About national competiveness....

There is an increasing debate and worry about how to keep the country competitive. Overall the discussions seem to be about flexibility of the workforce, flexibility in the level of salaries etc. aka employees should be willing to work more & cheaper. Pretty simple formula and makes sense - work is cheaper in other countries than in your own. M.O.T. ? Or is it ...

Even though I'm not really a "fan" of remembering my old army times, the learnings from that period are now starting to make ever greater sense. Somehow army (and in it's extreme war) highlights how with working, truly involved and trusting leadership one can make 1+1 be much more than 2 whereas at the same time even the best equipped troops can produce much less than 2 under bad leadership. History is just filled with examples to prove this.

In order to sustain competitivness shouldn't we concentrate in truly engaging people to bring out their natural flexibility (in terms of time but most importantly in terms of commitment) ? Shouldn't we become the number 1 country in terms of leadership and thus individual commitment and trust to quarantee that working teams would truly sustain competitive?

Fear factor part 2.....

http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/doc.ot?f_id=1114909

Exactly what I've been thinking of and was writing about in Fear factor...

"Yritykset eivät yleensä kuole siihen, että ne tekevät vääriä asioita vaan paremminkin siihen, että ne jatkavat aikoinaan oikeiden asioiden tekemistä liian pitkään", Kosonen kiteyttää.

"Companies don't normally get killed for doing wrong things but more like that they continue doing the right things too long".

...I have to admit though that it does add an extra layer of credibility to one's thoughts if you've been a "strategia- ja tietohallintajohtaja" on sabbathical leave from big successfull corporate and writing a book about how "The biggest threads for a company can be found from inside"... ;o)

Early Saturday winter morning magic

I had to drive Vili to the starting point of their Scout day trip to Nuuksio... about -20C, 07:30am in Saturday morning, barely no cars and a beautifull crisp winter day about to start...

True

Jamie Collum rocks... had been hearing some of his songs in radio earlier but only bought the latest CD few days ago. Fantastic CD.

Anyway to the point - sometimes some key "wisdom" can be found in song lyrics...

"... and it's just another story caught up in another photograph I found.

When I look back on my ordinary life

I see so much magic

thought I missed it at the time..."

Pretty well summed up ?

Snowboarding...

Everyplace is a potential "street" ?

Jebe and Otto on +3 meter elevation ;o)

Mandarines....

Not quite what I meant when I gave Valtteri a peeled mandarin ...

Sometimes the interesting new stuff is in the toilet's ceiling ?

Thanks Antti and Tero-Markus... http://www.megapolis2021.org/ looks interesting: 2021 2/3 of people live in cities... there will be couple of tens of +20M inhabintant cities.

Remeber to look at ceiling also sometimes ?