The decision to join the ranks of Citibank changed the direction of my life. But the change also had a more immediate impact: Liisa and I at last had some money. Citibank paid a salary positively ducal compared to student loans. We quickly gave up our student flat in Akehurst Street and moved just half a mile or so to our very own house in Larpent Avenue, baronial in scale to match my new salary. There was plenty of space, and we could entertain. It was our home in London from 1978. We weren’t sure that we would find a place equally splendid when we returned to Finland.
I had nothing against a regular monthly income. I had received a small amount as head of the National Union of Students, and when I worked for the Centre Party I had been paid enough to get by. I wasn’t a big spender, but I naturally wanted to be sure that our little family would have enough. We started to take in London in great gulps – we met people, went to concerts, made long expeditions on foot. The change in circumstances was welcome. I didn’t really own anything, just a debt-laden apartment in Helsinki, and there were some student loans. I didn’t own any shares, and I knew nothing about investing because I had never had any money to invest. I hadn’t inherited any. When I went to Citibank I started to earn a proper salary. For the first time I felt that my income was in line with my abilities. To be properly rewarded for my efforts was a good feeling and one I have enjoyed ever since.
Shaping the future with one’s own hands and through one’s own labors was part of my inheritance: my father had built his life and his own house; his father had built his own business; and my mother’s father had cleared fields in order to grow food for a large family. My family background, stretching back for hundreds of years, was made up entirely of people who had labored long and hard.
I had many preconceptions about Citibank’s work. I had long wondered whether banking could possibly be intellectually stimulating. I also brooded on Citibank’s position in Finland. If the head of a Finnish commercial bank had been asked about Citibank, he probably would have said that working for it was a strange choice, possibly even an unpatriotic one. Foreign banks weren’t then allowed to disturb the peace of the big Finnish banks.
Only at the beginning of the 1980s did the barriers begin to crumble, when three foreign banks were given full permits to operate in Finland: the French Indosuez; Chase; and Citibank, which received its permit on 27 November 1981. Until then foreign banks had been allowed to practice in Finland only through representative offices that marketed their services. The actual transactions were carried out elsewhere, often in London.
Citibank was my business school. In London I concentrated on studying two things: the analysis of individual firms and how an international bank worked. Once again studying satisfied my ambition. With every atom of my being I soaked up international banking, accounting, analysis, and everything else I imagined I would need in my future work. As well as formal training I also learned how work was done in the bank. Everyone was at their desk by eight at the latest, and we went home at seven or eight in the evening. The office culture was very different from Finland’s. We sat in an open-plan office where we heard our colleagues’ telephone calls. That too was a new and educational experience.
In Finland the big banks were used to waiting for their customers to come to them, to humbly beg for loans for their projects. Bankers sat on company boards and took care that those companies applied to the right banks for their loans. The banks owned large chunks of industry, and all companies had to live with credit regulation. At Citibank we looked at business cold-bloodedly on the basis of company analysis. I learned the methods for analyzing individual elements of a company, its position relative to its competitors, and its future cash flow and overall prospects. When we concluded from our basic analysis that a project was sound, we started to consider what products we might sell the customer. In the Finnish market the idea of selling banking products to corporate customers was new. Finland’s big banks didn’t need to waste their time on marketing since their customers were already at their mercy.
Citibank made a salesperson of me. I didn’t find it easy at first. I was an analytical person, and through my education and experience I had set out to become the sort of expert who didn’t have to worry about customers. And my Finnish and Nordic nature didn’t give me a head start in taking on the role of a sleek salesman. But Citibank’s global organization was a good teacher. I learned how to approach customers and how to put together proposals that were hard to refuse. I learned, too, how customers should be taken care of at every stage. You must persuade customers that you really care and are ready to do pretty well anything for them. And I learned the subversive truth: businesses, even international banks, live or die by satisfying their customers. If I hadn’t learned about customer service at Citibank I could never have succeeded at Nokia, where I always regarded myself as the company’s most senior salesperson.
Citibank also became for me the model of a global organization. It had a matrix structure, which worked efficiently and well. A matrix organization is one where management takes place across both functions and business groups, and an individual has more than one reporting line. A matrix structure is seen as the natural and, indeed, only practical model for an international company operating in several areas.
I understood that a strong company must have a strong culture. Back then I had no idea that companies had cultures. But I saw in practice how a strong culture influenced the way Citibank looked after its business and its customers. This hadn’t happened overnight. What’s more, the bank’s culture and its leadership model were interlinked. The head office and the front line had to understand each other, and this required continuous effort. Excellent two-way communication was essential. Citibank wanted to be the front-runner in all forms of new technology and communication. So in 1982 I was already using an email system developed for internal use. I joined Nokia in 1985, but the company used email only from the end of that decade. Citibank developed its internal technical abilities while selling its customers a vision of making money electronic.
My Citibank training turned my own thinking upside down. Only later did I realize how widely what I had learned could be applied. I drew on this new knowledge both consciously and subliminally at Nokia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When I joined Citibank I was an economist, pure and simple. I knew nothing of balance sheets, for example. Everything I learned about how to analyze a company I learned from Citibank.
I also learned a great deal about how to manage people in large organizations. Earlier I had thought that organization meant a diagram made out of boxes joined to each other by thin lines. I thought that the leader’s job was to lead this “organization.” At Citibank I learned the revolutionary truth: the leader does not lead boxes or an organization, but people. A leader, even in a big organization, has to be interested in the people whose efforts create the results. Good leaders must know their people. A good leader must also be ready to promote some surprising people within the organization, without regard to the official boxes. At Citibank it was understood that the organization had to be clear but must allow flexibility, for which good internal communications and respect for people were essential.
My role model was John Quitter, a well-informed, civilized, able, and professional American banker. He travelled constantly and knew the Nordic region and its key people well. He was good with figures and was supremely good at asking trainees the sorts of questions that would help them refine their calculations. John was also very gifted socially: he could chat as easily with someone on the shop floor as with the chairman of the board. He was experienced, far-sighted, and cultured. Since then I have met countless captains of industry, and John could bear comparison with any of them, even though he never quite reached the top of the banking world. John became my exemplar, my coach, and my mentor, and I often sought his advice, even after I’d moved to Nokia.
That fertile year in London, from autumn 1978 to autumn 1979, passed quickly, even too quickly. I had made the biggest decision of my life, I had studied, learned a great deal, and become a businessman, or at least a banker. Liisa had completed her dissertation at Helsinki University and also graduated from the LSE. We had both done a great deal of work. Even our little