Against All Odds. Jorma Ollila

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      I also did some travelling. In the first Easter holidays I took the boat over to Ireland, from Fishguard to Rosslare. Ireland in those days was by no means the mainstream European country we know today. It wasn’t exactly a third-world country, but it didn’t feel like part of the first world, either. I took the train up the coast to Dublin and then hitchhiked to the little town of Strabane, which straddles the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. There I stayed for three days with the family of a boy I had met at a scout camp in Finland the previous year. They were a prosperous, middle-class family, but they were Catholics in Northern Ireland where Catholics were treated as second-class citizens. They spoke passionately of their desire to see a “Free Ireland.” I could sense from talking to them that something was not right in their lives. I was too polite or too tactful to probe them on the matter, though I knew nothing then of the ancient, almost tribal conflicts that divided Northern Ireland. About six months later the Troubles there ignited.

      At Atlantic College I learned to live and work with people from different cultures, which wasn’t common for young Finnish men in the 1960s. There were of course opportunities to go abroad as an exchange student, to Britain or the United States, for example. But this didn’t guarantee exposure to the richness of many cultures as Atlantic College did. Finland was a monocultural country in the 1960s, or at least that’s how it felt in Ostrobothnia. The generation of corporate executives before mine never learned what real multiculturalism is. On the other hand, for generations younger than mine multiculturalism is one of the necessary conditions for work. Without a multicultural attitude one cannot work in an international company. Atlantic College helped me understand what real multiculturalism is, and why it’s essential in a globalized world.

       CHAPTER 6

       Back to Finland

      EVERYTHING COMES TO AN END. My “escape” concluded in the spring of 1969. I graduated from Atlantic College with excellent marks in both the International Baccalaureate and in my A-levels, the British school-leaving exams. I returned to Finland, as did the other Finns. The Finnish Cultural Foundation, which had funded our studies, expected that of us. I suppose, though, that we would have all returned home anyway because a peculiar emotion had developed within us. It would perhaps be too solemn to call it patriotism, while homesickness sounds a little too frivolous. It was something between the two, for which there isn’t really a word in either Finnish or English. We had had to represent Finland, which was scarcely known at all in the rest of the world. Now we wanted to come back to our own country and continue our studies and work in Finland.

      When I came back to Finland I had to go to the university to sit entrance exams. I was applying for Helsinki University of Technology, which did not recognize the A-levels I had taken at Atlantic College, or indeed give me any credit for them. The university assumed that a student with an international background would sit its tests and so confirm that they would get through the course of study. A week after I’d finished my exams in Wales I once again found myself in the exam hall. It was tedious. Anyone who has ever taken entrance exams for university will know how important it is to prepare properly, and I have always believed in preparing myself thoroughly for everything I do. Now I was sitting exams I hadn’t had a single day to prepare for.

      I walked across the grass and along the gravel path to the main building of the university. I had to sit the exam in the big auditorium, along with hundreds of other applicants. Apart from the holidays from Atlantic College, it was my first contact in a long time with my Finnish contemporaries. They were hunched over their exam papers, their hair flopping over their ears. Their shirts had wide collars, and a mixture of nylon and tension was making them sweat. The scratching of pencils was the only sound in the room. The tests covered math and physics. Fortunately the grounding I’d received at Atlantic College was so thorough that I knew as soon as it was over that I’d done well. I felt at ease with the way I’d been able to respond to the questions and challenges.

      The Finland to which I’d returned had grown economically. Politically, Finland, like other countries, had moved leftwards at the end of the 1960s. The threat of socialism seemed real again, since support for the social democrats and communists was growing, especially among students. In Finland the left-wing student movement was turning into a repugnant form of communism, a species of Stalinism that blindly idealized the Soviet Union. In the early 1970s this strange phenomenon was influential – indeed almost hegemonic – in student organizations and cultural and political life.

      Many of my contemporaries were enthusiastic about left-wing or communist thought. Good relations with the Soviet Union were the bedrock of Finnish foreign policy. This meant maintaining good relationships between individuals, and so the closest friends of our strong neighbor also enjoyed the fruits of this policy. The Soviet Union took the lion’s share of Finland’s foreign trade. For this reason many companies and “capitalist” organizations became participants in Finland’s “official” foreign policy. At the same time, of course, Finnish businesses wanted Finland to be open to the west, where Finnish industry’s export markets had traditionally been, and where there was real money rather than funny non-convertible rubles. We had traditionally exported tar, butter, and paper and, in recent decades, increasing volumes of machinery and electronics.

      In the spring of 1969 I was a very different sort of boy from the one who had left for Atlantic College nearly two years before. I had certainly grown a little taller. I was gangly, long-haired, and fully familiar with the latest pop music from Britain and the States. In the spirit of the age I wore trendy jeans, and my English was fluent, though apart from Finnish and English I didn’t really know any other languages. I was still working to fill this gap when I was at Nokia. But the most important thing was that I had grown in self-confidence and self-esteem. I had gone abroad for two years on my first foreign trip. I had survived, indeed flourished, though from time to time I had missed Finland and my family.

      Now however I was back home where I spent the summer helping with the hay on my uncle’s farm. At the end of the sixties the region was prosperous and lively, although the farm was small and old-fashioned and relatives were the main source of power. Just a little while back at Atlantic College I’d been working with pen and slide-rule; now I was holding a pitchfork or a scythe. That summer was the last extended period I would spend in Ostrobothnia, though I didn’t know that as I slogged away in the fields. I felt neither sad nor nostalgic; rather I had a sense of excitement and expectation. When Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 were approaching the moon, and Armstrong took the first steps on its surface, his progress was continuously monitored from my uncle’s traditional little farm.

      Atlantic College had made me independent of my parents and cut me free from the place where I grew up. My world was open. My parents were no longer much in my thoughts and I certainly didn’t listen to them as I had when I was younger. The self-sufficient child had grown into an independent young man in a single bound. It had been stressful; but it had also been necessary.

      While many of my generation interested themselves in Soviet collective farms, the Communist Party, and Five-Year Plans, I had moved west to join the wider European and global conversation. At a key phase of intellectual development, my world view had diverged from many of my contemporaries. I had studied and also seen how the world worked, how capitalism worked. At the same time that many of my friends had cleansed their minds of independent thinking in favor of party propaganda, I had painfully learned to think for myself, to put together my own viewpoints, and to defend them against intelligent criticism. This experience built up my self-esteem, but it also made me an outsider in Finland, where activists in political parties seemed to be gaining the upper hand and taking ever-moreimportant positions at an ever-younger age.

      Leftism – the adoration of the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic – had assumed the nature of a group psychosis in Finland. The movement reached СКАЧАТЬ