Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [114]
“It’s too expensive,” Joronen replied. And then she added, “And I don’t want people to stay here. I want them to stay with the customers they want [to recruit], the marketing people to do marketing…. This is our headquarters. What do they do here? Very few people have to be here … The more people you have here, the more you have internal problems. They create their own work and they create bureaucracy. Then you need more personnel managers and you need more people just to look after your own people.”
We started to notice a puzzling pattern with this big-business-owning, tram-riding president. Having stepped aside as CEO in favor of her children, she professes to be reluctant to visit the company too often, but when she does, she clearly loves every minute of it (even flying to Finland from France for the opportunity).7 She praises the free Thursday soup for employees and visitors alike but judges it to be too expensive to provide every day. In the first ten minutes of our conversation, Joronen told us—in the space of two sentences—that she “lives in chaos” but, at the same time, she insisted, “I don’t go there and there and there,” waving her hand in three directions, “I go somewhere.” She also told us that once she “decides something,” she’ll “break through walls” to get it done—but she never “takes too big risks.” She was, in a word, full of paradoxes.
And sure enough, she gave us another one a moment later. Returning to the question of corporate headquarters, we asked her whether companies that build large head offices are making a mistake.
“Oh, I love them,” she said with her characteristic warm smile and just a hint of mischief. “I love them, because we clean them. And every time I give a speech to a client I end it, ‘But don’t do what we do here. I love you and your big headquarters because you are my client.’”
She was joking of course, but there was also something deeper in her attitude: Recall Harley’s Teerlink saying “People don’t resist change; they resist being changed.” Beneath the humor, there was something of this wisdom in Joronen’s remark. “It’s not necessary for us” to have a big headquarters and all the support departments, she elaborated. “But, you know, it’s their business. I always say, ‘You can do good business in many ways. This is our way of doing things.’” But then she added, “I have to behave in society because I am the opposite of almost everything in the society. But I have to, because I still have the society, they are my clients.”
So add “rebellious conformist” to the list of Liisa Joronen’s paradoxes. We went back to the beginning: When her father offered her the most problematic, most unprofitable piece of the family business, did she hesitate?
“It was a big risk, but not too big, I thought,” Joronen answered, adding: “I don’t do any calculations, ever. I went to school for economics but [I never do them]…because if you’ve been running a business for five years, year after year, day after day, you know it.” Then, to show she’s serious about this approach to business, she added, “In 2009, for the first time, we have abandoned a budget. We don’t do budgets anymore.”
How do you run a business without a budget? From the start, she said, SOL’s business philosophy was to avoid centralized corporate budgets and instead to have individual, supervisor-by-supervisor budgets. But now, SOL is leaving even those behind. In their place, supervisors will forecast only the end results: their “growth and profits.” The goal, after all, is not to spend your budget, but to earn more than you spend.
That may sound too simplistic, but it recalled one conversation with Zobrist. Referring to the acquisition of the European steel giant Arcelor by Mittal, he asked us, “Do you know how many business indicators Arcelor had? One hundred and fifty. And how many does Mittal have? Four. Very clever company.” And it’s hard to argue with Joronen’s results so far. In 2007, SOL grew 15 percent. Its profit margin was 8.7 percent,