Citibank had been my school of leadership. I’ve noticed since that leaders learn to lead between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. It’s a critical period, the time when you need a good model of leadership if you’re to become a leader yourself. The model sticks in the mind and helps you create your own style of working and also your own expectations of what others can offer. If leaders are bad, lazy, or dishonest, they will pass on the wrong model of leadership to the next generation, who will turn out suspicious, cynical, or downright incompetent. They may become people who are always on the lookout for conspiracies or gratuitously engage in corrosive office politics. If a crooked leader deceives his subordinates, the iron will enter their soul. They will find it difficult to recover or to believe in any leader ever again. So good role models are a matter of life and death for every enterprise. Indeed, I believe that in the worst case a company can die if the model of leadership fails.
Citibank didn’t supply a unique model of leadership, but it offered an excellent example of corporate culture. The bank was international and had several sets of values – to the point where some found it chaotic. But it had a large measure of that dynamism that I both valued and had lacked, as well as a strong sense of shared purpose. Its top management were marketers for the bank, who promoted their products and met with clients. Not even Walter Wriston could close the door to his office to enjoy an exalted solitude. The American culture demanded that everyone throw themselves into the job in order to achieve the bank’s goals.
I learned this way of thinking at Citibank and took it with me to Nokia. I compelled myself and my senior team to travel the world, meeting customers, learning new things, and selling our products. Perhaps I would have understood all this without Citibank, but I wouldn’t have seen how a business culture affects the way one works. Of course Citibank made mistakes, and I tried to learn from those as well.
I wasn’t an easy subordinate for anyone. When John Quitter came from London to visit the Helsinki office I arranged a private breakfast with him. I tapped on the table with my fingers, as I sometimes do, and told him I wasn’t happy with the way my career was developing. I lacked opportunities to get ahead. Liisa, who was working at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, had been offered an international job in Geneva, but Citibank had nothing to offer me there. It was a disappointment for both of us.
John Quitter listened to my outpourings sympathetically but didn’t say much in response, because he surely understood that I wouldn’t be at Citibank for much longer. I often used to talk things through with him later, after I had left Citibank. I knew that if I stayed there I would be offered the opportunity to gain experience in a larger market – perhaps in another Nordic country, the United States, or Latin America. But in Citibank’s structure in Helsinki I was at the third level down. Even if I had gone abroad and returned to Finland, the best I could hope for was to become second-in-command. That wasn’t enough for me. I knew my worth and I was impatient to get on. I was already over thirty and had no time to squander.
And there were other things on offer. The powerful chairman of one of Finland’s biggest banks and his deputy responsible for international affairs invited me to their bank’s head office. In their ceremonious way they announced they had chosen me to lead their daughter bank in Singapore. We discussed the question and I promised to consider the offer. A couple of weeks later I told them I didn’t wish to pursue it. One of them told me later that my response had caused great consternation: in the Finland of the early 1980s one didn’t lightly refuse such offers.
I received another offer, too. This came from EVA, a think tank established to put the case for the market economy and to counter the simple-minded leftism I mentioned earlier. EVA was politically influential, undertook research, and worked to make public opinion more favorable to business. At that time the head of EVA was Max Jakobson, a former senior ambassador and a foreign policy heavyweight – he came close to becoming the secretary-general of the United Nations, but Kurt Waldheim got the job instead. We had a couple of discussions about a possible move to EVA, which led to a job offer, but again I didn’t take it.
Looking back, that was fortunate for me and indeed for EVA, too: I was just about to move into the “right” line of business. That’s where my future lay, though I have never ceased to follow politics or try to influence developments in society; it’s just that I’ve done so in my role as a business leader. My path did eventually lead me to EVA: since 2005 I have been chairman of its board.
By my own reckoning I had achieved a great deal at Citibank. The corporate finance portfolio had grown. More and more major Finnish firms came to us. We were trusted; my little team understood the customers. I had learned important things about myself: the world of business really was the place for me.
Though I wasn’t entirely happy at Citibank, I had nevertheless made the right decision in London. I still had that yellowing piece of paper, which guaranteed the chance to return to an academic career and to complete my doctoral dissertation. I buried it deeper in my archives.
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.