Название: Against All Odds
Автор: Jorma Ollila
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781938548710
isbn:
My compatriots were scarcely happy with my appointment. I had been a student politician, and after that I had worked in an American bank. These were not plus points. Student politicians were basically unsound, and it would have been more patriotic to have worked in a Finnish bank. Many people in Finland had no idea who I was. My background was unusual for a chief executive: Finns might well ask what this forty-one-year-old engineer and economist knew about factories or the lives of the people who worked in them. It was a good question: in their position I’d have asked it too. I came across as an impatient, smartly dressed banker with a stubborn look and an excellent memory for figures. I had so much self-confidence that I had no idea how many ways there were for me to fail as Nokia’s CEO.
I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get down to work. Lots of work. I could do it and I would enjoy it, but on its own it was not enough. I also had to find something that would enable both Nokia and me to survive. I had to find good people who would believe in the company. I had to breathe new life into the company, so that people would believe in themselves. Otherwise we would be lost in that sea where lie so many shipwrecked companies whose names no one remembers.
I and a few other managers of my age at Nokia had a dream. As a dream it was perhaps a little mundane, of the sort one can actually put into effect. We looked around us and saw that Finland and the Finnish economy were close to collapse. We looked at Nokia and we noticed that the company had not been led properly. Nevertheless we knew that Nokia was a fine company. We knew that this company, which had been given to us to lead, could clearly do better than before. We wanted to demonstrate that to the whole world.
This is an account of our time at Nokia during its transformation from an old-fashioned Finnish conglomerate to a global enterprise. It’s also the story of how by chance I became CEO of Nokia, though I should have been a physicist or an economist. It’s an account of our team, the people of Nokia, who set out to follow an everyday dream. It’s a story of exceptional success, but at the same time of the poor judgment we sometimes showed, and the bad decisions and mistakes that we made.
MY JOURNEY BEGAN in southern Ostrobothnia – a rural province on the west side of Finland – in the middle of August 1950. The time and the place are significant. I was an Ostrobothnian on both my mother’s and my father’s side. My roots went deep into that flat landscape, home for centuries to stubborn farmers, dogged tradesmen, and fanatical preachers.
At the beginning of the 1950s Finland had yet to recover from the war years. We had not been occupied; the country had not been laid waste; and, above all, we had kept our independence. But things were not easy, either. Finland had lost a tenth of its territory; and painful memories of war were still fresh. We had to pay huge war reparations to the Soviet Union. The country was anything but rich, and indeed famine was still a living memory. Industry was developing rapidly, but a large proportion of the population still lived by agriculture and forestry. No one wanted to hang on to the past, rather everyone was looking ahead. There was no room for freeloaders; everyone had do their own share and preferably more. The country’s self-esteem still seemed rather shaky. No one could be confident about the future, but every effort went into building it. The war had ended just a short time before, and it was uncertain whether peace would last. Our political leaders were trying to make Finland as secure as possible in a world that was anything but secure.
The whole country was a building site: new houses, flats, little shops, and workshops. Everyone was in a hurry to move forward after the difficult war years and the tedious, lifeless period that came after. The birth rate was high. Poverty coexisted with faith in the future. Everyone was in a tremendous rush so that children were just left to get on with things. There was no television, no computers, no mobile phones, and our days were filled with school, sport, housework, and homework. Our world was small, the size of a village. Everyone knew their place, and life felt secure.
The Ostrobothnian landscape was one of large fields and meadows dotted with barns and divided by riverbanks, as it remains today. In the winter snow would cover the fields, where clumps of trees would stand like black islands. In spring, when the snow melted, the rivers would swell and flood the fields and roads. There wasn’t much forest by Finnish standards, but the fields and cows produced enough for expanding families to feed themselves. If you couldn’t survive from your smallholding, you had to try something else. For that reason there were many small businesses in Ostrobothnia: in Kurikka where we lived there were a sawmill, a textile works, metalworks, dairies, and various other factories. Around 10,000 people lived in this typical small town, whose center consisted of a church, schools, sports fields, banks, shops, and a factory with a tall chimney. On the short cold winter days grey smoke would rise from this chimney and freeze into little clouds of red against the brilliant sky.
I was born into a family that was not poor, but not rich either. My grandfather Kaarlo (Kalle) Ollila had set up an electrical goods business in Kurikka. His great-grandfather had bought a farm called Hiiripelto – “Mousefield” – in the village of Vähäkyrö. This became the Ollila farmstead. My grandfather’s father did not stay to take over the farm, but moved to Copper Cliff, Canada. Two of his three sons died in infancy. The only survivor was my grandfather, who came back to Finland and attended the commercial school in Raahe, a port on the northern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. He was known as a man who could do complex calculations in his head.
My grandfather was a tall, wiry, headstrong man, who didn’t do small talk. He was widowed young and did not marry again. This left its mark on his life. Through a child’s eyes granddad seemed a stern and somewhat mysterious man. Kalle fought in three wars: the Civil War, the Winter War, and the Continuation War. He took part in the siege of Tampere in 1918, fighting on the White side. This was the worst battle of the Civil War, and at that time the biggest to have taken place in the Nordic region. But to this day I can’t find out anything more about my grandfather’s role in these wars. The siege of Tampere was an especially closely guarded secret in our family, and I only learned of it while going through my late father’s papers. At my grandfather’s funeral we – his grandsons – went through his desk drawers, and in one of them we found a loaded pistol. We had no idea why Kalle Ollila had retained his weapon; but at the very least it posthumously augmented his aura of a man apart.
My father, Oiva Ollila, returned from the war, completed his studies, and graduated in engineering from technical college. He met my mother in Helsinki. Her name was Saima Elisabeth Kallio – she was always called Liisa – and she had studied agriculture and forestry at Helsinki University. They lost no time in starting a family. My mother broke off her studies and returned to Ostrobothnia with my father.
My mother was enchanting, beautiful, and clever. She had large, soft, inquiring eyes, a high forehead, and dark wavy hair. Her bright smile lit up the whole world, though now and then she would gaze yearningly into the distance. She didn’t look Finnish: she seemed to have a drop of Italian blood and a dash of Mediterranean warmth. I was the eldest and a boy, so I had no need to compete for my mother’s favor: I was always СКАЧАТЬ