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.
CITIBANK WAS MY UNIVERSITY as far as business life was concerned, and also my first proper place of work. It was a demanding environment for a young economist. I had researched the bank’s history. It had been founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York with an initial capital of $2 million. By 1894 it was the biggest bank in the United States, and by the turn of the century it had started to expand internationally. It operated in Asia, Europe, and India, and its branches stretched from Shanghai to Manila.
Citibank undertook foreign currency transactions earlier and more widely than any other bank in the world. In the year of the Great Crash, 1929, Citibank became the world’s largest commercial bank. By World War II it had one hundred offices in twenty-three countries. Citibank was a formidable international financial institution; perhaps that was what interested me most. I knew I could learn from Citibank everything there was to learn about international banking. It was also a prototypical global enterprise, with structures designed for effective international operations. Perhaps only IBM, which also began international operations much earlier than other companies, could compete with it in terms of effectiveness. In fact IBM had been the first company to design its organizational structure rather than let it grow organically. Its ideas were later widely copied.
When I joined the ranks of Citibank it was led by the legendary Walter B Wriston. He ran the bank for seventeen years, first as chief executive, from 1967 to 1970, and then as chairman of the board from 1970 to 1984. Wriston reinvigorated banking. His powerful and far-reaching vision encompassed internationalism and a strong belief in new technology and new services for customers. Some regarded him as too radical; for example, he foresaw the use of automated teller machines and everyday electronic transactions when these ideas must have seemed to belong to the world of science fiction. Back in the 1970s not everyone saw how prescient Wriston’s vision was.
I would never have been invited to join Citibank if it hadn’t been strongly committed to international expansion – the bank was looking to establish itself in Finland. Until then its London office had taken care of all its Nordic business. Now it was headhunting promising young professionals. There was just one condition: Citibank had promised not to poach people from the big Finnish commercial banks, which didn’t want the American giant to pay excessive salaries to young bankers. Citibank politely kept this promise.
I don’t know exactly why Citibank approached me. I suppose someone at the Finnish Embassy