Friday, June 29, 2007

Suitable Shoes and Eight-Passion Business Talk

In this country the business advisory systems work well. If you have an idea, they do their best to help you to develop it further. Today we went to business counselling to report the results of a marketing research of a business idea we are developing. The research shows that the market exists. All the rest seems to depend on how to finance the project. Three small businesses together does not make one big and prosperous one. We ended up talking about pitching the idea. In other words, we started thinking how to explain the whole concept in three minutes while standing in an elevator by side of a likely business angel.

"Just in case you see proper size shoes while standing in a lift," our advisor said.

Shoes are important. Not only in the elevators but also in art galleries. As far as I know there is only one Finnish art gallerist who has had remarkable success in international art business as well. All kinds of people pop in into art galleries. "How do you recognize, who are the real, big customers? How do they stand out from ordinary visitors?" the interviewer asked.

"You never know," the gallerist said. "There is nothing especial to indicate big buyers. They do not stand out. You never know. " After some thinking she added: "Well, maybe I could say one thing. That is their shoes."

World is filled with valuable tacit knowledge. Sometimes it is in recognizing shoes. Sometimes somewhere else. However, it exists. That is something you can be sure about.

Pitching is of vital importance when building business, no doubt about that. However, it is equally important to be able to talk about life outside business. If you talk only business, you are dull. Dull people do not attract business angels.

The problem embedded in this is that building business does not leave a lot of free time to live a colourful life filled with versatile interests to talk about. What can we do? There is much enough risk in your business idea. You do not want to extend risks to your social life around it. The remedy has been found. You can talk about hockey. If you do not like hockey, you can choose some other passions:

"Audi cars, Breitling watches, tinnitus/Ménièr´s disease, boxers (the dog breed), adopting children, London, digital photography, and Macintosh. With these eight passions, I can connect to anyone in the world."

Having read that I feel helpless. The most familiar one of those topics would be tinnitus. Talking about that is unpleasant, because I need to first imagine the tinnitus sounding. It is a sharp, annoying whistling at the background of the slight rattle of the keyboard. It is like imagining the bagpiper at the corner of a street without the man wearing a kilt. I do not want to talk about tinnitus. Next alternatives would be London and adopting children, but the tinnitus is now going on. I´m unable to concentrate on collecting ideas around any other topics just now. Maybe later.

Audi cars, Breitling watches, boxers, digital photography and Macintosh! A Spanish poet once said to me: "Tener una conversación contigo es como hablar con un extraterrestre." Maybe I should become one to be able to talk passionately about the topics on that list.

Perhaps I am "a pathetic person with no passions". In that case there is one thing I can do: read voraciously. People who read voraciously can at least talk a little about a lot of things.

If you want to learn more about business and passions you will find the above information in the book Kawasaki, Guy: The Art of the Start, The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (Portfolio, 2004, ISBN: 1-59184-056-2). I greatly appreciate people who share the valuable tacit knowledge they have gathered as business advisors, art gallerists and writers.

Kawasaki says that he would rather be poor than play golf. I would rather play golf than listen to the tinnitus. Luckily I know the message it is telling to me - Go to bed. It´s past midnight.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Stories to Think About

One day I went to the library. Seen from the air you know why it is called wood grouse - el urogallo. Entering the building you understand why people consider it their own living room. The muumins live in the gound floor. They have been caught in the middle of their adventures. In daytime they look motionless and innocent, as if nothing were happpening there. But you should see their night time acitivities - wood is chopped, ships are loaded, journeys pepaired. http://inter9.tampere.fi/muumilaakso/

During the daytime the activities take place on the first floor. My favourite acitivity is to check what the librarians have chosen as "special offers" at the head of the long shelves - newly acquired books, seasonal topics and something that they for some reason want to point out. That special day I found Cuentos para pensar by Jorge Bucay.

Picking up a book in Spanish is exciting. Due to my occasional mastery of Spanish I never know beforehand if I understand the text or not. Sueños en el umbral by Fatema Mernissi and Sin destino by Imre Kertész are examples of books that might have gained even extra enjoyability just because I read them in Spanish.

Sometimes reading in Spanish becomes pure meditation. I just read and because I do not understand the text, my brain starts working on something else. It is refreshing.

What surprised me in the Cuentos para pensar by Jorge Bucay is the following extract:

"Voy caminando por un sendero.
Dejo que mis pies me lleven.
Mis ojos se posan en los árboles, en los pájaros, en las piedras.
En en horizonte se recorta la silueta de una ciudad.
Agudizo la mirada para distinguirla bien.
Siento que la ciudad me atrae.
Sin saber cómo, me doy cuenta de que en esta ciudad puedo encontrar todo lo que deseo.
Todas mis metas, mis objetivos y mis logros.
Mis ambiciones y mis sueños están en esa ciudad.
Lo que quiro consequir, lo que necesito, lo que más me gustaría ser, aquello a lo que aspiro, lo que intento, por lo que trabajo, lo que siempre ambicioné, aquello que sería el mayor de mis éxitos.
Me imagino que todo eso está en esa ciudad.
Sin dudar, empiezo caminar hacia ella. /.../"
(Bucay, Jorge: Cuentos para pensar, Del nuevo extremo, Integral, 2006, p. 83, ISBN: 84-7901-868-2)

Imagine that there are two people standing at the spot where Bucay starts describing walking on the path. Both of them listen to the story.

One of them follows it and approaches the town, sin dudar. The other one turns around and starts walking to the opposite direction, towards the forest. Looking for the fullfilment of dreams in a town would never occur to her. If you want to activate your dreams, you do it in the forest, you need to be surrounded by nature.

You can guess who of those two people is a Finn.

Thank you Jorge Bucay. Sin tu texto nunca me hubiese fijado en la profundidad de una diferencia cultural así. Los libros contienen universos, mundos enteros y concretos. También tienen consequencias. Aprendemos.

This experience reminds me of Gregory Bateson - the difference that makes a difference. Today´s paper tells that half of the population of the world lives in cities. What would we Finns gain, if we started at least pretending that life in a city could mean the fulfillment of our personal dreams?

It has been raining heavily for three days now. Thick clouds make the summer nights dark grey. It is a pity!

Monday, June 25, 2007

An Invitation to World Championships

Today I was invited to take part in World Campionships. The contest takes place on Friday. It´s Monday and I´m getting prepared. Mainly mental training at the keyboard. Special focus on persistence in achieving the goal set. This blog-writing programme devours text, labels it as a Draft and then keeps it to himself! I have real difficulties in understanding why the programme is so complicated! The only way to get this text published is to think that this mental strain is useful for gaining some bigger purposes as well. Maybe this is my only possibility to become a world champion. You know the classical once in a lifetime opportunity...

I wanted to add some physical exercise into my training programme to improve my oxygen intake. However, Uffe turned back home when we got on the other side of the street. Somehow he had got the idea that we would go by car. When realising that he should walk he changed his mind and lead me back home.

It is getting cold now. The morning was warm and beautiful. Knowing that the number of hot, sunny summer days is limited to sixteen, if I remember correctly, I decided to invite my mother for a coffee in the open-air market place. Opposite the café there was a stand of the Finnish Aquajogging Association. Aquajogging World Campionships take place in Ikaalinen 29.-30.6.2007. Further information http://vesijuoksu.fi/english.htm

The necessary equipment cost 30 euros. It is a kind of west you wear to be able to run in the water. I hope to have time to test it before Friday.

The programme reveals a kind of age discrimination. Or what do you think of the age groups - 3x50 metres relay, men, women and mixed teams, age + 150 years; 50 metres and marathon, age groups + 40, +50, +60, +70. As you see - exclusively for adults. Sorry young people! You can go to Doris and hit your heads against one another! - Or you can try to find team members with a suitable age to win world championship in relay.

As far as I know the most important matter in sports is to sleep sound, deep and long. This blog-writing programme devours time by side text. In fact I should be sleeping now. My friend Leena bought the aquajogging west as well. She is a madrugador. We made plans to go to practice in the morning. It´s full daylight from three o´clock on. I can put my mobile phone into voiceless, but if she comes to get me Uffe will start barking. I hear him sleeping already...

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Finnish Midsummer and Australian song lines

Can life be normal without being repetitive?
Laura is painting stairs leading to the attic and I´m painting laths. Talking about normal life means picking up exceptional events occured lately. The exception Laura has lately experienced is meeting a gourmet cook. Normally the regular staff of various restaurants where she occasionally goes to work weekend rush hours does not react to the newcomer. This cook does. First he brought her strawberry cake. Next he surprised her with delicious pizza slices. Now he is included in our conversation about repetition and normal life.

"In fact, you could arrange a garden party and he could come and prepare a gourmet meal." Laura suggests. "Oh, yes. You could invite your friends. Tobias would invite his. And then we would invite Seela´s and Samuli´s friends. It´s an excellent idea." I rejoice.

"And what would happen then? What would be normal?" Laura continues. "After the party Tobias would go to Doris and write about that. You would carry all the dishes into the kitchen and say ´Huhhuh. Now I will have a good night´s sleep.´ And that would be normal life in Finland as well."

I admire Laura´s intelligence and her sense of humour. I wish my normal life will offer me friendships like the one between us in the future as well.

We Finns exist for being able to experience the Midsummer. It is Sunday now. There have been no buses since Friday afternoon at two o´clock. All neighbours have gone to the country. Houses are empty. It is quiet. Everything being exceptionally quiet you feel strange when having the feeling that someone is staring at you - espeally if you have just come out of shower. Checking the situation I saw something dark behind the window. My eyes met the eyes of a big, soft-hairy cat. The cat didn´t mind. I was worried that Uffe might smell the visitor and get beaten. Nothing happened. Uffe is no more actively looking for excitement or adventures. If he faces some, his breathing starts hissing. Which do you prefer - normal life and normal breathing or excitement and gasping for breath? It´s your choice.

Today the staring-cat story started opening up.
In the morning I was woken up by a magpie family chatting loudly in the garden. Having finally in the afternoon cut all the branches of apple trees lying on the ground in the garden I could mow the lawn. I found that at least one teenage member of the magpie family had been caught by that tranquil and satisfied looking cat. Maybe I heard their funeral ceremonies in the morning. Or maybe, it was a parental lecture on the importance of paying heed to personal safety.

At Midsummer two dozen Finns get killed on roads, lakes and fights. As there are only 5,276,955 of us (31.12.2006) that is too many, especially because we want to take care of everybody.
In the old days, before contraception, the Midsummer loss of population did not matter that much. It was automatically replaced by new baby Finns nine months later.

In this country we know by the experience of thousands of years that the power of the light Midsummer night magic easily beats the magic power of dark nights. That is why we love the days getting longer and longer since Christmas. We are continuously looking forward to the magic summer nights.

The quickest and most efficient way to change your life is to get married as many Finnish couples do at Midsummer. However, I have contented myself with less radical methods. One of them is reading. I just finished Nice Girls Don´t Get the Corner Office, Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers by Lois P. Frankel (Warner Business Books, 2004). What have I learnt? To be successful in business I should start playing chess. It teaches strategic thinking.

Successful men and women regard business and corporate life as a game. Less successful women regard it as an event - going to a concert or a theatre.

To my disappointment I´m much more more familiar with going to a concert than with playing any games. I
n my family it never occured to anybody that children should learn toplay chess. Chess was for my father only. Neither did we learn to play cards, because playing cards results in rows and fighting. Good bye success in business life!

Perhaps I had better start reading a new book. The next choice is Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. "The book offers concrete suggestions for how to turn negative thinking into positive results."

Have you ever thought about thinking? It would be very interesting to know what happens on the other side of thinking, just before a thought enters your mind. Maybe you have experienced something that refers to the pre-existence of thoughts. Sometimes you get concrete evidence of it.

Perhaps the invisible song lines that in the Australian desserts connect people to each other form a global network. But who activates the connection? Is it the person who came into my mind two minutes ago? Or is it me? Who thought of those pizza slices first - Laura or the gourmet cook? Who had the initiative - me thinking about Anneli and her email address? Or Anneli who called me two minutes after I had thought of her?

Is it so that thinking of anybody activates that particular song line or opens the channel - and that offers us a concrete opportunity to bless that person? Maybe that activation is part of normal life.
Perhaps that can be done in the same way we go to concerts. Maybe we could also make conscious plans to activate the song lines we happen to cross, in which case we make use of strategic thinking. Gourmet cooks are good at strategic thinking. Strategy becomes useful only after you know what you are aiming at.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Uffe and the sunset

I get irritated by the asthmatic, hissing voice of my dog - and I get irritated by my own irritation. It is eleven o´clock. He does not want to go to sleep. He wants to sit outside on the steps looking at the garden and smelling the sunset. It means that he could be sitting there for nearly three hours until the sun starts rising again, because the sunset is immediately followed by the sunrise. There is no darkness in between. Uffe, my dog wants to enjoy normal early-summer life in Finland now.

Daytime is filled with all kinds of scattered and dispersed items - irritating and encouraging. It is the chronological order of the daily anyway items that makes the chaos look an organized, premeditated whole, normal life. Maybe Uffe is collecting his daily experiences and organising them into a coherent, dog-formed whole.

Why do I want to write about normal life in Finland? It is because of my very good friend Tobias. I have regularly read his descriptions of normal life in Finland - vida normal en Finlandia - and I have become more and more interested in what he considers to be normal here. Thank you, Tobias.

For two more weeks Tobias can take pictures from his kitchen window at one o´clock at night with the Näsinneula tower and the sun embracing each other in the horizon. From my own windows I can see just the night-blue-coloured sky having a clear hint of yellow in the north. I used to think that the early summer nights here in Tampere are dark. My reference point was Lapland. Tobias´s reference point is the Mediterranian summernight. All is relative.

Julio was driving me to the airport at Barajas in Madrid. "Why do you go to the llegadas?" I asked. "I´m leaving. We should go to the salidas." "All is relative." Julio said. "The indication is for cars, not for aeroplanes." Had I been driving, how could I have known that in this special occasion llegadas refers to cars and not to aeroplanes? Maybe this is why we need friends - to make sure what llegadas y salidas really refer to.

Tobias writes in one of his native tongues. I envy him. His blog is well written and it can be read anywhere around the world. I`m writing in a foreign language. It takes more effort that I would like to admit, but I do it because of maps.

Once I told Russian teacher students that Finland is a maid. They found it surprising and amusing. Later I saw the Russian maps of the world. Finland was a small formless spot in the left hand corner in them. To see the maid of Finland you need to change the perspective and that changes the relations between items. What is normal becomes different. My own map changed.

I am lucky because I need not get worried about my own ability to tell the difference between the normal and not-normal. My dog Uffe knows the difference. He also pulls me back to normality. If I went downstairs into the kitchen now, made some bush tea and sat at the kitchen table to read something, it would not be normal. Uffe would come and look at me with worried eyes as if saying that I should not disturb him like that. "Take your tea and go upstairs, because that is what you normally do."

When there are visitors in the house, I need to sit where I normally do. Otherwise Uffe comes and politely reminds me where I should be sitting.

Somebody has said that our dreams reveal, what we would do if the body didn´t stop us. Our definitions of what is normal function in the same way. They stop us from seeing what is normal as well, which is a nice contradiction. This is why I need my dog Uffe and my friend Tobias. Uffe shows me what I normally do. Tobias shows me what I could also do.

Lately I have been reading Dreams of Trespass. Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatime Mernissi (Spanish: Sueños en el umbral, Memorias de una ni
ña del harén, Finnish: Unelma Vapaudesta, Lapsuuteni haaremissa).

There is a border between the normal and not-normal. In her book Fatima Mernissi refers to the separation of men and women in the harem. Maybe her words would be valid for the borders of normal and not-normal as well:

.. una frontera cósmica divide el planeta en dos. La frontera se
ñala la línea de poder porque dondequiera que haya una frontera, hay dos clases de criaturas que caminan por la tierra de Alá: de un lado, los poderosos y, de otro, los impotentes.
Pregunté a Mina còmo sabría yo en qué lado estaba. Su respuesta fue rápida, breve y clarísima:
- Si no puedes salir; estás en el lado de los impotentes.