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CHAPTER 17

I Move to Nokia

DEPENDING ON YOUR WORLD VIEW you may see life as a matter of chance or of destiny, or you may even detect the hand of God. My view is that everything affects everything else, although I also believe that people can help shape their own destiny. It was purely by chance that I became a businessman, a banker, and an executive at Citibank. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d followed my original plans.

In the autumn of 1984 I intended to spend one more year at Citibank. I wanted to leave the bank with the title of vice president, which would require further arduous training and the achievement of set objectives. I would then leave Citibank and find something else to do. I assumed that would be something to do with corporate finance. No power in the universe could have interested me even then in any opening at a Finnish bank. I could see all too easily that life for the big Finnish banks would soon become rather more problematic.

In September 1984 my phone rang. At the end of the line – it must have been a landline – was the personal assistant to the CEO of Nokia, Kari Kairamo. She had rung to invite me to meet him and his colleague, Simo Vuorilehto, president of Nokia.

A few days later I sat in a private dining room in a Helsinki restaurant with Nokia’s two top men. They were well-known figures in Finnish industry, though I didn’t know either personally, and both were about twenty years older than me. By the time our chat was over Kari Kairamo was clearly fretting that we’d failed to meet before. Vuorilehto said scarcely a word, while Kairamo talked non-stop. He was a wonderful salesman, and now he was selling me a job at Nokia. He said he’d heard a lot of good things about me. Nokia wanted to hire some promising younger people, to bring new blood and new ideas into the company. Later on we would see just how the company actually made use of those people.

Kari Kairamo was every inch the charismatic leader. His gaze was piercing, but he barely seemed to have the patience to stay in one place. He wore spectacles with large frames, and his hair was receding from his temples, though it had not yet gone gray. He liked to dress tastefully and stylishly, but in a hurry he forgot to tuck his shirt in. He ran Nokia in his shirtsleeves, and he detested all other formalities as well. Kairamo had no need to emphasize his own position: he came from a famous family of Finnish industrialists, which guaranteed a certain degree of self-assurance.

I was interested in his offer, because Citibank’s Helsinki office had nothing more to teach me. Until I received Nokia’s offer the alternatives facing me were either to go abroad or perhaps to develop investment banking services in Finland. The Finnish capital markets were just opening up. The services offered by banks were changing rapidly, and individual wealth was growing too. But then I would be doing what I had already done for years.

I was ambitious and wanted to go somewhere where I could achieve more. Nokia was just such an enterprise. Although it was a mixed collection of bits of different industries – a conglomerate – it was a Finnish company stepping on to the international stage. Kari Kairamo ran the business briskly.

There was much that needed updating at Nokia, but that would give me the chance to make changes there.

Of course I knew Nokia as a customer. I had studied the company, I had sold it financial services, and I had had frequent discussions with its finance people. I knew its strengths and weaknesses. One friend recalls me banging on about how Nokia could never hope to thrive while it had so many different divisions in such varied fields as mobile telephones and toilet paper. I knew that Nokia had to decide what it wanted to focus on. But that insight was essentially a banker’s theoretical musing – I really didn’t know what went on inside the company or what its top management thought.

In the early 1980s Nokia had grown to become Finland’s most important electronics company. It made televisions, telephone exchanges, mobile phones, and computers. I instinctively thought that its future should lie somewhere other than in making paper, rubber boots, or cables. I genuinely thought that Finns too could conquer the world with new products. And for my own part, which would not initially be a large role, I was ready to join this great adventure. I did not yet see the risks Nokia would later encounter. Nor did I see that Kari Kairamo himself would become a risk to the company. On the contrary: Kairamo was the most dynamic figure in Finnish business life. His company was the product of his international vision. He tried to fend off the power-hungry Finnish commercial banks. I agreed with him on practically every major issue. And he was regarded as an exceptionally inspiring leader, an assessment I found it easy to agree with after our first meeting.

The more I thought about it, the more attractive a move to Nokia seemed. I signed the contract between Christmas and the New Year. Before that I had told my boss at Citibank about it. I also rang John Quitter in London. John listened calmly, and then he politely but determinedly tried to persuade me to change my mind. He didn’t have much to offer, however. I didn’t want my future to be up for auction. John was sorry, but he wished me good luck. I promised to keep in touch.

My move from Citibank to Nokia made Nokia my life’s work. That move was partly a matter of chance and partly a planned operation. Nokia provided the chance element by getting in touch with me. It might just as easily have been a forestry company, a metals firm, or another conglomerate. But it was Nokia, where I was known because I had handled their account at Citibank. The fact that my friend Pentti Kouri sat on the boards of both Citibank and Nokia might also have had something to do with it, but I don’t really know.

Early in February 1985 I started at Nokia, on a journey that would last twenty-five years.