The Mentor I Never Met

My father was an entrepreneur his whole life, in northeast Finland. Around our dinner table, we talked about craft. How a thing worked. How you solved a problem. You did the job right the first time, because there was no second one. We never talked about customers. We never talked about strategy. For my father, the work spoke for itself.

For years, I believed that too. Then I started a company and learned the hard way that the work does not speak for itself. Someone has to choose you first. Nobody at that dinner table had ever taught me how to make that happen.

I found the answer in books. I do not remember where I first read the name Peter Drucker, but his thinking became the business education I never got at home. The mentor I never met.

One idea reorganized everything. In my own understanding, the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Profit is the result of doing that well, not the goal. The two functions that actually create a customer are marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost.

I had grown up believing the work was enough. Drucker made me see that the work has to reach someone, and that someone has to choose you over everyone else.

But the part that changed what we actually did was quieter. Drucker gave me a way to decide what not to do.

While everyone around us chased the easy work, database projects, financial applications, the things any competent team could deliver, we went the other way on purpose. 3D modeling. Machine vision. Classification algorithms. The hard problems most companies stepped around.

That single choice paid us back twice. We grew because almost nobody wanted to compete in the place we had chosen to live. The hard ground was empty.

And the best engineers came to us, because nothing pulls a talented person like a difficult problem that matters. We never had to sell them on the company. The work did that.

My father taught me to respect the craft. Drucker taught me to build a business around it. I have spent thirty years standing on the seam between those two lessons.

Both still hold.

Kauko Väinämö is CEO of Ginolis