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.

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.

“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it”, says author and blogger Seth Godin in a great little video shot by Nic Askew. “…a curious person explores first and then considers whether they want to accept the ramifications.”

For anyone wondering about creativity and quality of work on personal, on organizational or on national level, the five minutes it takes to watch this video are well spent: “Curiosity”

Today I went to listen to what some of the highest ranking industrial CEOs in Finland think of the climate change. The think tank EVA had first asked them to write their thoughts for a report that was published today and then appear at the seminar together with Jorma Ollila, the chairman of Nokia and Shell boards, and with professor of environmental change Atte Korhola from Helsinki University.

The combined message of these gentlemen was quite clear: a lot is being done, Finnish companies are active and decent, but this does not matter much. The emissions will grow and we are dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. The big challenge is China and it will not commit to serious reductions of its carbon emissions unless the US does the same. Mr. Ollila said that he has high hopes that in Bali, at the UN Climate Change Conference that starts next Monday, a process will begin that leads to The US and China finally committing to an agreement on reducing their emissions.

Meanwhile the carbon emissions are growing faster than in the scientists’ worst case scenarios. This means that by the end of this century in most places it will be 4 degrees warmer and in the polar regions possibly 8 degrees warmer than it is today. And there is almost nothing we can do the prevent this from happening.

Listening to all of this against the recent worries that people may not spend enough this Christmas to prevent us from sliding into a recession, of recent Finnish tax breaks to huge diesel cars, of the EU confusing reducing carbon emissions with enforcing the usage of renewable energy sources (that may increase carbon emissions), one feels helpless. It’s like being in an unprotected orgy and knowing that most of the people present already have the big disease with a little name.

The future will be different. It will be smaller. No huge cars or houses. It will be more local. Travel, whether to work or to the Bahamas will be very expensive, probably regulated. Stuff will also be more local. We can’t ship goods all around the globe the way we do today. The one thing that will become more global is politics. Even the EU is a small player, the world has come together to meet the challenges. The future will also be much more wired. Since we can’t travel in person, we will travel and meet in cyberspace.

It is going to take a lot of adapting. The two things I look forward to is more sailboats and more trains. I have a soft spot for both.