From Mowgli to Finsky oligarch

“Welcome to my home,” Pekka Viljakainen said in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, on a cold and rainy evening.

He was speaking literally, as he lives on the top floor four days out of the week, when he’s in town as an adviser to Viktor Vekselberg, the president of the Skolkovo Foundation.

The post is a new role for the 40-year-old Finnish businessman, who retired in late 2010 from Tieto, an IT company that in 1998 purchased a firm he had started when he was 13.

“I started from very low,” Viljakainen said. “I didn’t have money, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started with fishing, crayfishes, when I was 12, with my brother, and after that we were able to get our first computer, so I didn’t have any venture capitalist or any equity.”

 

Skipping a generation

While Viljakainen was not without an IT pedigree – his grandfather was one of the founders of Nokia – it did not become a family industry, his parents both being psychologists.

“They decided to raise the children – we were five altogether – in the middle of the forest, so we left Helsinki for our family farm 250 kilometers northeast, so I’m kind of a Mowgli of the IT industry, even though I have now a €10,000 suit, but anyway, it’s a Mowgli, with a lot of sh*t, actually,” he said, referring to the mud on his leather shoes from visiting a Skolkovo building site earlier that day.

Despite being a self-described “nerd,” Viljakainen discovered early on that he did not have a gift for programming, so he stuck to the business and management side in an industry Finland was ideal for.

“It’s not only technology, it’s the whole society,” he said. “The average Finn at the millennium visited a bank physically every six years. There was no reason, because everything was already automated, everything was digitalized.”

This development proved to be his breakthrough, since Tieto had created the first e-banking application in 1995 and helped Finland become the country with the most digital banking in the world within four years.

It is this emphasis on environment that brought Viljakainen to Skolkovo in 2011, after his retirement. He had found in Russia an ideal place to apply his theories from his first major project after leaving Tieto.

 

‘No Fear’

Undergoing an assessment at Tieto called the Leadership Index in 2001, where his employees anonymously evaluated him, Viljakainen scored 93 out of 100, which he said reflected his leadership style – establishing a lot of personal relationships and connections with his staff.

Two years later, with a new generation – what Viljakainen calls “the PlayStation generation,” those born after 1985 – entering the workforce, his score plummeted to 44 and then to 27 in 2004.

“It was this close that I should be firing myself from my company, which would be kind of embarrassing,” he said. “I started the process about, ‘What is wrong with my leadership style?’ And then I noticed, this young generation, they need the voice of influence, they want to know more, ‘Why are we here?’”

He worked to refine his leadership style to connect more with his younger employees. Two months before his retirement in 2011, his score was back to 92, based on 18,000 responses.

The self-assessment resulted in first a book, whose contributors include Sberbank vice president and chief information officer Viktor Orlovsky and Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, and then an online community, called “No Fear.”

The book and website focus on new leadership strategies to harness young talent, not as a way of disregarding or discriminating against older workers, but of retraining them to work in a new business culture – a culture embodied in Skolkovo and other innovative businesses around Russia.

 

Life re-assessment

It was not just his career he needed to re-evaluate, however. In early 2010, 20 kilograms heavier than he is today, Viljakainen had a severe heart attack.

“They investigated me and they didn’t find anything in me,” he said. “I don’t have any cholesterol, pipelines are all open, but they said that the heart attack was caused by ultrastress.”

After two years on a strict physical and dietary regimen, he plays sports eight to 10 hours a week, including half-triathlons every summer.

While the heart attack was not a physical reason for the retirement, it was a psychological reason.

“When I was lying there in intensive care, I decided that there are two basic principles what I do in my life,” he said. “I do only those things that are meaningful for me.” 

This includes his family and his work at Skolkovo, he said. “I feel it meaningful to help Russian start-ups. I really want this entrepreneurship society to be established.”

“The second principle is, I don’t work with *ssholes, because I can select what I’m doing, and with whom I’m working.”

While his work is rewarding, however, he admits his life is still far from ideal.

“It’s killing me to live here, even in this nice house, nice living room and good food, but of course, I have two small kids, 8 and 5, in Helsinki, watching them through Skype, it’s not the perfect life, either,” he said.

Source: themoscownews.com