Читать книгу Against All Odds - Jorma Ollila - Страница 31
ОглавлениеMY FIRST OFFICE AT NOKIA was in a rather shabby office block opposite Helsinki railway station. I was a young, new, and enthusiastic Nokia man. My fifth-floor room looked out over the station square, one of the largest open spaces in central Helsinki. My first task was to find a desk and chair from somewhere. My arrival seemed to come as a surprise, as the arrival of new workmates often does. “Who on earth is this guy and what on earth are we going to do with him?” seems to be a common reaction.
There were some at Nokia who made it clear that there was no red carpet for me. I must have seemed very fresh and eager, full of myself and what I’d learned at Citibank. As a newcomer I had to show I was useful; only then would I be accepted. There were weaknesses in my CV. I came from a bank, and Nokia had no particular fondness for banks. One of Kari Kairamo’s main goals in life had been to win Nokia’s independence from the banks, which had been among the company’s major shareholders and had thrown their weight around on the board.
In the 1980s Finland was a country governed by banks, and Nokia had declared its own uprising against this system. At least I had not come from either of the main Finnish banks, which were two of Nokia’s main shareholders. They kept a close eye on each other at Nokia. The only decisions made were those where the two banks agreed, so decision-making was onerous, complicated, and full of suspicion. The men who ran Finland’s banks had little understanding of what it meant to run an international technology company, for they had grown up in a regulated market where they could be confident of their power. For them the customer was servant, not king.
Most major Finnish companies belonged to one of the groups of big banks and insurance companies. This was very different from the United Kingdom or United States, where different financial institutions weren’t so closely linked. Perhaps it was more like Japan, which has also effectively been owned and run by financial conglomerates. It’s important to know that these groups were held together by more than just ownership. The major Finnish firms were debtors, and the financial groups guided them on the handling of their debt. Directors of banks and insurance companies sat on company boards and often made decisions without the necessary expertise. At the end of the 1980s the two banks where power was concentrated fought a bloody battle between themselves.
The banks naturally got into difficulty, and the whole system changed in the 1990s. The historical irony is that one of the two main banks collapsed and was forced to merge with the other. The merging of the two giants would have been utterly unthinkable in the 1980s.
Nokia’s chairman, Kari Kairamo, loathed the Finnish banking system and the banks’ power over industry. He thought industrialists should run industry themselves. He gave public speeches demanding laws to restrict the banks’ rights of ownership. Kairamo was right. In the Anglo-Saxon world it was industry that made the world go round. The bank’s job is to provide the finance, not to wield power within the company. Nevertheless there were many at Nokia who thought Kairamo was gambling. The banks wielded so much power that some of Nokia’s board feared the empire might strike back.
Another shortcoming in my CV was an absence of shop-floor experience at Nokia. I hadn’t set foot in a factory since my summer job in Vaasa at the end of my first year as a student. I was an engineer, but I didn’t design telecommunications networks, mobile phones, or new types of cables. And I had been very active in the field of student politics, which was another black mark. In Finland student politics was often a launch pad for a political career, and that was where my new colleagues thought my ambitions lay. But I’ve never really spent too long worrying about what other people think of me. I believe in getting things done, in achievements and results. Beyond those, people can think what they like about me.
I had learned how to analyze a company. In my previous job I’d had to assess whether it was worth lending, say, 100 million dollars to some Finnish forestry company. Would the company be able to repay the loan? What was the company’s real profitability? Did the managers know their jobs? At Citibank, companies were not analyzed solely on the basis of the figures – the company’s management and culture were also factored in. Nokia seemed to employ lots of good people, but the company’s management was hidebound and old-fashioned.
The Nokia I joined in 1985 claimed to be an international company. That was certainly the reputation it enjoyed in Finland. It could boast that it operated in twenty-four locations around the world.
Kari Kairamo’s stance as an internationalist certainly attracted many young and able people to Nokia, because at least the company wanted to be international. Of those who would be my closest collaborators in the coming years, Sari Baldauf had joined the firm in 1983; Pekka Ala-Pietilä joined in 1984, the same year Matti Alahuhta returned to the company after several years away; Pertti Korhonen joined the company in 1986; and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was already there, having started as a lawyer back in 1980.
The company was still dependent on its trade with the Soviet Union, as were many other Finnish firms. It had been agreed within the European cartel that cable trade between Finland and the Soviet Union belonged to Nokia. This guaranteed Nokia a profitable relationship with the Soviet Union – as long as the country continued to exist.
Nokia didn’t lack global aspirations. Its wall map of the world map lots of little pins in all sorts of places. The company’s leaders had distinguished themselves by the competitive acquisition of large and small enterprises, but no one had ever assembled all the bits into a coherent whole. Some of them were insignificant sales firms – little more than corner shops – while others did sensible things.
My first task at Nokia was to bring some order into this chaos. I sat in my room and collected files that told me about Nokia’s international subsidiaries. I tried to work out what they really did and why, and how they fit into the bigger picture. Some of them were complete catastrophes – for example, Nokia had an IT company in England whose losses greatly exceeded its revenue. I asked to see the papers on which Nokia’s investment decision had been based; reading them was so sad it was funny.
Files and papers flooded my desk, and I tried to get rid of them as quickly and efficiently as possible. I didn’t really have anyone working for me, but I was at the center of power because I answered directly to the company CEO and the president. I was a staff officer whose job was to prepare the company’s international projects. I was also expected to consider how the company’s leadership structure should be developed. Developing the international side of Nokia’s operations was a further apprenticeship for me. In my discussions with Kari Kairamo and Simo Vuorilehto I had been promised a place at the company’s front line one day. This was important at Nokia – those who had managed an area of business and brought in money were regarded more highly than those who had stayed at headquarters. This ethos has prevailed at Nokia, and in many other companies, up until today. I lacked front line experience and passionately wished to gain it. I knew, too, that without it I wouldn’t get very far at Nokia.
