Great Blog

Great Point will wind down for a while now.  In the beginning of 2010 I will begin as the CEO of Kotimaa-yhtiöt, a media house owned by the Lutheran Church of Finland. The company publishes newspapers, magazines and books, as well as builds organs and sells clothing and  accessories to local congregations. I’ve loved just about every day as a consultant, but the possibility of putting some of the things I’ve learned in this business into practice in this particular context was too hard to resist. In the emerging new media landscape there should be amazing opportunities for companies serving interest-based and value-based information needs.

Great Point will not go away though. It will just become even more boutiqueish than it has been before.  A few great relationships with great clients will continue, maybe something new will be picked up on the side. Not much. Just a few pet projects.

I want to sincerely thank Great Point’s clients for the wonderful ride we’ve had during the last few years. It’s been great. Let’s keep in touch.

Cheers everybody,

Jaakko

The press release about the job at Kotimaa-yhtiöt can be found here.

Finnish Cultural Foundation is turning its eyes on built environment. For several years Pori Jazz Festival has been accompanied with SuomiAreena, a series of discussions on different aspects  of  contemporary Finland. This year the Cultural Foundation will organize  a discussion focusing on how housing in Finland will change due to global warming and other forces changing our society. Are sustainability, ambitious architecture and Finnish tastes compatible? I will be moderating a discussion on this on the 17th of July at 11.00 a.m at Pori Art Museum. Joining me are Olli Niemi from NCC Construction, professor Panu Kaila and mp Oras Tynkynen, who is also the government’s dedicated expert on climate change. It is a promising group of experts not afraid to say what they think. So, between Duffy on Thursday and Booker T. Jones on Friday evening, can you think of anything better to do?  Have coffee at The Pori Museum and listen to some house debate with heart and soul.

I will be chairing a two-day seminar on trends and brands at Wanha Satama Conference Center on Katajanokka on October 28th and 29th. The free seminar, organized by MTL (The League of Marketing Communications Companies), will feature key experts from the Finnish scene as well a exciting representation from abroad. Without recent changes in the economic environment this  would have been a solid seminar on current marketing and communications thinking. Now I’m looking forward to an x-ray of an industry that, together with the rest of the economy, will go through some major changes. Today, trends are radically different from what they were just two months ago. Only a few brands will not be touched by this.

While the official documents for the new Aalto University were being signed at a prestigious ceremony at the centre of Helsinki on Wednesday June 25th, another kind of groundwork for Finland’s future innovations was laid a few hundred meters away at Katajanokka’s Wanha Satama. A three day seminar, organized by Sitra and Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation, that brought together almost a hundred design thinkers around the world came to an end.

A closed seminar, with very open working methods, was trying to tackle the new paradigm of design and what it means for education, industry, governments and of course the design profession. The new thinking stresses design as a method and a process that can be applied to a lot of things, instead of seeing it just as a way of giving a form to an object or a service. According to this new school of thought, design and designers can help to solve wicked (enormous) problems like health care, global warming or national competitiveness in addition to their old role. Design can be seen as working method that brings together a wide range of experts to tackle specific problems and challenges.

What the seminar accomplished is yet to be seen. We can for example expect a Helsinki Design Manifesto to stem from the work done during the Lab. What is clear and welcome is that the role and nature of design is being rethought, as Finland gets ready to apply it’s new national innovation strategies and to launch the Aalto school that will combine the existing tech, business and design universities in the Helsinki area.

The new paradigm – that design is everywhere and can be applied to just about anything – reminds me of the shift in the role of marketing a while back. For long marketing meant marketing communications, then all of a sudden everything that the customers needed and therefore a company should provide was called marketing. It made sense but was also a struggle for hegemony, the fun people from the marketing department wanted to invade the corner offices, or at least be invited in for a chat.

Now designers want to do the same, and not only designers, there are other powerful forces – like Sitra, some of our industry and some behind the Aalto school – that are pushing for design nation Finland to take its design more seriously. It is difficult to expect anything but good to come out of that.

It was a turbulent week in Finnish book publishing. A week ago two of the most respected publishing professionals in the country left their long-time employer WSOY saying they were going to start their own house. The two men are brothers Touko and Aleksi Siltala, respectively the (now former) literary director and the non-fiction director of Finland’s biggest publishing house. A few big names from WSOY’s list, among them three former Finlandia Prize winners, have said that they would follow the brothers to their new venture. A few other big ones have already rushed to say that they will not.

Something similar happened on my watch at Tammi Publishers when some key employees left and founded Teos Publishers. In the quiet garden of publishing something like this is always a storm that rips and rearranges. The way I see it in retrospect is that literature needs big publishing to stay relevant, but it also needs small publishing to stay good. Big publishers keep books in the stores and in the media, but at times they forget to give passion and curiosity the role they need to guarantee the long-term vitality of the program.

“We are the good guys, but they are not the bad ones”, said an (American) independent publisher to me once when we were talking about big publishing. “They are boring – and that is even worse.”

The best guarantee against boredom is probably a healthy undergrowth of competent small publishers.

Another somewhat dramatic piece of book news was that Finland is not going to be the Guest of Honour country at he Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011. Well, if not in 2011, why not a few years later, I hear people saying. Sometimes setbacks are needed to sharpen your approach.

At a seminar the other day the speaker mentioned that Google’s market share in Finland is one of its highest anywhere: roughly 90% of Finns use Google as their default search engine. The same day, as I got home, I experimented a little. I first googled (http://www.google.fi) my company Great Point, and it came up as number six on the search. But when I yahooed it (http://fi.search.yahoo.com), it came up as number one! Google 0 - Yahoo 1, since these are search engines customized for Finland, and here my Great Point is the only one. On the Finnish search engine www.fi it came up second. Former Ask Jeeves, now just Ask (http://www.ask.com) did not find it at all.

Then I googled my own name to find out how relevant the search engine thought Great Point is if someone is trying to learn things about Jaakko Tapaninen (it is by far the best source). After all sorts of references to all possible things related and not related to me, link to www.greatpoint. fi came up as number 92 on Google. Not very good. No one looks at anything that ranks 92. When punched my name into Yahoo!, www.greatpoint.fi came up as number 9! And what was just as interesting was that most of the stuff on the first page was far more fresh and relevant than the oddities that Google dug up. When I asked Ask.com, it did not find my Great Point at all, but all sorts references to English-Language sites where my name is mentioned. It was interesting though, since this was stuff I did not know existed. But how about the Finnish engine www.fi? When the first 50 references did not link my name with my company, I gave up.

So, the next time you want to know how you look in cyberspace, try yahooing yourself for a change. And if like what you find, hey, maybe you should use it for other stuff too.

Tonight I attended a mini-seminar that featured two prodigies of Finnish politics and finance, the director of The Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen and the director of the financial group Sampo Björn Wahlroos. The think tank EVA had asked them to discus the US sub-prime crisis and its possible effects on the international and the Finnish economy. The discussion took place at the famous Mirror Room of Hotel Kämp.
Is the crisis over, or is it going to get worse, was what Satu Huber the moderator wanted to know. This is of course a question relevant, not only to director Liikanen whose bank is responsible for the monetary stability of Finland and to a multimillion euro investor like Mr. Wahlroos, but to anybody with any investments or any loans, that is practically everybody.
A fair summation of the very enjoyable discussion that took place would probably be to say that things might start getting better after Christmas but that things are more likely to get worse, Mr Wahlroos being the more pessimistic one of the two. Both agreed that sub-prime loans are more an indication of deeper problems than the cause for instability in the financial markets. In general, after a long period of overlooking risks, the risks are being reassessed and investors are fleeing from bad investments to quality ones and this is happening throughout the financial system. Those with money want to know exactly what they have gotten into. “Flight to quality” was the term that Mr. Wahlroos used several times. For Mr. Wahlroos the current quality asset is cash.
I cannot help thinking that the last time I heard people saying cash is king was during the stock market turmoil exactly twenty years ago. Yet, I walked out of the seminar feeling that this time around we have better bankers handling whatever is to come. Man, I hope I’m right.

The annual mega gathering of publishing professionals ended in Frankfurt last weekend. I did not go, but those who did, say it was a good book fair. For me it became a great fair when I received an excited phone call from the fairgrounds telling me that the our Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin had submitted Finland’s letter of intent to the Buchmesse to become the Guest of Honour in 2011.

It is bold move for Finland. It is going to cost a lot, and it is going to take a lot to put together an interesting presentation, but it is also an amazing possibility. I did a feasibilty study on The Guest of Honour programme for the Finnish Literature Information Centre (FILI) in the spring and - although I have visited the bookfair nine times - I had never before understood what an amazing reach the Guest of Honour status and programme have in German-Speaking Europe. It is like buying the Super Bowl half-time ad in the cultural life of Germany. No one can escape you. The book Fair is the biggest annual cultural event in Germany and 40% of the media attention is dedicated to the Guest of Honour. This is because the the guest country is the news every year, everything else stays pretty much the same.

So it is not really an honour, or an exhibition - it is a huge medium, and it is available to the guest country for the whole year, all around Germany. For Finnish literature, Germany has been the spring-board to the rest of the world for long. If Finland gets the status – Iceland is applying too but we remain convinced of our chances – well have much more than a spring-board, we’ll have a literary trampoline the size of Germany to show what we’ve got. Better start getting ready for the show…