From Hygge to Hyderabad: Katja Larsen’s Playbook for People‑Centric GCCs

Katja Larsen’s mornings don’t begin in a war room or on a runway. They start with motion and ritual: an hour’s walk with her husband in Hyderabad, South Indian filter coffee, hot water with lime, and, when she can, time with horses. It’s an ordinary routine for a career that’s been anything but: Denmark to Shanghai to Delhi to Hyderabad, with stops at Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, a Danish government IT agency, a China posting that required fluent Mandarin, an Asia-Pacific role at Haworth, a pandemic-era leap into entrepreneurship, and now a client-partner seat at Anser building global capability centers with European rigor and Indian velocity.

Why this conversation matters (the nut graf)

In this episode of Fika Friday at the Office, Ram Puranam and Katja trace a geography of work across cultures and decades: what makes Scandinavian “hygge” feel at home in India, why coffee corners beat conference rooms for building trust, how data and behavioral signals are quietly reshaping offices, and where AI belongs when the brief is still profoundly human. If you build workplaces, lead expansion, or translate global standards into local truth, Katja’s map is a practical one.

From code to cities to people

Katja trained as a software engineer with a side of business—a Danish blend that made data feel native. Early work at Cisco and Johnson & Johnson thrust her into big data before it was a buzzword, culminating in a presentation to European senior leadership. The lesson landed early: curiosity scales, status anxiety does not.

That curiosity carried into Denmark’s Agency of Governmental IT, where she worked on environmental planning datasets—evidence that public infrastructure, like enterprise systems, lives and dies by how well information flows. Then the aperture widened.

China, in Mandarin

Katja and her husband decamped to Shanghai. She joined the Danish Central Region Office helping companies like Arla and LEGO navigate market entry—not with backdoor favors, but with literacy in government and culture. She learned Mandarin in three years, built rapport with city officials, and then made a pivot that would define her next decade: into Haworth, serving Fortune 500s across Asia-Pacific on workspace strategy.

Why workspace? Because it is where people meet intention. Furniture and finishes matter, but only in service of whether people can think, collaborate, and breathe. In China, her focus on talent, data, green buildings, and wellness reframed “sustainability” from material spec to human health: carpets, paints, air, and decisions you can feel in your lungs.

India, on purpose

India had already hooked her on first arrival in Delhi: the smells, color, hospitality. Post‑COVID, she founded Silver Spoon Consultancy to help Scandinavian companies enter India with eyes open on ESG, culture, and operating norms. The throughline remained the same: make responsibility practical.

Anser and the GCC wave

Today, Katja is Director, Client Partner at Anser, guiding global entrants as they build GCCs in India. Her current work with Deutsche Börse loops back to her data roots: fintech complexity, regulated stakes, and the need for clarity at scale. What stands out about Anser, she says, is a flat-ish structure with entrepreneurial willpower and direct access to decision‑makers when speed is the strategy.

The macro shift is unmistakable: where headquarters once fixated on China, post‑pandemic geopolitics and talent realities have moved India to the center. Scale, skill, and hyper‑growth converge here. The trick is translation, not transplantation.

Coffee corners, bathrooms, and where culture actually happens

Ask Katja about community, and she’ll point you to the coffee corner—Hyderabad’s version of a Scandinavian kitchen table. Gossip is a feature, not a bug. Relationships are built over cups, not tickets. Festivals become primers on India’s internal diversity. The sari tutorials happen in the bathroom, because some conversations need privacy and pins.

This is the same energy behind “Atithi Devo Bhava”, the guest is akin to god, and the Danish idea of hygge: safety, warmth, and presence. Candles in Copenhagen, diyas in Delhi. Her memory of coming home to a kitchen lit by her late father’s fire and candles is less a Danish postcard than a blueprint for belonging.

What changed at the office (and what didn’t)

• People first, now with proof. Offices are finally instrumented for behavior, not just bookings. Data can reveal friction, flow, and bad patterns before they calcify.
• AI is arriving in layers. Manufacturing, risk, service, space planning—use cases are multiplying. The litmus test is not novelty but net‑friction: fewer clicks, clearer choices, better days.
• Human variance is the point. Intelligence is plural, mathematical, musical, interpersonal, and culture is context. One size still does not fit continents.

Where AI fits (and where it shouldn’t)

Katja is bullish on AI for the boring and the brittle: automating clerical loops, spotting patterns across messy datasets, surfacing risk before it bites. She is equally clear‑eyed about its limits. AI does not feel. It will not produce hygge. The mandate is AI‑for‑good: ethical applications that amplify human work rather than replace the reasons we gather.

The playbook for crossing cultures

• Don’t flatten difference. India is not “one” market, any more than Europe is. Ten kilometers can change the answer.
• Translate, then design. Importing equality frameworks or office rituals wholesale rarely works. Start with local truth and build up.
• Make wellness tangible. Air, materials, acoustics, light. People notice what they breathe and hear long before they read a policy.
• Protect the informal. Coffee corners, festival briefings, and yes, bathroom sari pins. Culture scales in the small places.

The last word

From a dataset in Brussels to a coffee corner in Hyderabad, Katja’s arc argues for a simple posture: be rigorous with information and generous with people. The future of work will have better sensors and smarter models. The best offices will still feel like someone lit the candles before you arrived.