-intensive, with relatively low margins and subject to global economic fluctuations. The sector has always been “spiky”, in terms of market behaviour, and 2020 was more spiky than most years. After a few months of suppressed trade, the US government unleashed trillions of dollars in fiscal stimulus. So-called revenge spending ensued, and suddenly shipping was as busy as ever.
While he is acutely sensitive to the geopolitical climate, Soren makes the shrewd observation that underlying trends and human needs can be a surer guide to trading patterns than headlines in the news media, and even trade or actual wars.
“There are many people who ask: What happens if China invades Taiwan? And I say well, probably we won’t sail through the Taiwan Strait for a while but other than that, goods will move.”
Globalization is changing shape, rather than being curbed. Supply chains become less lean, more resilient and less reliant on China. But onshoring has its limits: the West cannot make all the goods and services it wishes to consume. “It’s not as though, from tomorrow the United States or Europe or anybody could start producing what we’re consuming today. It’s an impossibility.”
At a personal level, while he has lived and worked in three continents, including a spell in Hong Kong, there are limits to the pull of global locations. There is a poignant tone as he recalls how his kind-hearted mother, now passed away, would have wished for him to live closer to home. And he makes it a condition of support for his adult children’s education that they study in Europe.
“I was infatuated with wanting to see the world”
“Being a parent is a journey too. Everything is temporary, and all journeys are finite, but you don’t stop before the end.”
