Rasmus Ankersen

Rasmus Ankersen

• Best selling author and leading conference speaker on performance development
• His fact-based high-performance development strategies are used by many admired global brands and companies
• Chairman of two of the world’s most innovative football clubs,  recognised for their use of big data to drive decision-making
• Producer of 2021 film The Hockey Miracle in the Middle of Nowhere

Rasmus Ankersen from Denmark is a bestselling author, a speaker on performance development and a trusted advisor to businesses and athletes around the world.

His keynote presentations are based on his leading motivational books, ‘The Gold Mine Effect’ and ‘Hunger in Paradise’ which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.

He is a specialist on data analytics or the so-called ‘Moneyball’ approach to interpreting the performance of top-flight footballers.

He is also a football executive and currently holds the position as Chairman of FC Midtjylland in Denmark and co-director of football at Brentford FC in the English Premier League. Both of these teams he has helped to develop explosively through their respective leagues and reach their top division in a very short period of time.

Midtjylland and Brentford are regarded as amongst the world’s most innovative football clubs, especially recognised for their use of big data to drive decision-making.

Rasmus’s skill is that he is the only expert on the subject of high performance who has literally lived and trained with the best athletes on the planet. For the last ten years, Rasmus Ankersen has been intensively studying the world’s leading talent in sport, business, science and music.

In 2021 Rasmus has launched his film, ‘The Hockey Miracle in the Middle of Nowhere.’ 

Despite over a decade focussed on high-performance development, Rasmus hadn’t realised that the most impressive talent hotbed was right on his doorstep in the small town where he grew up.

This realisation led him to return home to Herning to tell this extraordinary story about how this little town against all odds produced five players in just nine years to the worlds biggest hockey scene.

“From a competition perspective, the iPhone is nothing but a niche product.” The famous words belong to Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo when he on the 17th April 2008, barely a year after the iPhone’s release, was asked if he saw iPhone as a commercial threat.

Kallasvuo’s answer came to stand as a monument to the arrogance that sent Nokia into a free fall towards the abyss. In six years Nokia’s smartphone market share dropped from 50% to 3%. The same people who made Nokia so successful also turned it into a gigantic failure.

There is no doubt that at the heart of success lies the reason for failure. While we talk a lot about how to achieve success, we talk way too little about the consequences of success. About the complacency, arrogance and the fear of losing it all again, which often follow as a shadow of success. Success produces complacency. It happens to individuals, companies and nations. But how do you stay humble when the company cashes in record profits, and how do you provide people with the feeling that they are standing on a burning platform when there are no flames in sight? Or put it in another way: How do you create hunger in paradise?

2. The Gold Mine Effect

Why are 137 of the worlds 500 best female golfers from South Korea? How did one athletic club in Kingston, Jamaica, succeed to produce most of the worlds best sprinters? What is the reason that the worlds best marathon runners grew up in the same village in Ethiopia? What is the secret behind Brazils mass production of soccer super stars? How has one village with 500 inhabitants in Sweden managed to produced the best skiers in history?

Rasmus Ankersen, a performance specialist, quit his job, spent his last pennies booking flight tickets and for six intense months travelled the world and literally trained and lived with the world’s best athletes and their coaches in these six gold mines of talent. In this keynote Rasmus presents his surprising conclusions on how any business, organisation or team can learn to dramatically improve their ability to identify, grow and motivate talent by understanding the secrets of the gold mines.

When was the last time your company took a step back to consider the best way to identify and grow talent? When was the last time you stopped to deeply reflect on important questions like: How can we create a competitive advantage by re-thinking how and where we look for talent? And how do we build a culture where people put urgency above complacency?

–

For organisations seeking to recruit, train and retain talent Rasmus Ankersen provides essential information, supported by extensive research presented in a professional and engaging way. Rasmus resides and travels from London.