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Claus Møller was the leading management thinker in Scandinavia. His concepts have been implemented by companies employing millions of people all over the world. He has won recognition for his concepts and has written bestselling business books. After selling his life’s work, TMI consultancy, in 2004, he has run seminars, done keynote speeches worldwide, and helped companies set up training foundations for the future. He spent his spare time in France, where he and his wife Viveca Møller had built a unique conference venue and management retreat, Les 4 Moulins, and they run open seminars and in-company management events.

Claus was an Honorary Fellow of the All India Management Association and the inventor of such concepts as The Human Side of Quality, Personal Quality, A Complaint is a Gift (also a US business bestseller co-written with Janelle Barlow), Employeeship, and many others. He was a Goodwill Ambassador for Copenhagen, and in this capacity, he was working on a project designed to make the Greater Copenhagen region the global leader in customer service and openness. Before developing his concepts and founding Europe’s most successful training consultancy, he held senior positions within Danish, Scandinavian and global companies.

Claus Møller’s & TMI’s Story
Time Manager International A/S (TMI) was founded in Denmark in 1975 by Viveca and Claus Møller with the launch of the Time Manager, an all-in-one tool to achieve better results, create an overview and optimising the use of resources – and with a unique philosophy attached to it.

In the beginning, it was solely marketed as a physical product, but a seminar was quickly developed, focused on how to: make the most of one’s time, become better at prioritising, avoid stress, and develop and maintain a work-life balance. This is why the seminar was not just about managing time but also about lifestyle, values, and human relations. The seminar very quickly became popular in Scandinavia and was the best-selling seminar in Denmark (1976), Norway (1977), and Sweden (1978). Everybody had to experience the seminar – not least because the teaching method was unique and allowed people to see their errors and where there was room for improvement in a fun and engaging manner. This meant that the participants left with a desire to improve themselves rather than be defensive about their attitudes.

In 1982 another cornerstone of TMI’s success was built: the service program Putting People First (PPF). This educational program has helped many companies and organisations in a variety of industries all over the world, to create remarkable results and achieve international recognition – to the extent that they have won numerous prizes and commendations for outstanding service quality.

Claus Møller has achieved personal international recognition for his service concepts Personal Quality and the Human Side of Quality, which were both launched in 1988. The British Department of Trade and Industry (the forerunner of the current Department for Business, Innovation & Skills) and the European Organisation for Quality have described the concepts as some of the world’s best contributions to quality development at the personal, team and organisational levels.

Another Claus Møller innovation was the Employeeship concept, which was launched in 1992. Most management theories focus on what it takes to be a good manager and place the responsibility for the company’s success or failures on the shoulder of the manager. These theories completely overlook the importance of the contribution of the individuals and the teams to the success of the company. Employeeship is about what it takes to be a good employee – manager or not – and places the responsibility for the success of the company on all of the employees. By implementing Employeeship, many companies have managed to mobilise the positive energy of all staff and create a culture characterised by everybody’s responsibility, engagement, loyalty, initiative, and change willingness.

Claus Møller’s Heart Work concept and training program saw the light of day in the year 2000. Heart Work is all about relations and emotions. It is about how individuals, teams and entire companies can create better results through developing and utilising their emotional intelligence.

In 2003, the first Practical Leadership event took place in the purpose-built training campus in Provence, Southern France. Practical Leadership is an intense and immersive experience for a limited number of existing and future leaders structured around a framework for creating General Business Excellence (the skills required to succeed in any company, in any industry, and in any country). A model consisting of three pillars and a roof ties the concepts together: Productivity, Relations and Quality underpin Leadership. This 6 day training program has been held for the over 100 times and still continues today.

The Growth of TMI
Over the course of almost 30 years (1975 to 2003), TMI expanded internationally to become the world’s largest Human Resource training consultancy with offices in 42 countries. Below are some of the key milestones for the business:

Service (Putting People First) Training for SAS - 1982

Training of all 12,000 SAS employees. The Putting People First program was a main contributor to SAS’s awards of “Airline of the Year” and the subsequent award for “Best Passenger Service” in 1986. The resounding success of the client meant the beginning of a decade of tremendous growth of aviation clients. In 1983 British Airways followed and between 1983 and 1985 36,500 British Airways staff underwent training in 430 PPF programs delivered by Claus Møller and his team of British consultants from TMI UK. Similar programs also took place in most of BA’s overseas destinations. As a result of this, British Airways won the coveted “Airline of the Year” award in 1987. In an interview with BBC1, Sir Colin Marshall (Chief Executive at the time and later Chairman) expressed the belief that it was primarily Claus Møller’s and TMI’s doing that BA had achieved these remarkable results. Throughout the late 1980s, further training was run for India Airlines, Air India, and Japan Airlines. With the latter, it meant a complete re-working of the concept to fit in with the Japanese culture and a joint venture was launched in 1988 to deliver Western training attuned to Japanese sensibilities.

TMI is the First Management Consultancy in the Soviet Union – 1983

TMI became successful with the help of Mikhail Gorbachev himself. After having worked extensively with large state run organisations for 4 years, Claus Møller wrote a personal letter to the General Secretary on July 30th, 1987. As a response, TMI was invited to deliver management training to the Soviet central administration and to help boost the implementation of perestroika. In 1988, Claus trained 180 leading bureaucrats from the Soviet presidium and in 1989 he delivered training to all members of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was the first of many government interactions for TMI, which went on to deliver greater and smaller programs for the European Union (all employees underwent training from 1988 onwards), Mexico, Poland, India, Romania and Iceland.

Big Client Wins in the 1980s and 1990s


 * Kaufhof department stores in Germany: 40,000 staff trained in customer service    (1985)
 * Avis: 30,000 employees in 16 major US cities and 30 smaller towns (1987-1988)
 * Ford Europe: 30,000 employees trained (1988)
 * Telecom New Zealand: 25,000 staff – and still the largest staff education program    ever undertaken in New Zealand (1988)
 * Fiat Group: 70,000 employees trained globally (1991)
 * ABB (ASEA Brown Boveri): training of employees in 16 European countries, utilising    12 different languages. Training focused on Employeeship and sales     management. TMI was the only educational provider qualified     to take on the task (1996).
 * Matav (Hungary): 16,000 employees trained to prepare this national telco for    privatisation (1997)
 * Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane: 60,000 out of 120,000 employees in the state owned    national railway company undergo training undertaken by TMI Italy (1998)

Awards & Recognition
In 1982, TMI won a Danish export prize awarded by the bank, Provinsbanken. In the reasoning for the award, the jury noted:

''”TMI is a good example of how an idea, which is marketed correctly, can become a sales success, not only at home but all over the world. It is clear example of the sale of know-how of great importance to the Danish economy as this form of export is purely positive on the trade balance.”''

In 1984 TMI also went on to win the Danish marketing association’s (Dansk Markedsføringsforbund) annual marketing prize. In 1989 TMI UK won the “Business of the Year” award in its home region of the West Midlands.

In a July 1988 report to the European Commission, the European Services Industries Forum (ESIF) placed TMI as Europe’s leader within the field of training and education. The report focused on 25 new service industries where European companies were world leaders. ESIF calculated the revenues for each sector and determined the leading European companies based on an assessment of product quality and professionalism. TMI was one of only two Danish companies included in the list, the other being facilities management giant ISS. Coincidentally, Claus was the SVP of Marketing at ISS prior to founding TMI.

In 1990, the British government’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) called Claus Møller one of only eight quality gurus in the world. Claus is the only European to make it onto the list of innovators in modern quality development. There were 4 Americans (Deming, Juran, Crosby and Feigenbaum) and 3 Japanese nationals on the list (Chingo, Ishikawa and Taguchi). Some years later Tom Peters was also added to the list by the DTI. The eight quality gurus’ contributions were described by Professor Tony Bendell in the official publication “The Quality Gurus – What can they do for your company?” Claus Møller was mentioned as the coiner of the terms Personal Quality, the Human Side of Quality, soft service quality and internal customers. The other gurus have primarily focused on the technical (hard) factors of products, production quality, and statistical quality control – unlike concepts developed by engineers for engineers, Møller’s quality concept was for everyone. This became the start of Claus’s career as a renowned international management speaker and since then he has appeared all over the world, often speaking at conferences with renowned politicians or management thinkers.

Also in 1990, TMI became a partner of EFQM, European Foundation for Quality Management.

In 1994, Claus Møller and Sir Collin Marshall become honorary members of the All India Management Association (AIMA) in conjunction with AIMA’s 21st national convention.

Interesting Media Coverage
In 1988, BBC1 commissioned a programme about Claus as part of its Business Matters series on management gurus. You can read more about it here. As a follow up, Dutch national television decided to bring a 50 minute interview with Claus Møller, which resulted in several client enquiries and subsequent training commissions for Philips and Royal Dutch Shell among others.

The same year, TMI first appeared in Time Magazine and Readers’ Digest published an article about both Claus and his wife, Viveca, in several national issues. This was read by millions of people in more than 40 countries. The following year, the first article about TMI appeared in Fortune Magazine.

Harvard Business Review ran a case study (the “Case of the Complaining Customer”) in 1990 and Claus Møller was one of four experts asked to advise on how to deal with a specific customer complaint.

In 1991 TMI was one of 14 case studies in the international management bestseller “Making Customers Count” about excellence in customer care.

In 1992, the leading Danish broadsheet Berlingske Tidende did a large portrait on him. The same year the concepts of A Complaint is a Gift, Energy Meter and Personal Guarantee were launched.

In 1993 the renowned business journalist and author wrote the book “The Quality Makers” on behalf of EFQM, the European Foundation of Quality Management. A whole chapter and an addendum was about Claus Møller and TMI, included as one of the 14 organisations considered to be ”the leaders and shapers of Europe’s Quality Revolution”.

South America’s leading business monthly, Gestion, features Claus Møller’s accomplishments in 1997. The leading article and cover focus on the Human Side of Quality and the article mentions him as the world’s leading expert on quality management.

As a consequence of the 1998 TMI project for the Italian state railways being the largest organisational transformation project ever undertaken in Italy, there was significant press coverage in both the daily newspapers and financial magazines. The project was based on the “Vision & Leadership” concept developed by Claus Møller and the Managing Partner of TMI Italy, Franco d’Egidio.

Later in 1998 the American Management Association decided to celebrate their 75th anniversary by publishing the best 75 management decisions of all time in their Management Review. They focused on the decisions, which had the most profound impact on how companies and societies worked. The list included such little known decisions as Walt Disney deciding to listen to his wife and calling his character in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie, Mickey rather than Mortimer. Another decision was Queen Isabella of Spain deciding to sponsor Columbus’ voyage. In the middle of the 75 decisions, which were randomly placed, was Jan Carlzon’s decision to implement Claus Møller’s Putting People First program in SAS. This changed the airline industry forever.

In 2003 the leading Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende named Claus one of the 50 greatest business personalities of all time in Denmark.

In 2007 Nordisk Råd (the Nordic Council) created a research group consisting of professors and management specialists from each of the 5 Nordic countries. The group was charged with mapping and describing the most important contributions to Nordic management thinking. Claus Møller was identified as one of the key contributors. Commenting on the selection of Claus, Professor Stein Jonny Valstad said the following: ”Claus Møller is one of the few actors who, to a significant degree, has been part of shaping the ideas which constitute Nordic management. Over a period of more than 30 years, he has developed and communicated ideas and concepts which leaders and employees all over the world have benefited from. Better than any other Nordic leader, he has managed to industrialise his ideas. This has especially been done through the development and leadership of TMI. In addition to the reach and dissemination of his concepts, they also are of a quality, which has led to TMI and Claus Møller being internationally recognised over the years.”