Business owners define an ownership strategy, which defines why they want to own the business, the direction they want the business to take, and their financial or other expectations of the business.
The Annual General Meeting also elects the Board of Directors, which is responsible for ensuring the legality and effectiveness of operations as well as strategy work. Choosing a good Managing Director is central to these.
It is said that expert organisations in Finland are "overmanaged but underled". We know how to manage with engineering-like precision, but when it comes to managing people, we scrabble around. However, in growth companies, inspiring people to grow and implement a shared vision is a key cornerstone of success.
Leadership, as well as sales situations and various negotiation situations, eventually become condensed into people-to-people encounters. Success depends on the parties being able to put themselves in each other's shoes and understand what is important to the other party and why. In an interactive situation, different emotions also come and go, and understanding them helps in managing the situation.
An important tool for good leadership is the leader's own personality and self-awareness: a good leader is able to call on the different facets of their personality when confronted with different people, situations and motives. The hidden, unconscious emotions of a good leader don't get in the way of an interactive situation.
In 2004, the United Nations and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) launched a pamphlet called "Who cares, wins" to provide systematic guidance for financial players on how to better integrate ESG, for example, environmental, population and governance issues, into their decision-making processes. The underlying idea was that the most effective way to improve the world is to require that regulated financial players are made accountable, rather than requiring it from companies without any legal or regulatory constraints.
According to the Diversity Review recently published by TESI (Finnish Industry Investment), a fifth of the venture capital team in Finland today are women. The trend is much better: the number of women in the sector has doubled in recent years and even the number of young people has grown steadily.
The task of a limited liability firm is to generate value for its owners, and the task of a managing director and Board of Directors is to ensure that this actually happens.