Quickthink

Mr. Martini was annoyed. After all, Tallinn has been loaded with Finnish tourists for years. Why isn’t Tartu loaded with Finnish … intellectuals?? We are, after all, a university town. I thought this was a pretty good point and so over a glass of wine, I mentioned it to my friend, Marju Unt (Director of Estonian Euromanagement Institute)

BTW where I very happily teach negotiation and conflict management).

Here’s a pic of Marju in Verona (she is an opera lover)

Marju answered

“Silly boy! The Finns ARE here. This Friday we had an outstanding event in Tartu: Regio, a very special company, had invited the famous Finnish management and leadership philosopher Esa Saarinen to talk to the company and to Regio’s friends.  

So I asked Marju if she would write a brief review of the event. here it is . and very nice too!

Regio has always been striking proof that the modern company has no limits — under certain conditions. Its employees should have no limits. The company should work with the same dynamic passionate people whose limits are very broad, and the company should keep  pushing the limits of these people. Teet Jagomägi, the leader of Regio, has talked about his principles of life and work as a visiting professor to the alumni of our institute.

I was honored to be invited as a friend of Regio, to share the interesting space of thought with 150 people. It was a luxurious day, thinking about fundamentals of our life, both as professionals and human beings. 

Esa led us to think how the smallest things, if we have imagination and courage to do them in a different way, may create a big difference in a long run. 

He started by paying tribute to president Lennart Meri, recalling the famous story from the beginning of the 1990’s, when Meri, was returning from his visit to Japan. Meri gave his press conference in the Tallinn Airport… from an ugly dirty toilet!  Meri’s gesture made it absolutely impossible to ignore any longer the sad state that our international gateway was in… and action followed — there was no way to escape!

Esa Saarinen got us thinking, why are we so afraid, hiding our fears by being cynical and thus diminishing our world via cynicism, rather than up-scaling it, putting ourselves in line, and 100 per cent into the game!

I personally would have liked some public discussion with the professor during the session, going deeper into some interesting matters, listening to his comments.  But Esa had his own plan, where he wanted to lead us to during this one short day!

I am very glad that such a great number of bright young Estonian professionals were thinking about the human side and their own ability to raise the quality of each other’s lives as a key to having a fruitful professional life.  I kept hearing people saying: “why haven’t matters like these been discussed with us already many years ago”? Or that, “everything that Esa said, seemed directly to apply to my own life”!

 Hmmm ….. wonder if Mr. Martini can get me invited next time ……. In the meantime, I will be posting about these kinds of events in QT, and looking to develop more!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Business, Business models, Law, Management, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.