The Nordic Way

Is there such a thing as Nordic leadership? And if there is, does it have any real relevance in today’s world? Could Nordic leadership be deployed in non-Nordic cultures? Thinkers50 CEO, Mikko Leskelä, dives into a conversation about Nordic leadership with Laura Sivula, the director of academic and international affairs at Aalto University Executive Education; Anders Indset, author of The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success; and Frank Martela, assistant professor at Aalto University and author of A Wonderful Life: Insights for Finding a Meaningful Existence.

For Laura Sivula, Nordic leadership is defined by a few key characteristics. The first of these is trust; many of the systems in Nordic societies are built upon trust rather than power. The second characteristic is egalitarianism; treating people equally on an individual, organisational, and societal level. Other characteristics include wellbeing and happiness – Finland is often rated as the happiest country in the world.

With a background as a professional athlete, Anders Inset’s ‘Viking code’ is a philosophy of living an active and vital life where everyone serves the collective and, as the collective grows then everyone performs better. If, as an individual, you aspire to succeed, you are better off if everyone around you is performing well. The Viking code, says Anders, can be adapted to politics, education and business in general. 

In his Harvard Business Review article in December 2023, Frank Martela introduces the concept of ‘Nordic minimalistic leadership,’ a leadership style which is the opposite of the more traditional command-and-control leadership. Here he explains that Nordic minimalistic leadership is about supporting people’s growth and development to help them make good decisions, rather than relying on the leader telling them what to do.

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Transcript

Mikko Leskelä:

You are all very heartily welcome to follow this conversation we’re having today on Nordic leadership. We are doing this to honor the Leaders50 list that is published for the first time and we are all very excited about it. My name is Mikko Leskelä. I come from the Thinkers50 and I’m here to host this conversation with three great guests we have today. They are all experts or even deep experts on the topic of leadership and especially Nordic leadership as you are about to find out. The question we’re trying to answer today is whether such a thing as Nordic leadership even exists, and if it does, does it have any real relevance in today’s world?

How could it apply? Can it be applied in any other culture other than the Nordic? The Nordic leadership has been a popular theme within management literature lately, so we are excited to dive into this conversation with our guests. Without further ado, let’s welcome our first guest, Laura Sivula. Laura is the Director of Academic and International Affairs at Aalto University Executive Education and has a special responsibility area in the business that you do in Asia. Is that right?

Laura Sivula:

Yes, that is correct.

Mikko Leskelä:

Which countries would that be?

Laura Sivula:

So, we have a strategic hub in Singapore and we have had that there for 25 years. So, in addition to Singapore, we teach in South Korea, in Taiwan, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, and soon also in India. And in South Korea, we’ve been there for 30 years. I think that’s quite an exciting achievement. We are celebrating that special anniversary a year later on in 2025.

Mikko Leskelä:

You were hardly born when that started, but yeah, you are now the responsible one for-

Laura Sivula:

Yes.

Mikko Leskelä:

… exporting the Nordic leadership. Could you summarise in a few sentences what we actually mean when we talk about Nordic leadership? What is that?

Laura Sivula:

That’s a good question. I think we can find many definitions for that, but how I see it, there’s a few key characteristics that really show what Nordic leadership is. The first one of them is trust and if we look at the Nordic countries, a lot of our society, a lot of our systems are built upon trust rather than power. So, I think that’s one of the key characteristics. Then egalitarianism, so really looking at equal treatment of people on the individual level, organisational level and societal level. Wellbeing is one of them and even happiness, I’m quite proud to always bring in happiness to the question, is Finland has been chosen as the most happiest country in the world. So, that plays a big role in Nordic leadership in terms of wellbeing in work-life balance.

So, there’s a lot of tiny things that really, really build up Nordic leadership and I think in these times there’s actually a need for a more androgynous movement kind of style of leadership that’s quite different compared to the leadership styles we actually see around the world. So, I definitely see that Nordic countries such as Finland have a lot to give in terms of the new leadership paradigm.

Mikko Leskelä:

Okay, well it seems that it’s fairly clearly defined, but I will continue challenging whether it actually makes any sense and we’ll continue the discussion with the new guest. Welcome Anders Indset. Anders is a person larger than life, I would say. Philosopher or even a business philosopher, founding partner of Global Institute for Leadership and Technology and just recently, well already a five times best-selling author, but just recently written a book, The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success. Not a humble guy, I would say.

Anders Indset:

Well, if you think that success is based on Ferraris and yachts and materialism and that’s how you define progress in life, I think that you could make that statement, but my definition of success is human growth. It’s very grounded and founded in the Norwegian ethos of collectivism. So, I think if you misinterpret the title of high performing cultures to strive towards finite goals and to maximize and optimise at the cost of others, then your statement would be true. But this is basically the opposite that we aim to do, and what I’ve written about is more of a life philosophy on progress and how to take back the control of the agency that you have as an individual. So, I have a background as a professional athlete, I build companies, but I never felt success. So, today I look at that from a different perspective and that’s what I also cover in the book, obviously with some proud patriotic examples from some of the people in Norway in particular in sport that has been-

Mikko Leskelä:

Particularly in sports and that, you have to forgive me, it’s the little Finnish man inside of me that feels even smaller before the Norwegian success, especially now that the winter time is coming and all of your skiing heroes will be on the podium. Could you start by telling us why it would make any sense to try to define or identify leadership styles based on cultural similarity? Which of course we have within the Nordic countries or even by countries as you have done, you have concentrated lately on the Norwegian style of building high performance. Why do we need that angle?

Anders Indset:

… Yeah, I think it doesn’t really make sense. I think there are many similarities across cultures. I think the challenge that we have in today’s rapid society is solely to focus on what is leadership in a modern age? And what I try to do is to find facets of philosophy of leaders where we can take good examples on how we could on one hand experience the liveliness, the lebendigkeit as you would say in Germany, of life, to enjoy progress. And therefore I look to Norway to see are there cultural phenomena, are there recent developments? When we talk about high performance culture, the result that has come in sport is an outcome of a process.

So, I focus on the input and the micro steps and the ambitions that you lay as a foundation for then what compounds into what we call success. So, I’m very much about looking into facets and even in organisations and branches to see what makes for a good leader and why is it important today in a society where we have become very reactive and we have been very driven by technology.

So, I think we need leaders and we need more trust that Laura also touched upon, and therefore we could look to regions and cultures to find symptoms or facets that we can adapt to a good culture of leadership. And I think that in an essence as we move onwards could also be a global model as the world becomes even more interdependent and therefore countries such as Norway can serve as role models. If you look at Jens Stoltenberg of NATO as an example, navigating those cultural facets with Türkiye and some small things that you can see. These are strong leaders with good values and therefore you can have examples, but I wouldn’t say it would make sense to cluster it in countries or regions and say that there’s one style. It’s too dynamic and too diverse for that.

Mikko Leskelä:

Yeah. So, what you’re actually doing is that you look in different directions and try to find inspiration that would actually touch people, something deeper in people and teach them something about good leadership and life in general.

Anders Indset:

Yeah. Yes, and the book is that. I think the book and the first part, obviously, about sport, it doesn’t cover snow at all. It covers only the things we do, beach volleyball and soccer and track and field running, golf, tennis, all those types of things, right? But in the second part-

Mikko Leskelä:

And handball.

Anders Indset:

… Yeah, handball is also something that is decent. But in the second part of the book, I look at how what I call the Viking code can be adapted to politics, to education and business in general. So, it’s more of a deeper philosophy of living an active and vital life and one where we serve the collective and as the collective grows and everyone around you perform or play better, and if you have an aspiration as an individual to stand out or to grow even more, you are better off if everyone around you is doing better, which is not found in all organizations obviously, as you fight for the rise to the pinnacle of any competitive environment. So, this is what I look at and it’s more of a philosophy of life and I think it serves very well as a model for future organisations.

Mikko Leskelä:

Okay. Well the third guest is also a philosopher, Frank Martela.

Frank Martela:

Hello.

Mikko Leskelä:

Welcome, Frank. And Frank is known to never take his hat off. Almost never. Great to have you here. Frank is motivation researcher and assistant professor at Aalto University, author of a book called A Wonderful Life, that’s the reason one, and also author of an HBR article on Nordic minimalistic leadership. Frank, could you define what Nordic minimalistic leadership is about?

Frank Martela:

Yeah, so I guess my project about this minimalistic leadership started with me just observing certain Finnish leaders who have felt that they were doing something right and they were also quite successful in their careers, like Matti Alahuhta, who was the CEO of this Kone, which is one of the world’s biggest elevator companies or Ilkka Paananen who was the founder and CEO of Supercell, which has become the one of the world’s biggest mobile game companies. And I saw that they had a certain leadership style which quite much characterised by, or is quite opposed to, this traditional command and control kind of leadership.

So, instead of that, it was more about inspiring people with this very bold vision. This is where we are heading, and then giving people much room to make the decision by themselves about how to get towards that vision. So, it’s this ‘inspire and serve’ kind of model, “Here’s the direction, and then I’m supporting you in your own ability to get towards that direction.” So, in that sense, instead of leading with power, telling people what to do, it is much more about supporting people’s growth and development so that they themselves could make the right decision so that the leader themselves don’t have to tell them what to do.

Mikko Leskelä:

Yeah. Well, back to Anders. What Frank just described, isn’t this very much about applying the concept of Jante’s law, which you actually do in your book very much. That might not be familiar to everybody, so could you describe the concept and how it actually reflects the ideals that Frank just described?

Anders Indset:

Yeah, sure. There was an author back in 1932, Aksel Sandemose took the commandments of Moses and wrote a sarcastic way of telling people not to believe in themselves. And I grew up with this, and this is very typical for Norway saying that you should not think that you’re better than anyone else. You should not think that you can do something, achieve something and stand out. And there are similar concepts from New Zealand. I just had a podcast this morning with Australia and they talked about cutting the flowers at the same size and conditioning everything to stay grounded and be the same and not to stand out. And this was very true for me growing up in Norway, where I had to serve the community and go to all the sports, because if I didn’t show up for the other ones, they wouldn’t show up for me. So, we had that sense of buying into the collective, but we were not supposed to believe that we were superstars or to have self-trust to go out and do something like the barbarian Vikings did 1000 years ago.

And something happened around 2000 where these athletes led the way to say that, “Okay, it’s okay to have self-trust, because only if you trust yourself can you also trust others.” So, you need to have a strong core, but you don’t do it at the cost of others. So, this book is also very much about overcoming the law of Jante and understanding that it is okay to have a strong self-trust, but you shouldn’t do it in a command and control way, as Frank mentioned, and that structural part.

So, this is a bit of the evolution of the law of Jante that I think that Norway now is trying to detach a little bit from without losing the values. So, you see this with these athletes that they’re not only the best at what they do, but they’re also very much liked by all the competitors in tennis and golf. They practice fair play. So, this is a little bit about the journey coming from that Jante law or law of Jante that has kept Norwegian society grounded. And now today I think the respect is still there, the trust is at the core, but now you can also go out and believe in yourself and to build organisations outside of Norway and to go after these careers that many have done in the last years.

Mikko Leskelä:

So, even if Jante’s lies, you see many times in a bit of negative light, there’s some power, some movement there and the evolution is actually making use of some of that power that comes from also believing in the community at the same time as you believe in yourself.

Anders Indset:

Yeah, I think Frank wanted to say something, but yes, we have the concept of Dugnad in Norway. Everyone goes to Dugnad, it means basically volunteer work, but it doesn’t feel like work. It’s just showing up for the communal service. It’s a word that is very much rooted in the Norwegian language, like Hygge in Denmark where you have the Dugnad and I think that is something that many countries outside of Scandinavia and the Nordics, they see this as a cultural phenomenon. And I think this is a very strong basis for, we could call it a reinforcement learning model, where you put in the effort for the team and the team grows. And in sport this is natural because I as an individual in team sport today, I need my team players performing at a higher level. So, that is the essence of first serving the community or serving the team so that they can grow and then if you have the aspiration to put in extra effort and have an aspiration to grow, you play against better players and that obviously strengthens your development.

So, I think it’s a very good model to think about how can we unite individualism or collectivism to the extent that you understand the power of the group? What we call a culture or where we build organisations that are greater than the sum of its parts and I think this is very much also what leadership is about. And I think Laura and Frank also touched upon this to facilitate and also to enable other people to grow. And you see that if you go into a boardroom in Norway, you will not recognise who is the boss. It’s not only the clothes and the structure, but even also the conversation. It’s not, there are times where you have to take the decision and move on, but you cannot really see that.

And when I do that in Germany and I go into the boardrooms in Germany, it is very clear who is the CEO and who’s the boss still and that is an obvious cultural difference that you can see. And I tend to believe, and I strongly believe that the model of this equality and talking at eye level where respect is a given, I think that is a model that will continue to expand in other regions of the world as it has already done in the tech scene and with young organisations obviously. But these are, as I said, symptoms or small facets of what I would say are criteria from Scandinavia that are worth noticing.

Mikko Leskelä:

Yeah, I’m a bit surprised that you can see such a big difference even between Nordics and Germany.

Anders Indset:

Yeah, I mean Germany is still hierarchical, but I think bringing Frank in also to the conversation here, and Laura, I think there are very many hierarchical structures still in Germany, but over the years that I’ve lived in Germany for the past 25 years, I never understood the polite Sie form having a different ‘you’. To me, there’s only one ‘you’ and many still use that still today and it’s a very clunky way of communicating, because you don’t know who is on Sie and who is on ‘you’ and how you communicate with titles and what have you. So I think this is slowly fading out, but it’s still very much present in a lot of organisations in Germany.

Mikko Leskelä:

Okay. Frank, you’ve been a motivation researcher. Now, if it holds true that we have such a unified culture that it even has its own leadership styles, that is very much reflected in the lower hierarchy and trust and concentration on wellbeing and all of that, how does it look from an individual motivation point of view? What actually happens in an individual when they exercise work, do work in this kind of environment compared to others?

Frank Martela:

Yeah, so in motivational research, one often makes a distinction between more controlled forms of motivation and more autonomous forms of motivation. So, control forms of motivation are more of this carrots and sticks. So, like some carrot that you are striving to get or some sticks that you’re trying to avoid and through this kind of motivation, you’re going to get people to conform to your actions. If you’re the leader and you can always say to people, “Do this or otherwise you’re fired.” Or “Do this and you’ll get the bonus.” And so forth, so you get quite less conformity out of people through this more formal motivation.

But if you want to get more engagement people, if you want to get more pro-activity from people or if you want to get to people to be more creative and themselves think how to get towards the shared goal in those situations, then you have to appeal to these more autonomous forms of motivation, which usually means that people have to somehow feel that it’s something that they… That they think that what they’re doing is something that it’s worth doing, and also that they have enough autonomy to make their own decisions about how to get towards that goal.

In that sense, I think this Nordic relatively low hierarchy culture brings forward this more autonomous form of motivation, because then people usually feel that they’re more part of the organisation rather than just working for the organisation and through that they’re more committed, make the effort to get towards the shared goal. So, in the end I think that through that kind of method, you get more out of the employees than if you just try to get them to do whatever you ask them to do by these more controlled forms of motivation.

Mikko Leskelä:

Okay. Let’s put that idea to a test. It sounds beautiful. Laura, you have experience in exporting that model. You said Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, which are very hierarchical and well Frank used the expression stick and carrot. Maybe those cultures are more stick and carrot than the Nordic ones. How does this model resonate? Can it be exported? Can something we learned from it? How do individuals experience it when they come from such a different culture?

Laura Sivula:

I would like to build up on something that Anders said really about building a new global model for leadership. I think it’s good to understand that we do not intend to drop something into other cultures in a way, but it’s more of a, “Yes, and?” Model than a either/or. So, it’s always about finding what’s already good and working in organisations and cultures and bringing that Nordic flavor into it. So, one of the reasons why we are quite often asked to partner up with local universities and we work with global organisations, is the reason that nobody wants Nordic leadership just because they want Nordic leadership, but rather they have something that they want to solve with a new leadership approach.

Quite often we talk about innovation capabilities, we talk about self-leadership, we talk about an entrepreneurial mindset, having the ability to find solutions for sustainability. So, when we have these underlying issues in the background, that’s typically what we start talking about. How can we learn both from eastern and western leadership styles? How can we really bring in something new to the discussion? And quite often I think innovation is a good example since what we need for innovation is often a bit lower hierarchies, a bit more freedom to think, a bit more freedom to express yourself. So, I think Nordic leadership as such doesn’t necessarily exist on its own, but it’s really quite a nice toolkit in order to look at how individuals and how organisations can perform better in a way that they can be more innovative and contribute more to their organisations and to society at large.

Mikko Leskelä:

Okay.

Frank Martela:

Leadership is quite much about these expectations. I just agree with one nice example of this was there was this one Finnish very low-hierarchy organisation that I’ve been working with. And at one point they like to open their offices in London and Berlin, and then the local CEO said that in the Finnish culture there was this, everybody was discussing about where should we be heading, but then there he realized that whenever he opened his mouth, then the conversation was, that was the end of the conversation, because then the local employees in Germany and England thought that, “Okay, now the boss has spoken, so no need to speak anymore.” So, because of that, he stopped, they gave his comments, so he allowed the people to discuss and he didn’t say his own opinion, because that was the only way to get the conversation flowing. But then the Finnish employees who were working there, they were like, “Hey, why are you not contributing? Why are you not giving your opinion?”

So, the Finnish employees were expecting him to give his contribution, but the Finnish employees were evaluating his contribution as one among the other opinions rather than the boss’s final word on these matters. So, it took some teaching to these German employees and his English employees for them to learn how this model works. And when the boss says something, you can still say your own opinion, even if it will be different from that, you can disagree with your boss. So, probably these cultural expectations have a big role in how the leaders are, they’re expected to behave. And then if you have trying to bring this more low-hierarchy model, it’s probably going to take more time and more hierarchical culture to implement, because people have to unlearn the old way of thinking and old way of behaving in organisations in order to be able to fit to this new model. So, in that sense, it’s probably easier to implement these kinds of models in the Nordic countries, but I think it’s still possible, but it’s just more of a learning curve.

Mikko Leskelä:

Do we have any global known success stories where an organization would’ve adapted more Nordic leadership style intentionally and gained great results?

Anders Indset:

I would say there are, I mean, facets. If you look at an organisation like Pixar, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs, you look at read of the great leadership books that we’ve read multiple times the communication style of an uplifting communication where you not have that dominant preach, you don’t tell people what to do, but you teach them how to think and Ed Catmull was very good at that. He had a concept called plussing, whereas they would draw the characters and they would come back and they would sit together and discuss the storyboards very openly so, because it’s co-creation, but instead of saying, “No, this character should not be a rat, it should be a mouse.” Which is a dominant way of managing and using the power that takes out the creativity of an employee, they would say, “I liked what you did with the ears. I liked what you did with the face. I liked the character in this character. Maybe we could try it also as a mouse.” Right? And it’s a way of plussing the basis of what you have done.

I think this is a way of communication way that is a symbol of one organisation. Other things is also that you can see a lot in the tech companies today, knowledge is we have infinite access to free knowledge today. So, the layer of management where we have someone preaching knowledge becomes obsolete, because everyone has access. So, today it’s more about how can you facilitate change or progress? And I think that comes out of two things. One of them is trust, as we have talked about, and the other is friction. So, you have those different opinions. So, you have the trust and the friction, and if you can dance with different opinions going down into, because I’m a first principle thinking and looking at the underlying problems, then something new can emerge.

And we used to have this spot in an organisation. We had a trillion-dollar industry where everyone used to go to the office, right? Remember where we had some kind of base trust in the company and we bumped into each other at the coffee machine. So, the coffee machine was symbolic for trust and friction, and there sparked many small Gallic villages ideas that grew into organization.

And I’ve seen this in many organisations that, coming back to your question that there are many organisations that behave like this, whether it’s on purpose or not, I think it has a lot to do with that, what we call culture that you cannot really grasp and copy. It’s not a one-off, a very stable five bullet points to check that. It’s much deeper in the human scheme of things and I think that is very important today. So, I think a lot of the tech companies are actually operating like that, because they understand that it’s not about just preaching knowledge, but to teaching people how to think, to learn how to learn and we need a big toolbox and dynamic structures to do so. So, yeah. I see quite a few organisations that are moving in this direction.

Mikko Leskelä:

Yeah, and… Sorry. Go ahead, Frank.

Frank Martela:

Yeah, I also agree that the more the organisation is in a creative industry where they need to innovate, where the people need to create something new, I would think that those are the places where you tend to find these kinds of organisations. But at the same time, I think one misconception is that this Nordic leadership style would mean that everybody would be equal on an equal level. So, of course the CEO might be the one who is more listening to people, wanting to know what people’s opinions are, but still, they’re still often the ones who are expected to make the decisions … the bigger decisions in the company.

So, in social psychology, there’s the distinction between two ways of having power over others. So, one of them is this dominance, which means that you can somehow order other people to do certain things and you have certain punishments or certain rewards through which you do that. But the other is this, so-called prestige where people follow you because they feel that you are the one who knows where we should be going and in these kind of organisations, I think leaders are leading more through this prestige that people are following them, not because they have to, but more because they feel that, “Hey, I want to follow this person because I think the person has a good vision of where we should be going.”

And then on some minor issues, it might be that some expert within the company has more knowledge than the CEO of that matter. So, in that situation, the people are more willing to follow that person’s opinion. So in that sense, the CEO or the top manager has to earn their prestige by making the right decisions and showing people why they’re, and giving the reasons why they’re doing the certain decisions rather than automatically having people following them.

Laura Sivula:

Maybe to follow up on that, I think self-directed leadership styles and autonomous leadership styles have received quite a lot of bad press, because I think that they’re quite often misinterpreted in a way that the organisations where people are left on their own, that’s not really what we are aiming for. So, I think when we combine this trust and freedom with also taking care of people and understanding people’s motivations and how they really thrive at work, that’s really the sweet spot where we want to operate when we talk about these leadership characteristics that we have now associated with the Nordic leadership style. So, bringing in that sense of work-life balance, sense of well-being and happiness is something that I think is quite characteristic.

One thing that I often talk about, about Finland when I meet people around the world, is I think it’s quite interesting that we can’t actually afford to lose people in the job market. So, we actually have to keep people fairly happy because we have to keep everyone working. We don’t have a concept of a housewife, we don’t have a concept of people working in your home, so everyone is expected to contribute to the society. So, when we have this kind of structure, it builds interesting kinds of expectations to work life as well and we tend to take quite good care of the people who work in our organisations. We are forced into that situation, but what comes out of it is something quite unique in a way how we operate in organisations and in society.

Mikko Leskelä:

Laura, it’s like you were anticipating my last question, because now the discussion has been very much on the situation of the organisation or even the individual. We live in a very uncertain and difficult to grasp world. Is there something from a larger, wider point of view that would actually make good for the whole world? If one principle from the Nordic leadership style was adapted more widely, what would that be? And the last comments, in free order, who wants to? Whoever wants to go first. What would be the one thing you would adapt more widely in the world to make this world a better place?

Frank Martela:

I think the trust that was mentioned already in the beginning by Laura, I think that’s very important. I also remember as regards to this happiness, Finland being the happiest country, the Nordic countries being always in the top 10, in the top 10 of the world’s happiest countries. I remember when the pandemic started and I actually had just written a chapter for this world happiness report, and we had this internal meeting of researchers focusing on that topic.

And then everybody seemed to have been thinking about the same thing when the pandemic started, that, “When will the pandemic end?” We are going to see that those countries where trust in each other is high are going to be the countries which are going to survive this pandemic better. And that turned out to actually be the truth, that afterwards there were studies that showed that high trust countries had lower debt rates compared to low trust countries, because in those countries people were like when there was some order that, “Hey, you should be behaving this way.” People were trusting the government, they were following the order, and through that they were able to survive better than those countries where there was much mistrust, many various suspicious theories about the origin of the thing or how it should be treated and so forth. So, I would think that trust is important at an organisational level, but it’s probably even more important on a societal level.

Laura Sivula:

Something that I would want to see more is this kind of sustainable and long-term thinking. So, really investing in building a good work life. So, trusting people in organisations and building good places to work, good places to build careers and to innovate and to contribute. I think that’s something that we value very highly in Nordic countries. So, not chasing after quick wins, but rather looking a bit further with a long-term vision.

Anders Indset:

Yeah, I think there are two things that I would mention. One is unfortunately he passed away way too early, one of the great inspiring thinkers from Sweden, professor Hans Rosling and the founder of the Gapminder Foundation, he talked about shabam of the American dream and everything should be that all the way or the destructive pessimism like the Germans always complain, but they just keep working, right? Between that you have a realm of Possibleism and Hans Rosling united enlightenment and a look into the future. And I think one of the crucial skills today in leadership is to anticipate futures. There you go, Factfulness. Exactly. And I question over and over again, why is it that so many leaders around the world, politicians included, act as if we would not have progress in technology and science?

We can anticipate over the past 80 years we’ve had exponential growth in technology and I do not think, by all due respect to this organization, but I do not think we will go and play a snake on our Nokia 5110 in the next five years. I think the development will continue. We will have better batteries, we will have more energy, and so on and so forth. So, this skill to anticipate the future, I think Sweden and Finland has been good at that. Norway is catching up also on an entrepreneurial level and looking into future business models that unites economy and ecology. So, that is one thing. The other thing that I wanted to mention is to live an active life. There was a recent Ipsos study showing that Chinese workers are happy, much more so than a lot of the people complaining in Europe.

So, the welfare state comes at a cost because the destructure into home offices and too much spare time and there was a great book back, I think it was 1984 written called We Are Using Ourself to Death and it builds on the dystopia from Brave New World, from Aldous Huxley. And basically it was a television, right? And we have gotten into that social media optimisation culture of thumbs up, thumbs down, and we are becoming reactive, which is very exhausting. So, living an active life and you see that in the Nordics. You put the winter clothes on the kids and throw them out to play, and they want to play in the forest and in the snow and they’re active and they are working less and having home and sick days and what not. It seems like a social model, but it turns out that it’s in a destruction model because it gets into that consumption and reactive mode and we used to have that activation part.

And I think in order to live a fulfilled life, you have to fill your life with activation. Coming back to the motivation that Frank talked about. So, finding an incentive for change, finding an incentive to go to do things, to have structure and to actually do a lot of work and to progress and to feel that experience. I think that is deeply ingrained in happiness and I think many lose track of that when we get too wealthy, a little bit lazy, and we want to have too many days off. So, I think there is some magic to that active culture that Nordics have had over the years with children doing a lot of stuff and having a big toolbox of various skills and things that they do. So, I would say the activation and also the anticipated future to be two things that also emphasises global leadership in the future.

Mikko Leskelä:

Amen. I think we’ve now accomplished the task that we were set to define what Nordic leadership could be about, how it could be relevant to wider audiences or even what we should not forget about it ourselves. Isn’t that right? Thank you for this conversation. I’m truly happy that you, Anders and Frank and Laura could join us and today is a great day. We published the Leaders50 listing. You’ll find a lot of leaders there who actually live up to the ideals that were just described here. Thank you all so very much and thank you to all the viewers who got this far. Thank you.

Frank Martela:

Thank you.

Anders Indset:

Thank you so much, Mikko. Thank you for doing this.

Laura Sivula:

Thanks.

Anders Indset:

Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Frank.