Читать книгу Against All Odds - Jorma Ollila - Страница 25
ОглавлениеIN AUGUST 1978 I REACHED THE AGE OF TWENTY-EIGHT. I had in my hand a letter from the London School of Economics practically guaranteeing me the Ph.D. in economics that would launch me on an international academic career. At just that moment fate or chance intervened and changed my life.
At a lunch given by the Finnish-British Trade Guild I met some executives from Citibank, which was expanding rapidly throughout Europe, setting up new offices as it went. Of course I knew Citibank’s operations in London, and I knew that it was a well-run global institution. At the LSE I had familiarized myself with the growth of international capital markets. I knew that the liberalization of the capital markets would have a greater global impact than just about any other conceivable peaceful event.
International banks had a major role in this. Citibank was doing in practice what I had studied in theory.
Citibank offered me a job. I would work first in London, where I would study the workings of the international money markets while also learning how the bank operated. After that I would move to Helsinki, to Citibank’s new office there. Citibank offered a salary, real work, and the opportunity to learn new things in an international environment. The bank was recruiting young people from good universities in various countries. I had been picked for the team just as the whistle was blowing for the first match in a new tournament. Citibank reckoned that we young professionals would repay its investment within ten years, though an active system of training brought this down to five or six years. So from the bank’s point of view the training system was a profitable investment in the future and in growth in new markets. It also brought Citibank credibility in countries where it was just opening up, such as Finland. Without local expertise the American banking giant could scarcely have competed with the established national banks.
The offer from Citibank compelled me to make the most difficult decision of my life. Many of my contemporaries had already found their niche. They had studied effectively, graduated, and could provide for their families and pay off their mortgages. I wasn’t a bohemian – far from it – but I had nevertheless contrived to live my twenty-eight years without serious consideration of what profession I should follow. When I went to London I only knew it would be something in the academic line. It was the same dream I had taken to Atlantic College ten years earlier. That was perhaps part of my nature.
According to one popular analysis people can be divided into four groups: achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. The names are more or less self-explanatory. Socializers, for example, enjoy doing things together. For them the company is more important than the results; the common good and a feeling of well-being are the most important things. With all due respect one might say that many people from the Mediterranean region belong to this type. I am one of the achievers. Achievers enjoy getting things done. We always want to take on a new project, see it through to its conclusion, and move on to the next. We get enjoyment from working, doing, and studying. Our relationships with other people come through our work. We gather around us the sorts of people we can work with toward common goals. Achievers are always aiming toward something bigger, something better, toward the next project. We relish every success, but our minds are already focusing on something else.
In London back in 1978 I didn’t analyze myself in this way. It was only later that I discovered these categories, and Liisa agreed that I was definitely one of the achievers. Of course we all have elements of each personality type; nothing is purely black and white. And fortunately people can take on new qualities.
Although I was only twenty-eight I had already experienced a lot of power games. I had led a student organization, I had negotiated with the Russians, I had become familiar with party politics. I had not, however, enjoyed it; and I was not sociable enough to go out and win votes from strangers. Nor did power structures or power itself interest me enough for me to crave a seat in parliament or a job in the foreign ministry. I simply wanted to achieve things – I wanted good things to happen. I was always delighted when the National Union of Students won better financial terms or living conditions for its members. If I could say to myself that I had done things right, that was enough for me.
An achiever must always have something to do. Achievers are usually curious about things, because new knowledge makes new achievements possible. An achiever doesn’t need too much social life or external recognition – the achievement is its own reward. However, the achiever will be deeply hurt if the value of his or her achievement isn’t recognized or if it’s disparaged. Achievers keep the promises they make to others, but also the ones they make to themselves. And it’s the ones they make to themselves that are the most difficult. In 1978 I had promised myself that I would complete my final dissertation at the University of Technology and then go on to do my doctorate at the LSE. The promise to the British Council weighed on me a little, but not as much as the promise to myself.
Thinking about it now, in my sixties, I think that there may also have been a subconscious debt to my mother, who had never had as much education as she would have liked. I think I wanted to show her that I could become a doctor of economics.
Before the offer from Citibank I had had no experience of business life. I had seen my father’s endless and onerous work in the factory, which didn’t hold much appeal for me. I had learned how, in theory, businesses should operate in an economy. I was a firm believer in the capitalist system, though I recognized its weaknesses. Finland was dominated by the big banks, the big forestry companies, and a few firms in the metal industry. The power of these enterprises was exerted in a few private dining rooms where the leaders of the banks and insurance companies made decisions on the future of industry – decisions that industrialists should have made.
The Bank of Finland regulated the capital markets, and companies had to apply to it for foreign exchange credit and other financing. The Finnish economy was a club, run by a handful of major companies and closed to new members. But Finland lived by exporting: there was the profitable Soviet trade and the traditional exports of paper, wood products, and machinery to the West. Some Finnish firms had opened up new areas: a company named Nokia had decided at the beginning of the 1970s to start making telephone exchanges, and the firm had also sold some big computers to the banks. I hadn’t known anything about this in London.
My understanding of the way companies actually worked, both in general and in Finland, was vague. I had never set up my own company. I had neither bought nor sold. I had never marketed anything and neither had I developed new commercial products. But, in principle, I did have some sort of idea of how businesses operated. I doubted, with good reason, whether I would get along at all in the business world. Though I had learned to make presentations, I was highly analytical and an expert by nature. I loved studying things, especially as part of a larger whole. I rather dreaded joining an organization that existed solely to make money for its shareholders – I wasn’t sure if I would find intelligent life there. I looked at the heavyweights among Finnish business leaders, and the question seemed all the more pressing: Did I want one day to be an authoritarian leader who made decisions after five glasses of cognac in some private dining room? Did I want to stop thinking and become a sleek merchant, whose discussions with party hacks from the Soviet Union went on week after week? To that question I certainly knew the answer.
Wasn’t there something a little too easy about business life? And wouldn’t I have to give up my theoretical musings if I chose “the practical life” in its place? What would I say to all my friends who were advancing in their academic careers? How would I explain all this to myself, if business life turned out just as I feared: mind-numbing, even mindless, profit-making spiced up with opportunistic power games?
The offer from Citibank compelled me to examine closely my dream of an academic career. Did I want to continue my research work on a small salary, when we already had our first child and more would surely follow? Could I endure waiting a decade for my first professorial appointment? And at heart was I really interested in an academic career? Wasn’t I rather a practical person who wanted to spend his whole time doing something useful? Was the lonely toil that was part of a scholar’s life really for me, when I had always enjoyed the bustle of working with others? Was my academic career a castle in the air, when in reality I wanted something different?
The questions tore me apart. And if I had known then how decisive the conclusion would be as far as my future was concerned, I would have surely deliberated even longer. As it was I considered my options throughout August. My nights were sleepless. I talked it through with Liisa, who doesn’t remember ever seeing me so torn by a difficult decision.
Never since have I made a decision that would have such a big impact on my life. On 20 August 1978, five days after my twenty-eighth birthday, and following another sleepless night, I made up my mind – I would accept the Citibank offer. In business life I would perhaps do better on account of all my studying. I would become part of a team and perhaps eventually its captain.
Only much later did I realize how big that decision really was for me. All major decisions demand sacrifices. In making this decision I sacrificed my dream, but I have never regretted that: the coming years showed my decision to have been right, but those August days in London were full only of uncertainty. That, too, is invariably an element of big decisions. You can’t plan your life, even if you want to. I’m an instinctive rationalist, but I must nevertheless concede that, without a chain of many random events, I would never have become a chief executive. I could have made a different choice in London, in which case I would now certainly be a professor of economics, perhaps in a world-class university. My life would have been different, at the very least.
Although I had to look at many fundamental factors, there was one practical point that made it easier for me to reach my decision: I still hadn’t done my military service, but now I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to join the army before my thirtieth birthday, which would interrupt the writing of my doctoral thesis. Citibank said they would let me take nearly a year’s leave of absence for my military service. The following day I told John Quitter, who was responsible for Citibank’s Scandinavian affairs, that I would start as a trainee in London just over a week later, at the beginning of September. And I put the LSE’s offer concerning my doctorate into a plastic folder and then into an envelope. I would keep it safe against the months and years ahead, in case I came to regret my choice. I had “academic life insurance” if business life disappointed all my expectations and made my nightmares come true. The LSE’s letter is still in safekeeping in my personal archive, but I haven’t needed to use it.
