A.P. Moller – Maersk
How Can a 120-Year-Old Company Keep Changing?

The blue containers with the white seven-pointed star are familiar sights at ports, on highways, and across global logistics networks.

A.P. Moller – Maersk was founded in Denmark in 1904 as a shipping company. Over more than 120 years, it has evolved far beyond ocean transport into an integrated logistics company connecting terminals, inland transportation, warehousing, air freight, forwarding, and end-to-end supply chain solutions.

From the perspective of the Human Leadership System, however, the most interesting point is not the scale of the company.

The deeper question is:

How can an organization with more than a century of history avoid becoming trapped by its past success and continue to transform itself?

And equally important:

How can a large global organization see what is really happening at the front line, learn from it, and turn that learning into improvement?

That is where the Maersk case becomes especially valuable.

1. Company

From a Shipping Company to a Company That Connects the World

Maersk’s history can be seen as a history of self-transformation.

The company began in an era dominated by steamships. Over time, it adopted new technologies, adapted to structural changes in global trade, and continuously redefined its role.

In recent years, Maersk has pursued an even more fundamental transformation.

From:

a shipping company that moves cargo from port to port

to:

a Global Integrator that connects customers’ entire supply chains.

This shift changes much more than the business portfolio.

When a shipping company expands into trucking, warehousing, air freight, digital platforms, data, and supply chain design, the capabilities required across the organization also change.

The work changes.
The coordination changes.
The skills change.
The leadership requirements change.

In other words:

Strategy Transformation requires Human Transformation.

That is the first major lesson we can draw from Maersk.

2. Leadership

Changing the Business While Preserving What Should Not Change

Maersk has five long-standing Core Values:

Constant Care
Take care of today while actively preparing for tomorrow.

Humbleness
Listen, learn, share, and give space to others.

Our Employees
Create an environment in which people can grow and contribute.

Uprightness
Do the right thing and keep commitments.

Our Name
Protect the company’s reputation as a symbol of trust and responsibility.

There is an important lesson here for long-lived organizations.

Maersk has been willing to change strategy radically while maintaining a stable set of values as a reference point for decision-making.

If an organization changes its values every time the environment changes, people eventually lose a sense of what they are supposed to stand for.

But if an organization protects not only its values but also its old ways of working, it becomes unable to adapt.

Leadership therefore requires the ability to distinguish:

What must change, and what must remain.

3. Genba Walk

Genba Walk is often translated as “going to the workplace,” but its meaning is deeper than a simple site visit.

The purpose is to:

see reality directly,
listen to the people doing the work,
and
notice the gap between assumptions and actual conditions.

The larger an organization becomes, the more information flows upward through systems.

KPIs.
Monthly reports.
Incident reports.
Customer data.
Employee surveys.
Dashboards.

All of these are useful.

But data is not the same as reality.

For example, a report may show that accident frequency is declining.

Yet people on the front line may still feel that certain situations are unsafe but difficult to report.

An engagement score may look healthy.

Yet employees may still feel unable to speak openly with a manager.

That is why leaders need to go and see.

Japan has a strong management tradition called Genchi Genbutsu—go to the actual place, see the actual thing, and understand the actual facts.

Genba Walk is closely connected to this way of thinking.

Genba Walk Is Not About Giving Answers

When leaders visit the front line, there is always a temptation to start instructing.

“Why are you doing it this way?”
“You should change this.”
“Here is the solution.”

But once that happens, the Genba Walk becomes an inspection.

The HLS approach is different.

First:

Observe.

Then:

Listen.

Questions might include:

“What makes your work most difficult here?”
“Where do you see risk?”
“If you could change one thing, what would it be?”
“What are managers not seeing from where they sit?”

Questions like these can reveal realities that numbers alone may never show.

4. People Development

Developing People Means Building the Capabilities Required by Strategy

Transformation into an integrated logistics company requires new capabilities.

Traditional shipping expertise alone is not enough.

Digital capability.
Data literacy.
Supply chain knowledge.
Customer understanding.
Cross-functional collaboration.
Leadership across countries and cultures.

These capabilities must be developed across the organization.

The important point is not to define people development as:

“How many training programs did we deliver?”

A more useful sequence is:

Strategy changes
↓
Required capabilities change
↓
Recruitment, development, and deployment change
↓
Leadership behavior changes
↓
Organizational culture changes

People development therefore means:

building the people and organization capable of executing the strategy.

5. Challenges

Even Excellent Organizations Have Problems

The purpose of HLS research is not to present Maersk as a flawless success story.

We are more interested in another question:

What does an organization do when serious problems emerge?

As Maersk expanded beyond shipping into integrated logistics, the scope of its safety responsibilities also expanded.

Not only ships.

Warehouses.
Trucks.
Terminals.
Partners and contractors.

In addition, the organization has had to address issues related to harassment, psychological safety, and working culture at sea.

This highlights an important distinction:

Stating values is not the same as realizing them in daily work.

Writing “we care about people” does not automatically make people safe.

Values only become real when they are translated into:

systems,
training,
manager behavior,
reporting channels,
dialogue,
and improvement processes.

6. Improvement

Do Not End with “Who Made the Mistake?”

When a problem occurs, some organizations begin by asking:

“Who was responsible?”

That question may be necessary in some situations, but if it becomes the dominant pattern, people learn to hide problems.

A learning organization asks a different question:

What conditions allowed this problem to happen?

This is where Genba Walk becomes important again.

Go to the workplace.
↓
Observe the facts.
↓
Listen to people.
↓
Ask questions.
↓
Understand causes.
↓
Change the system.
↓
Check the result.

In that sense:

Genba Walk is the starting point of Improvement.

7. HLS Action BridgeI

What Can Japanese Companies Learn from Maersk?

This is where the Maersk case connects directly to Japanese management practice.

Japanese companies already possess powerful ideas:

Genchi Genbutsu

The Three Actuals

Kaizen

QC activities

PDCA

products, quality, and processes.

But what if we applied the same logic to:

leadership?

Look at communication defects the way we look at product defects.

Look at wasted meetings the way we look at process waste.

Look at signs of psychological unsafety the way we look at abnormal equipment conditions.

Look for the causes that prevent people from performing at their best the way we investigate the root causes of quality problems.

This is where the Human Leadership System may offer a new bridge.

From Manufacturing TQC to Human TQC

Japan once built world-class manufacturing quality around a powerful principle:

Quality should not be inspected in at the end. It should be built into the process.

So we can ask a similar question:

Can better leadership also be built into everyday work?

Genba Walk may be one practical way to do exactly that.

8. HLS Visual

The Leadership Improvement Cycle Emerging from the Maersk Case

From an HLS perspective, the Maersk case can be organized into the following cycle.

👀 Observe
See what is actually happening.
↓
❓ Question
Ask why.
↓
💬 Dialogue
Talk with the people involved.
↓
✅ Decide
Determine what should change.
↓
▶ Action
Make the change.
↓
🔍 Reflection
Review the result.
↓
📘 Standardization
Embed the better way into the system.
↓
👀 Observe Again

Return to reality.

This is what we call the:

Leadership Improvement Cycle

And the practical behavior that activates the first step—Observe—is:

Genba Walk

9. HLS Insight

Leadership Begins with Seeing

When we look at more than 120 years of Maersk history, one hypothesis emerges.

A strong organization is not an organization without problems.

It may be an organization that can:

make problems visible.

And once a problem becomes visible:

not hide it,
not simply blame someone,
but discuss it,
learn from it,
and improve the system.

That is why the starting point of the Human Leadership System is not a complicated management theory.

It is much simpler.

See properly before you think.

See the workplace.
See the people.
See the work.
See the facts.
See the difference between your assumptions and reality.

From there comes:

Question

then

Dialogue

then

Learning

then

Improvement.

One Takeaway

Better Leadership begins with seeing reality.

So the practical cycle becomes:

Genba Walk
↓
Observe
↓
Question
↓
Dialogue
↓
Learn
↓
Improve

Embedding this cycle into everyday leadership may be one of the most important lessons we can draw from A.P. Moller – Maersk.

Human Leadership System Research Series

At SmartWorks, we do not study world-class organizations simply to celebrate their success.

We examine publicly available information and ask:

What is working?

What problems have emerged?

What did people learn?

What did the organization improve?

By observing and comparing organizations across countries and industries, we aim to discover common principles and develop them into the:

Human Leadership System

Observe. Compare. Discover.