Soul of company

I believe companies have  a soul. It is a summary of the inspirations of it's employees and appreciation of these inspirations by employer.
Companies typically try to formulate this soul into "values". Unfortunately these will tend to inevitably turn against the good cause - "values" tend to amputate the soul because in people's minds and in everyday's management realities "values" turn into outgiven, externalised consultancy styled jargon. Companies make it even worse by enforcing these "values" in policies and in best practices ... which do not really go along with the term "soul".
For me what happened eg in Nokia is an example of this.... Nokia's soul was really drive for better solutions. I felt (in the 1990's) that this was practically every individual's primary agenda in the company - to solve things in the best possible way. Also, Nokia's real culture valued this greatly. "Solving" was encouraged and appreciated. Then it all changed - management was officially (eg by Mr. JT Berqvist) stated to be the "only scarce resource", "everything else (=everybody) is plentiful". 2000 was the start of the era where Nokia amputed it's soul, it's employees' spirit.... and it's competitiveness.
For me Apple's soul in the quest of mechanical and aesthetical perfection - they drive for it and excel in the markets.   

Kriek... always a small surprise after long break

OH .... it's red! but it is nice :D

Shower thinking ...

Friday early morning shower thoughts: "Man I wish it would be Saturday, and I could go windsurfing... sleep and chill."  "Hold on ............ am I really practically every day, even constantly, looking forward for something 1,2,3,... days ahead?" "I am." "I am soon 46y and time flies anyways way too fast.... gotta change this somehow"
One of the big human questions is starting to materialise itself to me - how to enjoy every moment of shortening life, how to make most of it without stressing? How to stay in the moment?

Could be equally wealthy with local thanks to current technology?

Listening to YLE Radio1 morning .... political commentators making quite righteous comments about the election winner party Persut ("True Finns") are extremely populistic = over simplyfying complex questions and complex world. True. They are. That is so cheap.
But it make we wonder, why is world increasingly complex... even to us "common people" nowadays. Global free economy? Yep that is the root cause for all this massively increased complexity. It is however also of course the source of this increased wealth (at least western wealth).
Could we have close to similar wealth nowadays, with the help of the new technology, new global innovations, if we could go increasingly back to local? Would it be more sustainable because we would be more limited by what resources we have in "proximity"? Would it be less stressy because the competition would be concrete, not virtual, and limited by same resources? Would we all have work?

Why we are loosing if this continues...

Work continues moving  to "cheaper countries", increasingly in terms of higher value jobs...  the significantly cheaper price of a working hour is always be mentioned as the reason for this. Looking around, hearing friends and relatives, having experienced myself, makes me wonder if there are couple of  other very important reasons....
1. pretty freaking horrid inefficiency that has been slowly (?) inbuild to our western corporate way of working through our "meeting culture". Massive amounts of meetings! That's what pretty much everybody seem to be having, constantly. And Individuals trying to manage their real work during evenings... which in turns slowly turns into de-facto burn-outs. Or at least constant lack of rest = ineffectivity in the long term.
I started working 1992 in Nokia, and in my own experience the big change started from working to "working"=meetings started after 2004 or so....
As a curiosity & sort of a proof of this can be seen in Nokia's Ruoholahti office - I guess it was designed around 2000 and each wing was planned to have 1 meeting room. I went there 2003 and left the site 2008 - during that time, 4 rooms were turned into new meeting rooms per wing - at they were constatly booked.
2. email has turned into as source of communicative chaos and burn-outer of human beings.... as it is now being used in many corporates, it is menace instead of usefull communicative tool. I bet it is a great source of inefficiency in the western working culture.
3. genuinely working community and common total end result (economical and sprititual) driven management has largely disappeared, and has been substituted by individual agendas only.

Sad. Hopefully the new working generation with it's emerging new values, will save the western competitiveness and wealth.

Chaplin's The Gold Rush and RSO....

The last Finlandia House "gig" of Radio Symphony Orchestra in May 26th .... Charlie Chaplin's music played by RSO for the original 1925 version of The Gold Rush. Fantastic - touching. Squeezed few tears in the end.
Pretty amazing how much more one co-live the movie when it's not having any sounds from the movie itself. I noticed myself jumping when Charlie had a hick-up.

Too good to be true?

Keeping my humble thumbs up that this would be real and go global fast..... sort of raises the faith again that we can solve things with engineering and not only cause them.

Pretty expensive

Pretty expensive beer :D   ...

"Tee todellisia löytöjä"....

Banner ad with a message: “Experience true findings” ... with a final touch (an arrow pulsating towards you know what).

Office building mania...

Been wondering that too.... for long time. Who needs all those new offices - everywhere?

Well said.... legendary Jaakko Kolmonen

"When then in 60's started this era of plentifulness and import mania, everything good (that had been build around Finnish home grown ingredients) was flushed down in few moments"

Newspaper adapting to new world - The era of metal... and about gold

The Era of Metals is exactly the kind of stuff newspaper should be doing… interesting background for news. Hesari has been good in it for quite some time, and is getting better.

About gold – pretty interesting that there is a valuable and also very useful metal, and still it’s mostly just stored. Huge amounts of it in national bank reserves all over the globe. It is also one of the main metals in mining industry, so we use huge amounts of energy and effort to dig it out and refine it – just to be mainly stored.
Great.

Cars - that big meteorite of our time...

For Dinosauruses it took just one meteorite and few weeks? For us it took just 50-100 years and about a zillion cars?

Death of Western middle class....

Heikki Patomäki speaking in Hesari about death of Western middle class… slow one.  Evident however since this kind of wealth is not really sustainable?