Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [112]
At the same time, the fact that they come back in such numbers—and that nearly every company in this book has experienced the same thing—tells you something else. Those people found a real value in the way that they were treated and how they could grow and self-direct inside a liberated company that neither a higher salary nor a fancy title could fully replace. To put it into the language of psychology, they were having their universal needs met, even if they wouldn’t talk about it in those terms.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world, another liberating leader has also made it her business—literally—to rearrange how her employees and her clients think about their office space.
12
THE SECRET OF
LIBERATING
LEADERSHIP
How Paradoxes and Wisdom Help Freedom
You can’t fill a movie theater with a director…. The most important thing in the movie is the actors…and the decadence of the cinema comes from the glorification of the director not as a servant of the actors but as their master. The work of director consists of extracting from all of the actors the maximum human richness. So let us respect and love them and help them to be great because they are the people who make the cinema unforgettable.
—ORSON WELLES1
It’s better to limp slowly along the right path than walk stridently in the wrong direction.
—MARCUS AURELIUS2
LIISA JORONEN IS the president of SOL, Finland’s number two cleaning-services company, with eight thousand employees and $212 million in revenue annually. And early one September morning she arrived to pick us up personally at our hotel.
The cozy hotel, it turns out, was once Helsinki’s prison. The rooms are converted cells, with small windows facing the sky, so it was a bit of a shock to emerge into the lobby and find there the woman who has built the freest company in Finland, and possibly all of Europe. She was a short, slight blonde, waiting for us in a bright yellow raincoat and playing with a school-age boy, also blond. She smiled spontaneously.
“Hello, I’m Liisa,” she said. “Do you mind if I first take my grandson to his school and then we go to the company?”3
We agreed.
“Do you mind if we take a tram? I have no car,” she explained.
We knew from our email exchanges that she spends most of her time today on her farm in the south of France. “I need to give space to my children [her daughter and son, both key SOL executives],” she had written a couple months earlier. “It is not easy to be a child of Liisa Joronen. I have too often seen fathers who cannot give up and they ‘kill’ their children.”4 The meaning of this took us some time to understand. In the meantime, we were quite surprised to learn that she’d flown up from France to Finland for a couple of days specifically to show us her company.
After we’d traveled some way on the tram she told us it was time to get off. But the journey to the school wasn’t over yet. “Now we need to change to another tram. You don’t mind?” she asked, but the next tram took forever to come. So we took a taxi, dropped off her grandson, and finally arrived at SOL City, aka SOL Studio. The company’s headquarters got this nickname because in 1991, when Joronen took over part of her father’s business, the only place she could afford to rent for a head office was a deserted movie studio. It remains SOL’s headquarters today, although its appearance has little to do with its movie days.
Joronen first joined the family business, Lindström, ten years earlier, in 1981, after fourteen years in banking. At the time, Lindstrom provided a range of cleaning services, from commercial cleaning to dry-cleaning and laundry. Her father anointed her CEO of Lindström at