How much time do you spend mentoring next-generation designers and how much time do you spend actually designing yourself?
I think that as soon as you gain some seniority you start to be a mentor. We have lots of young designers who have so many fantastic ideas — many of which are impossible. But as a manager, when you spot a talented designer, then you help by showing him how to get an idea into a more producible form without losing any excitement or any creativity. The lifeblood of any company is to have new, young people who follow ideas and don’t know they’re impossible. That’s critical. As we gain experience we realize that there are 1,000 reason why you can’t do that, but a young designer doesn’t know that. So, you let that creativity flourish and give people confidence. When it comes to my own design inputs, they are less and less regular because as you move up in an organization, you have got more and more projects to oversee.
Your successor at Volvo Cars, Thomas Ingenlath, is now CEO at Polestar. Car designers are underrepresented at the top of most auto…
