The morning opened with one question on the screen: Are you ready to commit to growth?
It sounds simple. In Finland, it is not. Earlier this year, two Aalto Leaders’ Insight articles from the TUTA Board Breakfast asked what boards should demand of a growth agenda. The CEO Growth Circle turned the question around. What does growth demand of the CEO, and of the owners who write the CEO’s mandate?
The answer was the same in both keynotes and at every table, and it was not a comfortable one. The Finnish growth gap has little to do with industry structure, geography, or capital. It starts with the target.
A decade in which no Finnish large-cap beat the global average
Jukka Maksimainen, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, opened with the evidence. In a global sample of some 3,300 of the world’s largest companies, revenue grew at an average of 8.4 percent a year between 2013 and 2023. The twenty largest listed companies in Finland grew at 3.4 percent. “Our research concluded that no large-cap company in Finland has grown above the global average,” Maksimainen said, and the distribution chart behind him showed every one of them sitting to the left of the global mean.
The usual explanations do not hold up. Take out the companies in cyclical or structurally challenged industries, and 0.6 percentage points of the gap disappear. Account for the loss of Russian trade, and another 0.4 goes. Four percentage points remain, and that is before counting the advantage Finnish companies enjoy in relatively low energy costs.
Industry structure and Russia explain one percentage point of the gap. The other four start with ambition.
Maksimainen’s answer is the target itself. Among large companies that publish a growth target, the Finnish average now stands at 5.1 percent annual sales growth. Their Swedish peers aim for 9.0 percent. Since McKinsey published its report a year ago, one in four Finnish large caps has raised its growth target, on average by half, and the targets have become more concrete. But the 3.9-point gap to Sweden is almost exactly the four points of growth that industry and geography cannot explain. “Finnish large-cap companies’ growth challenge starts with the growth ambition,” he said.
Capital allocation follows ambition. Over the past decade, Finnish large caps have paid out around 70 percent of net earnings to shareholders, against about 55 percent among global peers, and they put a smaller share of revenue into R&D, capital expenditure, and acquisitions. A company that does not expect to grow has no reason to reinvest, and a company that does not reinvest will not grow.
Big moves, and how few Finnish companies make them
McKinsey’s research on what moves a company up the performance curve is clear on one point: incremental effort does not do it. Over ten years, five “big moves” separate the companies that climb from those that stay where they are. Maksimainen showed how many Finnish large caps clear each bar.
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Programmatic M&A. At least one deal a year, none larger than 30 percent of market capitalization, adding up to 30 percent over ten years. No Finnish large cap clears this bar.
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Resource reallocation. Shifting 10 to 30 percent of revenue between businesses, so the portfolio moves without abandoning the core. Eight Finnish large caps clear it.
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Capital expenditure. Cumulative R&D and capex relative to depreciation in the top 20 percent of the industry. Three of them make the cut.
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Productivity improvement. SG&A productivity gains in the top 20 percent of the industry. A single Finnish company gets there.
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Differentiation improvement. Gross margin gains in the top 20 percent of the industry. Seven Finnish large caps qualify.
The moves compound. A company that makes three or more of them in a decade has a 47 percent chance of moving up the curve. With two moves, the odds fall to 17 percent, with one or none to 8 percent. No Finnish large cap has made three, four have made two, and the rest have made one or none. On those odds, Finland can expect about two of its largest companies to outperform their global peers over the coming decade. Two companies will not move a national economy.
“Few Finnish companies act decisively enough to make a difference,” Maksimainen said. His point was not that Finnish managers are weak. It was that they are aiming too low, and the minimum bar he proposed is the Swedish level of ambition. “We need to up our targets. Raise the bar, and make the choices needed to reach it.”
The same data set shows that revenue growth of 10 to 25 percent a year is the sustainable sweet spot: it finances itself, because return on invested capital stays above the cost of capital. Finland’s problem is not that its companies are growing too fast.
Growth starts with mindset
Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and HackerOne, looked at the same question from inside the company and arrived at the same place. Growth starts with mindset: curiosity, courage, ambition, and the will to renew.
Growth happens when six conditions are in place: curiosity, a growth mandate from the owners, a CEO with a growth mindset, growth skills and talent in the organization, focus and funding, and a readiness to cut back on other costs and priorities. Remove any one and growth stalls. Most are within the CEO’s reach, and without the first two, the rest do not matter.
“Your past success is your greatest vulnerability,” Mickos told the room. A company that has done well has every reason to protect what it has, and an organization built to protect resists change. His remedy is to hold both sides of the picture at once: the challenges of customer churn, competitive disruption, and tight budgets, and the opportunities in new products, new customers, and the team already inside the building. The team, he argued, is the most underused of these. Find the small group of people who are curious and fearless, give them the mandate and the space, and let them drive.
His growth principles were practical. Talk to customers and listen to them. Find the long-term trend that growth can be built around. Look for the path with the best learning curve, and start with a narrow focus. Experiment a lot, learn fast, and redirect. And the principle he chose to end on: “Be impatient with actions, patient with results.”
Mickos also asked the room to put business risk in proportion. Companies can fail; people move on and build again. Fear of failure is a poor reason to postpone internal renewal. His last slide explained why growth is not optional: “Without growth, a company cannot remain true to its original idea.” A company that stops growing slowly becomes something other than what it set out to be.
He accepted no excuses. The CEO owns the conditions for growth. If they are not in place, creating them is the first task.
“Without growth, a company cannot remain true to its original idea.”
What the roundtables added
The roundtables tested the keynotes against the reality of running a Finnish company. Five themes came up at table after table.
The first was the price of growth in the first two years. Simulations at the tables showed that a lower EBIT margin for a period can produce stronger growth and more value over time, but the first year or two of a growth investment looks worse before they look better. The hard part is explaining that to owners and the board. It takes a credible story, told before the numbers dip rather than after. An owner who understands the journey can hold the line. One who reads about it in the quarterly report cannot.
The second was alignment between the CEO and the board. Growth transformations take companies outside their comfort zone: investment rises, familiar metrics slip, and stakeholders start asking questions. It works only if the CEO and the board want the same thing and have agreed on what good looks like. Participants also noted that a CEO’s tenure is often about four years, while a real growth transformation takes longer. The ambition, therefore, has to belong to the owners and the board, not to one CEO’s term.
The third was that growth changes the organization more than companies expect, in culture, processes, ways of working, and capabilities. Can the existing people and teams make the shift? There are two paths: developing the people you have or bringing in people you do not, and leaders need to be honest about which one they are on. The importance of new recruitment also came up at several tables. Companies that keep hiring the same profile end up homogeneous, and homogeneous organizations struggle to grow. Growth needs more variety and fewer safe bets.
The fourth was time and the discipline of saying no. Growth often needs a year or more of investment before anything shows, which takes patience when the evidence is thin. But patience is not tolerance. Companies also have to stop good ideas that are not the best use of scarce resources. As one table put it, some good ideas do not die because they are bad. They die because we fail to invest in them. Moving money and people toward an uncertain future, at the expense of a predictable core, is the CEO’s job. No one else will do it.
The fifth was ecosystems and speed. Growth increasingly happens through partnerships and networks rather than inside one company. As another table put it, companies do not take risks; people do. That puts courage, incentives, psychological safety, and leadership behavior at the center of a growth culture. And speed itself is worth money: the ability to decide and move quickly deserves investment of its own
Some good ideas do not die because they are bad. They die because we fail to invest in them.
Growth is a decision, made three times
Put together, the morning came down to this. Growth is decided three times, by owners, boards, and CEOs, and it fails when any one of them leaves the decision to the others.
Owners set the mandate. If owners are content with dividends and buybacks financed by a stable core, no CEO can carry a growth agenda through the years when it costs more than it returns. The questions for owners: How much of last year’s profit went back into growth, and who decided? Would you back a CEO whose plan lowers EBIT for two years in order to double the growth rate? Have you said so out loud?
Boards hold the ambition. A board that spends its time interrogating the plan behind management’s target, and none of it asks whether the target is high enough, has already made its decision. The questions for boards: When did you last debate the level of ambition rather than the plan? Does the growth target get the same rigor as the cost budget? The Swedish benchmark gives every board a starting point for its next strategy session: why not nine?
CEOs build the conditions. Mickos’s six conditions and Maksimainen’s five moves are, in the end, a job description. The questions for CEOs: Which of the five big moves has your company made in the past decade, and which will it make in the next three years? Who in your organization has a real mandate to build the new business, and what have you cut to fund it?
Finland has everything it needs to grow except the decision to do it. Nobody in the room on September 7 disputed the data or asked for an exception. The question they left with is the one the morning opened with. Are you ready to commit to growth?
Be impatient with actions and patient with results, and raise the bar.
The Aalto CEO Growth Circle continues in February 2027, with the theme How AI Is Transforming Work, Leadership, and Organizations.
