Being honest, transparent and true and also creating the atmosphere for innovation are very important values for Victor Saeijs, Vice-President Sales Eurasia for Nokia. He also believes that the biggest values in everybody's life are family and health and he always tells this to his colleagues.
1. What values do you share in life and in business?
My fundamental principals which are very much in line with Nokia values, and that's why I love working for Nokia start with being honest, transparent and true. Paint the picture as it really is, if it's tough, if it's bad, show that it's bad, don't show any good picture. Be true with your teams, with your customers, with your family and with yourself. Another element is that nobody has the wisdom by him or herself, in a team composition if you have a good diversified team which is working in strong collaborative way together, you're simply stronger than other teams or individuals. In this respect you should always hire team members who are better than you in certain elements, whether it's in marketing or sales or logistics because you cannot be an expert in everything.
2. Is there anything else that is important to you?
Another values I've mentioned already is very much about innovating, challenging the status-quo and stretching - that's a key value that I have, and in that respect nothing is impossible. If you have a positive attitude towards making things possible they are very likely to happen. If you see the glass half full, it's a much better proposition than seeing the glass half-empty. A very interesting element of the human composition is that the mind can do so much more than we think we can. I've said before that life is too short to work yourself to death, you need to do the things which are important for you and important for your family and for your friends. I always ask my children to tell me what they think the most important thing in life is. And they say that it's family and health, and friends are a part of it as well. And that is my core value, I think it's very important. And everything else just fits into that.
3. Is money important?
Money doesn't make people more happy. I've travelled around, I've lived 6,5 years in Asia, I travelled all around Asia and India and Philippines and in extremely poor areas in China where people are so incredibly poor but they are very happy. They have other enjoyments - if there's a good harvest, they enjoy a good harvest, if there's a birth, they celebrate the birth, if there's the wedding, they celebrate the wedding and they have the incredible positive attitude to life, but they have nothing. And in many other parts of the world where people have lots, they may have better healthcare, they may live longer but are they happier actually? I'm not sure.
4. What is honesty for you?
I'm from Netherlands, I'm not sure maybe it's an international saying but it says like "Honesty takes the longest root", and very often it's the toughest root but if you stick to it and you follow through eventually it pays back. It may seem tough at that point of time but if you actually follow through, you'll see that it pays back later. We had a few cases in Russia in the last few years that I've been here where we simply stuck to our principles and it has helped and we did followed through. And sometimes it was really tough frankly speaking.
5. Could you explain the business model of your company in order it should be understood by a schoolboy?
We create very nice communication devices which look good and have great functionality and are easy to use, some of them are mobile computers and some of them are mobile devices. What we do is we make them so desirable that when we sell them to our consumers, people in the street are willing to pay the high price for a mobile - that's where we get our money. And we try to make the whole purchasing that we sell at a good level as high as possible and we buy at the low cost as we can. And everything that we have in between allows Nokia to reinvest into future products or services or pay money to our shareholders. So we create and sell very nice technology telecom products, sell as high as we can and buy as low as we can - and this is the way we make our money.
6. How much is there in nowadays Nokia from the small one it had been before?
I'm not sure how much of that is village Nokia, I've never been there, by the way. But if you think about the Finnish roots, they are still very strong. And the Finnish roots of Nokia are about transparency, teamwork, taking risks, going to new businesses. If you think about some of the sports where Finland is good in, multi-racing, ski jumping, you need to have pretty high level of risk taking and persistence to follow through, and some of them you can see in the culture of Nokia. That is one of the reasons why Nokia was able to win and has such a long history, Nokia was able to reinvent itself five or six times in a major way, we are in the middle of the major reinvention. The Nokia which will emerge into five to eight years from now will be very different from the Nokia five or eight years ago. I don't know how many reinventions there have been, but now we're on the next one. And that makes it very exiting to be part of it.
