Earlier this year, at the Board Breakfast at the IEM premises at Aalto University, around the table we had chairs and members from some of Finland's most influential boards, several faculty members, and a provocation on the screen behind us — a sentence we had both heard, in slightly different forms, from CEOs we respect.
"Cost is in my hands. Growth I cannot control."
It is one of the most expensive sentences in Finnish business. It is wrong. And it survives largely because boards let it.
Over the past decade, Finland's twenty largest listed companies grew at roughly 3% per year. Their global peers grew at closer to 8%. That gap is not bad luck, and it is not a talent problem. We have the engineers, the institutions, the capital, the trust. What we have not had — consistently, at scale, across decades — is the management discipline to treat growth with the same rigor we apply to cost.
Cost programs have a methodology. Owners. Weekly tracking. A CFO who lives and dies by the number. Growth gets one strategy slide with abstract goals. That is what we want to change, and the chair is the person who can change it.
The gap between Finland and its global peers is not a bad luck or a talent problem.
The data is uncomfortably clear
When BCG looked at 100 large transformation programs, the result was stark. Companies running pure cost-and-productivity transformations outperformed direct peers on total shareholder return by +11 percentage points over three years. Companies running holistic transformations — cost and growth, in parallel, as one integrated program — outperformed by +41 percentage points.
Almost four times the value creation. Same three-year window. Same volatility. The differentiator was that the CEO refused to choose between defense and offense.
And here is the gap we cannot ignore. Looking at the full sample of CEO-led transformation programs by headquarters location, the share of initiatives focused on growth is highest in North America, solid in Asia and the Middle East, lowest in Europe, and a further percentage point lower in Finland. We are, measurably, the most defensive corner of a defensive continent. That is a choice being made in boardrooms, one agenda at a time.
The ten things we actually said in the room
We did not have breakfast over abstract frameworks. We projected ten sentences with evidence behind them and talked through where each one had worked and where it had failed. Call them commandments if you like; we did. They are what separates the companies that compound from the companies that plateau and each one is something a chair can test at the next meeting.
1. Decide to grow. Set targets meaningfully above the peer average. Not “ambitious within reason.” Above the peer average is, by definition, where the value gets created. The chair’s job is to notice when a target has quietly been engineered from what feels safely deliverable.
2. Do not accept excuses. Every sector, every cycle, every geography contains companies growing two or three times faster than the rest. The market is never the reason. Find them, study them, beat them. The discussion starts with naming them in the first place.
3. Grow on a healthy base. Reset your cost position, productivity, and operating model before you pour fuel on revenue. Growth on a broken base produces dilution, not value. Be sure to have the facts that the base is in good shape.
4. Grow accretively, not dilutively. Ruthlessly prioritize good growth. Accounting revenue that destroys margin is not a strategy; it is a press release. Insist that growth is always reported with its margin attached.
5. Balance discipline and creativity. Expect delivery today and renewal tomorrow. The CEOs who get this right are bilingual; they speak quarterly results and ten-year bets in the same sentence. A board that only rewards the first language will end up with a CEO who only speaks it.
6. Accelerate via a growth transformation. Treat growth as a CEO-priority program with structure, governance, and resources — exactly the way you treat cost-out. Not as a portfolio of hopes attached to business unit leaders’ bonuses.
7. Set a portfolio of growth initiatives. Single bets rarely work for long. Growth compounds out of many interactions: pricing, sales effectiveness, new product introduction, geographic expansion, bolt-on M&A. Run them as a portfolio, not as a tournament. Individual levers reach their full potential only in combination with several others.
8. Set your growth equation. Define, on one page, where the growth comes from: organic versus inorganic, by geography, by segment, by year. Then stress-test it. If the equation does not survive a bad scenario, the strategy does not exist. A chair should be able to recite that page from memory.
9. Follow up rigorously. Establish lighthouse metrics that the whole organization is obsessed with. Two-thirds of growth programs do not meet their targets, and they fail almost entirely on execution, not on idea quality. Manage growth like you manage cost: weekly, with consequences.
10. Start now. The problem is not only a lack of ambition; it is a quiet conviction that we should wait until the plan is perfect, the committee has signed off, the consultant has presented, and the risk has been modeled three ways. Nobody was waiting for Slush when it started, and nobody believed a Finnish company could build a global delivery platform when Wolt started. Start before you are ready, because you will never be ready.
Here’s how boards can get started
Boards are not the heroes of growth — CEOs and operating teams are. But boards are the unlock. Without an ambitious, well-composed board, the CEO's growth agenda dies in year two, when the cost program starts paying back, and the easier path is to declare victory. Three things we asked the room to take home.
Audit your last twelve board agendas. Add up the minutes spent on growth versus the minutes spent on compliance, audit, ESG reporting, and incremental updates. If growth is below 30% of strategic discussion time, your agenda is telling your CEO that you do not actually care about it. Fix the agenda before you fix the strategy.
Boards wanting growth should ask themselves: do we have operators in this room who have personally taken a P&L from €50m to €500m?
Pressure-test the ambition, not just the plan. Most boards spend 90 percent of their growth-related time interrogating the plan behind a target that management has already set, and almost none challenge whether the target is high enough. Reverse it. The right question is not “can we hit 4%?” It is “what would it take to grow two, three, four times that — and what are we doing to remove the obstacles on the way there?”
Put a growth operator on every people committee. Nomination and remuneration decisions quietly determine whether your CEO can recruit growth talent and reward intelligent risk-taking. If everyone on the committee has spent their career managing mature P&Ls, your incentive system will reward managing mature P&Ls. Boards that genuinely want growth should ask one question of themselves: Do we have operators in this room who have personally taken a P&L from €50m to €500m? If not, fix the room before you fix the strategy.
Growth is execution
Growth is not a quarter. It is a habit — the team deciding every Monday morning that this week they will try something they have not tried, talk to a customer they have not talked to, or fix a friction they have been tolerating. The compound interest on that habit over five years is staggering.
Growth is not constrained by ideas, by markets, or by capital. It is constrained by the discipline of execution — the unglamorous management practice of setting a target, breaking it into pieces, assigning owners, tracking weekly, holding people accountable, and refusing to let it slip behind the cost agenda when the quarter gets hard.
Growth is not magic. It is management. Set the ambition, agree the equation, find the operators — and then, tehdään vaan.
