I have been working for little bit over 20years, in high tech. Brilliant times, most of the time. First 15years, lot of emphasis on how we work better, feel better, are more productive in sustainable way, become more competitive together and as individuals, lots of training by the companies.
Now? No real effective team work (virtual teams yeah right), loads of meetings, loads of emails, double shifts for just coping with emails and real work etc., lots of talk, ineffective decision making, mistrust of talent of own workforce (everything is better abroad for way too many Finnish "leaders")... well, just bad leadership in way too many companies. Resulting under-use of individual and team talent and devotion, and people burning out.
The real thread for industrial survival of Finland is just the state of leadership in this country - not the pricing of Finnish labor.
I believe this is largely due to the biggest industrial error in Finnish industrial history - the launch of Nokia's option system.
In short what it did was following...
'Early' high-tech Nokia was all about people being enthusiastic about telecommunications, products and about engineering. If you wanted to participate more than "just" do one part of the system, you could be trained, grow and go as far as you wanted basically up into the company's ladder. OK, bit of a simplification here but basically so.
First 1995....1999 option plans were very successful for many participants.
Nokia got a reputation of being a place where anyone with a good managerial position for the first time in Finland could get very wealthy, even rich in Finnish terms. And the better the managerial position, the more you would make. Automatically.
Nokia increasingly attracted people who only wanted a management position, if possible directly. Since it was the fastest way to wealth.
(Pardon me for generalization, but) Way too often these people had no or too little interest in the context or the products of the Nokia.
Big mental movement from over-valuing management skills over expert skills started. (Funnily enough I remember well a slide set from one Nokia EVP declaring in the first slides "The only scarce resource is management attention. Everything else is plentiful.")
Since the best, fastest way to get up in the ladder and to the promise of sudden wealth, was to sit on as many things as possible and be known for it, managers started doing majority of decisions increasingly independently of experts (and what do the engineers know about markets and products?)
Ideas for engineering and design were increasingly overlooked since everything was management driven (who lacked increasingly context and really the market understanding)
Engineering and design was considered not only as commodity but as a burden due to costs, long lead times and human (=leadership) aspects.
Own engineering also actually became sort of a thread for way too many managers who actually lacked the context vision and interest to it, real life strategical skills (easy to operate on endless budgets resulting form years of success) and real leadership skills; experts were capable to challenge decisions ... "but only because they did not understand markets nor strategies" ;)
Engineering was just to be sourced from best (=cheapest really) possible "partner". As manufacturing etc.
Add in a bit of good old Finnish "weak self esteem" also in very high positions: it just felt more important when everything was so international. Officially Finnish engineers were too expensive, did not know how code software, markets could do better on any IC anyway, only people in US could do Internet services, etc.
Unfortunately many too many companies copied the rewarding model and with the fact that simply wanting to become a manager was enough to climb the ladder.
"The only scarce resource is management attention. Everything else is plentiful." = No matter how good you are or become, we just don't care since you can be replaced. Wow! And the results can be seen ... unfortunately.
We are too small market and too protected to survive this in the long run. Thanks to also Finnish industry investments money has been cumulating to current developing countries for long time. At the same timed weakening our own economy. We become the new developing country.
What a mess as a blog post.
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