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Lawson Idols Debut “Simply Better” Song at CUE

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18 March: The Lawson Idol finalists debuted a new song titled “Simply Better” at the employee rehearsal Sunday night (March 16) at CUE 08 in Las Vegas. The song was written by two Lawson employees, Ulf Milberg (music) and Odella Schattin (lyrics).

Lawson Idol Benilda Cipcon (Manila), and finalist Anne Hartman (St. Paul) sang the song, with accompaniment by Idol finalist Sylvain Laisné (France), Mike Salovich, senior systems software engineer from St. Paul, and Arman Villamor, software engineer from Manila.

The song was Odella’s brainchild. “There is something magical that happens when people are singing together. Singing is a unifying force,” she said.

Odella is employee communications manager for Product Development and is currently on assignment in St. Paul. Ulf is a senior support engineer in Product Support in Linköping, Sweden, specializing in solving platform technical problems. But although both Odella and Ulf started working for Intentia/Lawson in Sweden in 1999, to this day, lyricist and composer have never met.

Crossing borders
Odella’s original idea was to get a group of “Lawsonians” from different parts of Product Development (St. Paul, Scandinavia and Manila) together to write and perform a song and submit it to the Lawson Idol competition. “That didn’t happen,” Odella said, “but the idea of an original song that we could make our own, without having to worry about royalties and copyrights, stuck with me.

“I wanted to do something extra, something special for the employee event at CUE,” she said.

Both Terry Blake, global director of communications, and Travis White, senior vice president for marketing, were open to the idea of a song, “naturally with a ‘wait and see’ approach as to whether it would be good enough to be performed at CUE (or anywhere else for that matter),” Odella said.

She started looking around the Swedish organization for a musician/composer who might be interested in the project. Why Sweden? Because part of her concept was for the project to be collaboration across borders, and she had spent nine years at the Stockholm office and knew a lot of people there.

Via a flurry of e-mails, Odella eventually connected with Björn Thornell, senior technology system analyst with Product Development in Stockholm. Although he had never written a song, Björn was enthusiastic to try. A few days later, Ulf Milberg, senior support engineer in Linköping, joined the effort. Ulf and Björn collaborated on the music, and, at the same time, Ulf also began working on his own melody.

“I decided to make a lighter type of song,” Ulf said. “One morning, I woke up with an idea in my head and immediately hummed it into my cell phone recorder. And that recorded humming was the embryo of the song. ”

The two tunes were quite different from each other and, as things progressed, they all agreed Ulf’s tune was more upbeat and easier to sing, so they focused on it.

Not a simple process
Then came the words. “I kept being told it would be easier for the composers if they had some lyrics, so I wrote some,” Odella said.

But writing the lyrics to a simple song isn’t a simple process. “How do you strike a balance between creating something meaningful within the context of our company but that also can apply to other situations?” Odella pondered. “How do you speak to a specific Lawson audience (customers, colleagues, partners, shareholders) and to people in general, all at the same time? Is it possible for someone who’s never heard of Lawson to find something in this song, too?”

“As I was writing the lyrics, I tried to take a dual perspective – the passion for problem-solving that unites us and helping customers be their best – and still not go over the top with too much ‘religion,’ ” Odella said.

Ulf, meanwhile, is known on his team as a songwriter. “I like working at Lawson,” he said, “and I like music to be my hobby and spending my free time with music.”

His boss, Fredrik Sunnermalm, got him into the project. “He knew I had written songs before, like the song for the local ice hockey team (one of Sweden’s top teams), so I guess that’s why he suggested to Odella to contact me,” Ulf said.

“I spent every night at home working on it,” he said. He recorded the song on his home computer. And he asked a friend to do the vocal track.

“I tried to make as good a demo as possible so that the song would be accepted,” he said.

Getting ready for prime time
Terry Blake approved the song. A professional recording was made in Minnesota. Then they had to get the idols involved. Each was sent the recording and lyrics so they could learn the song. Then they rehearsed via telephone – with Benilda in Manila, Sylvain in France, Ulf in Linköping, and Ann and Odella in St. Paul.

“It’s been a real international collaboration,” Ulf said. “I am amazed how things like this can happen. It was so fun to work together like this. It has been amazing. The song is about working together in harmony, and that’s what we did to write and perform it.”

“What I love about Ulf’s tune is that it makes me want to get up and dance,” Odella said. “It was both easy and fun to collaborate with him. He put up with my limited musical knowledge with both patience and humor. We faced many of the same challenges on this project that a lot of us face in our daily work – time zone differences, communication limitations.”

A song to share
Odella said she hopes people will want to use the song in many Lawson contexts all over the world. The professional recordings and sheet music are available for free use.

“I hope employees will get swept away by the groove and just want to use the song again and again,” she said. “Doing things together is simply smarter, simply better.”

Click here to view a video of Ulf Milberg talking about the song.

Check out these attachments:
• Professional recording of “Simply Better” – MP3 format
• Sheet music in A
• Sheet music in E

Here are the "Simply Better" lyrics

Attachment header			Size		Date
"Simply Better" professional recording MP3	:	:	4143 kb	:	Mar 17, 2008
"Simply Better" in E sheet music	:	:	55 kb	:	Mar 14, 2008
"Simply Better" in A sheet music	:	:	205 kb	:	Mar 14, 2008

Document Version:
Movex Version:
Publishing Date:	Mar 18, 2008
Valid to Date:	Mar 18, 2009
Document URL	Com_CD4A34
Document Owner:	Marta Cleaveland
Document Type:	Information