EP99 · Economy · first published 2021-09-18

Saving Strategy | Mika Sutinen Antti Haapakorva | Negotiator 99

Mika Sutinen and Antti Haapakorva have written a book with an uncomfortable thesis: strategy is not spoiled because it is hard, but because we ourselves made it too complicated and less inspiring. In their interview material only one company in four considers its own strategy execution adequate, and the diagnosis has two parts: focus is missing, and many organisations lack even the idea that execution ought to have a system. The remedy is a four-stage model running from understanding through vision and choices to execution, and its load-bearing principle is that modern people commit only to what they helped make. The most interesting passage is a disagreement left unresolved: Miettinen wants a meatier role for the board, Sutinen opposes it and grounds that in a question — can you as management be critical of your own superior if he works for you? The connecting thread is Musti ja Mirri's transformation from a loss-making company with 20 million in revenue to a market value of over a billion, and at the end the place of acquisitions in growth strategy: Sweden by buying, Norway greenfield.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy + Tools and Implementations

Saving Strategy | Mika Sutinen Antti Haapakorva | Negotiator 99

Summary: Mika Sutinen (former CEO of Musti ja Mirri, professional board member) and Antti Haapakorva (founder of Talentree) have written the book Pelastetaan strategia — Let’s Save Strategy — which Sami Miettinen reviews in this episode.

The book’s thesis is a self-accusation: strategy has been spoiled as a term, and we did it ourselves. It has been made too complicated and uninspiring, and that is not strategy’s fault but the fault of how it has been used.

A note on reading this

The episode is a book review with the book’s authors as guests. Miettinen raises several counter-arguments, and on one point the disagreement is not resolved. Views are attributed by speaker, and the disagreement is left visible as it stands in the episode.

Why strategy needs saving

Sutinen recalls a moment from the book launch that captures the problem better than any research number. The CEO of a significant Finnish beverage company asked from the floor whether, while writing the book, they had considered replacing “strategy” with some other term — because the term is so badly tarnished.

“And that question is itself an expression of the problem. We have somewhat spoiled strategy as a term, and we did it entirely ourselves. We made it too complicated, we made it uninspiring. And that is not strategy’s fault but the fault of how we have used it in practice.”

And he rejects the proposed fix: inventing a new term would treat the symptom, not the problem.

The book’s definition is therefore deliberately thin:

“Strategy is ultimately a plan for succeeding in the future. It does not have to be anything else.”

The second half of the diagnosis concerns commitment, and it is the episode’s guiding principle:

“Modern people commit to nothing other than what they were part of making. They cannot commit to something they do not themselves grasp.”

From this follows a requirement for the model: it must be simple enough for the through-line to survive — and the whole exercise has to be crowdsourced. Sutinen dislikes the Finnish word for “involvement” and prefers the English co-creation.

The research number

About 25 interviews were conducted for the book, deepened with electronic surveys of management and staff surveys. Many interviewees came via Kasvuryhmä, a Finnish growth-company network.

The number Miettinen fastens on is stark: only one company in four considers its own way of executing strategy adequate. In Miettinen’s phrasing, execution scores three out of five.

Sutinen’s diagnosis has two parts. The first is a lack of focus, underpinned by a conceptual confusion:

“We have a bit of a tendency to define strategy, when it should not be a definition but a plan — and a plan is something that ought to be executed.”

The second is harsher, and it is the impulse behind the book:

“A surprising number of organisations lack even the idea that there ought to be some system for executing strategy. We plan, we define — but once the strategy is finished, there is an empty gap after it. That is where it should only be starting.”

Sutinen quotes Harri Sivula, formerly of the Kesko retail group: “Well planned is entirely undone.”

Miettinen suggests the fault lies in a lack of co-creation — “it was set from the ivory tower downwards” — and Sutinen qualifies that this is not sufficient as an explanation: even if the planning was done together, the processes may still be missing. Many organisations have perfectly good project management skills; they simply need to be brought into strategy, and the change initiatives to be carried through must be named.

Two funnels

Miettinen presents his own model, which he says his colleagues have mocked: a future funnel in which near-term events sit in the narrow end and it widens towards a ten-year system level evolution where the giant waves of disruption show. Strategy sits somewhere in between. Before that he had a “circle of love”, and before that East German-style unions.

Sutinen and Haapakorva’s model is a second funnel, and a member of Miettinen’s community, Markus Maanoja, had asked how the two relate. Another member, Asko Kauppinen, had asked the more practical version: how do you get fine ideas into practice?

Haapakorva’s answer is neat and settles the question:

“Our funnel describes the process that happens inside your strategy block. So even though there are two funnels, our funnel is inside yours.”

Their funnel therefore describes the course of one strategy iteration: it starts from relatively world-embracing matters and compresses into decisions.

The four-stage model

Haapakorva describes the model with a river-crossing image: if the point of a strategy project is to get from one bank to the other, step on at least these stones.

Haapakorva adds the model’s most practical instruction, an energy budget:

“If you have a hundred units of energy available, it would be good to have, say, 25 and 25 for the last two stones.”

Steam typically runs out before execution — and Haapakorva says it may run out earlier still. He describes a call to a client the same day, where the management team was tiring because the topics already felt covered. His answer is the funnel itself: “The nuggets that come through at the end have in fact often been there the whole way. That is why they taste familiar by then.”

Vision and ambition — and the paranoid optimist

Miettinen asks whether “vision” in their sense is the same as a corporate vision. Sutinen’s distinction is subtle and personal: a vision carries feeling and a dream, while their näkemys is more concrete scenario thinking — what rules will be played by at the next Olympics, and the company is being coached for those. He concedes the analogy is poor, because a company has to perform every day.

Miettinen raises his criticism of the book here, and it is the clearest in the episode: he had listened to Risto Siilasmaa’s Paranoid Optimist, which has the same narrator as his own book. Against that, Pelastetaan strategia strikes him as a fine optimistic book with rather few monsters in it.

“Or is the paranoid scenario something you would not put your own money behind?”

Sutinen rejects the reading: every strategy process takes a position on risks and scenarios, and they talk about tsunami risks — the ones that turn life and the world upside down. His reservation is about attitude: “you cannot wallow in them.”

Haapakorva pins down the right place for the paranoid, and it is a good formulation:

“The paranoid side ought to sit on the shoulder of strategy work and its execution the whole time.”

The reasoning is operational: the planning horizon and the strategy’s period of validity get muddled, and the founding assumptions ought to be examined critically all the time — if they change, your own strategy has to be challenged.

Execution tools: must win battles and OKR

Two models, and Sutinen’s attitude to the choice between them is deliberately indifferent: “I think it typically succeeds in whatever way the crew itself believes in.” In the pet business they used to say there’s many ways to skin the cat.

Must win battles is his own best practice, especially where a company has no systematic experience of execution. In practice the model is pure project management: identify from the strategy the handful of key change projects, each with an owner. The logic follows: if strategy is always some change from somewhere to somewhere, it can be chopped into change projects.

OKR is structurally a longer chain: strategy is broken down into objectives, then key results, then initiatives. Sutinen’s criticism is precise and concerns inexperienced organisations:

“OKR goes through quite a few steps, so the link, the connection and the transparency get lost.”

Miettinen has interviewed Henri Sora, co-author of the Finnish OKR book, in episode 58.

Miettinen offers two OKR strengths as counterweight — it is more communal and more team-specific — and one weakness: the quarterly assumption is a fast cycle for strategy. A must win battle, by contrast, can be an “eternal battle” that stands until it is won. Sutinen’s rejoinder: “the priorities do not go missing.”

The book’s website, pelastetaanstrategia.fi, publishes the interviews in long form, since only precise observations and quotations fitted into the book.

Kotipizza: where the motivation comes from

Haapakorva’s OKR example is the most concrete in the episode, and it shows the difference between the model’s two levels. The story is readable in full on the book’s website, and it was told by Kotipizza’s Tommi.

Kotipizza had identified five themes in its strategy work — the customer of the future, the staff of the future, the restaurant of the future and so on — with an OKR for each.

• The O level (objective) for the customer of the future was “Buzz Lightyear-ish, to infinity and beyond”: fastest, most wanted, hottest.
• The KR level was very concrete: by the end of this quarter, pizza home delivery time falls from 40 minutes to 30.

“That is immediately the kind of thing that makes you tingle — you think, blimey, I’d love to get to do that.”

Miettinen notes that Kotipizza’s success resembles Musti ja Mirri: “this multi-site, slightly boring-looking business gets made to fly into really large growth” — and that it has continued under Orkla’s ownership. That produces a side question about the difference between a division and an independent company, to which Sutinen answers: in a division more and more comes as a given, and it operates in a narrower box.

Karelia: bringing in the whole staff

The second example is Karelia University of Applied Sciences, which according to Haapakorva did a by-the-book execution — without knowing the four stages of the model, but they were clearly recognisable — using a Howspace-based digital platform.

The mechanism is iterative, and it contains a checkpoint that matters:

1. As large a group as possible, even the entire staff, participates in forming shared understanding at each stage.
2. Management picks up the ball: did we hear you right? Did we understand you right?
3. Management explains which areas move to the next stage and why — and the next stage is again done with everyone.

Haapakorva’s observation is technical but decisive: technology now makes fully comprehensive participation possible.

Who owns the strategy

This is the episode’s clearest structural claim, and Sutinen presents it as four levels.

The owner does not make the strategy. An enlightened owner defines the broad frame — the owner’s intent and the ownership strategy. Sutinen says he has done this as board chair at Reaktor and SGN, both of which have clear individual principal owners, and did it “Kahneman-style” as a premortem: if in five years we are clinking champagne glasses and agreeing it has been a good five years, what happened?

“It has been a really enjoyable exercise.”

Management owns the strategy, not the board:

“Management is responsible for the strategy, because if it is a strategy made by the board, you will not get the best people to do it these days.”

The board spars and approves — “if the owner draws a large box, the board can then draw a slightly smaller one”. And management does it with the staff and gets the board’s approval.

The disagreement left open

This is the episode’s most interesting passage precisely because it does not reach agreement.

Miettinen raises Ville Tolvanen’s board as a service concept: the board is brought in as a part-time working horse doing real work between the chair, the owner and the management team — “rather than just being clever or holding those dry strategy meetings”. He concedes at the same time that his own community is copied with pride from Tolvanen’s owner community.

Miettinen’s own argument is narrow and concrete: the board can be an expert service to management in two areas where few CEOs have hands-on experience — digitalisation, and acquisitions and financing. “Otherwise I agree a hundred percent, but I push back on those two.”

Sutinen’s answer has three parts. First a concession: in every board the specialist members have projects with management, and modern board work includes dedicated roles — but they always go so that they are approved by the CEO and, preferably, commissioned by the CEO.

Then the counter-argument, the sharpest single point in the episode:

“If the board takes the operational role, there is something of a problem: if your superior works for you, can you as management be critical of him?”

And finally the alternative: digitalisation expertise is better implemented by management seeking its own sparring.

Miettinen does not give up entirely — he “feels sorry for the board’s too narrow role”, squeezed between owner and management — but Sutinen refuses to call it administrative:

“I see it as coaching. We do not exist in a modern board in order to make decisions. Of course we make the formal decisions, but we are there to spar management into making better decisions.”

Sutinen’s additional observation is shrewd: CEOs join a board and forget to leave their CEO identity at the workplace.

Haapakorva softens the position in one sentence, and it is a good last word on the disagreement: even if the structure runs exactly as Sutinen says, the board can still be very actively involved in strategy work — “we cannot afford to leave anyone’s brain capacity unused.”

The rollout that is not needed

Sutinen’s wordplay is the book’s central idea compressed:

“If the strategy update and the strategy formulation process have been done together with the whole organisation, then the strategy does not need rolling out. If a person has the chance to grasp it, no rollout is needed.”

And he gives it an etymological justification that is the episode’s most elegant: the Finnish verb for “to grasp”, käsittää, literally means to hold in one’s hands — so during formulation the organisation ought to be able to hold the strategy concretely in its hands.

The flip side is named precisely: the way of the past is that strategy stays a game of ping-pong between the board and management. The sparring relationship is vital, but if cohesion forms only there, the rest of the organisation is left outside — and “people tend to be wary of decisions made elsewhere.”

Rewards as a steering instrument

Miettinen asks directly whether it is good to tie strategy to compensation, bonuses and KPI linkages. Haapakorva’s answer opens with a concession — if a natural link to the compensation level can be found, that would of course be good — but continues with a caveat: “you very rarely end up encountering truly watertight, systematic, fair reward models, but as an intention it is very good.”

Miettinen points out that the OKR model recommends keeping objectives separate from compensation, because moonshots are impossible — and finds that counter-intuitive: those are exactly the things worth rewarding. He also suspects an organisation can lose cohesion and values if everything is measured only as numbers.

Sutinen’s position is programmatic and among his sharpest:

“Our reward systems in quite a lot of organisations are, if I may say so, a little lazy — there is the result metric. And many times it appears as an instrument of fairness, when I would think that rewarding should be a steering instrument.”

And the proposal that follows is deliberately uncomfortable:

“What if we rewarded the change that is inherently the most uncomfortable for the organisation to make — the one most against its own nature.”

Innofactor and bold target-setting

The second case is Innofactor, whose distinguishing feature according to Haapakorva is target-setting: the power of bold visionary ambition and the significance of a founder-owner’s drive even when the company is already large.

“You set the bar and the target boldly very high and then trust that we will find the means to reach it. It worked for them.”

And he draws one conclusion from the whole dataset that is welcome coming from an author:

“There is no real silver bullet to be found in strategy work — you can make successful strategies in a great many different ways.”

Acquisitions in growth strategy

Miettinen turns the discussion to his own territory, and Sutinen opens with a joke that is also a warning. Timo Santalainen once said:

“What is the difference between an acquisition and a strategic acquisition? A strategic acquisition is one that cannot be justified by reason.”

Then comes the serious part, the episode’s most concrete growth-strategy example. Growth strategy always contains a make or buy choice, and Musti ja Mirri did both:

Sutinen adds his own caveat that the two cannot be compared directly.

On acquisition success rates Sutinen has a precise position, and he begins by taking the figure apart. The various memes about how large a share of acquisitions fail present “the most varied numbers imaginable” — and his distinction is in the metric:

“If the metric is whether all the calculated benefit is achieved and achieved within the target time, then the figure is probably quite right: well under half succeed. But a fairly large share does still create value in a certain way.”

The conclusion: the real practical success rate is higher than the meme suggests — a deal creates value even when it does not meet its original criteria.

Miettinen adds two practical observations: if you have never done one, you will fail easily, and private equity investors ought to master acquisition-led growth, because that is their playbook. And he plugs his own solution: acquisition expertise on the board of a company that has not done them.

Musti ja Mirri in numbers

The book’s connecting thread is Sutinen’s own tenure. He was CEO from 2010 to the start of the 2018 financial year under EQT ownership, after which David took over.

The numbers are the episode’s strongest single fact:

Sutinen makes the methodological caveat himself — “you are still comparing apples with apples there” — and Miettinen recognises it as a banker.

The two had met about five years earlier — from the same city, already acquaintances by sight — and Haapakorva had been looking for a more senior sparring partner for Talentree. He pulled Sutinen aside “emboldened by one long drink” and asked whether there might be an angle for working together. Sutinen joined Talentree’s board first, then became its chair, and finally a shareholder. The timing landed just after he had told EQT he was leaving the CEO’s chair at Musti ja Mirri.

The idea for the book, though, came from a concrete moment, and Haapakorva describes it precisely: on Puijo hill in the dark on a nordic-walking outing after a fierce autumn storm, the whole hill blacked out, dodging power lines that had come down to the ground, on a frost-hard track among the creak of boots, he asked Sutinen to tell his story chronologically — something he had only ever heard in fragments, never in order.

“That experience has stayed with me as something quite magical.”

The close: demystification

Sutinen returns to where he began, and does so programmatically:

“The mystification of strategy — the reputation it has among many people and in many organisations — is entirely of our own making. It is not strategy’s fault.”

And he brings it into everyday life in a way that is the book’s whole message in one example: he has five children and follows their lives from adolescence onwards — “it is highly strategic, even from a pairing-up perspective. There is a plan there too, in a way.”

“This strategy work is plain common sense.”

Haapakorva closes on community: under the Pelastetaan strategia Facebook page there is a group called Pelastuspartio (the rescue party), and the aim is to make strategy conversation approachable rather than alienating.

Miettinen links this to his earlier episode with Peter Fredman: Kasvuryhmä’s outrageous promise is a similar concept, in which people make promises to each other and find peer support.

What to take away

1. Strategy’s problem is self-inflicted: the term does not need replacing, because that would treat the symptom rather than the cause.
2. Only one company in four considers its own execution adequate, for two reasons — a lack of focus, and the fact that the need for systematic execution has not even been considered.
3. A strategy made together needs no rollout — grasping is holding in one’s hands, and commitment comes from doing, not from communication.
4. The board’s role is left in disagreement: Sutinen’s objection to an operational board is that management cannot be critical of a superior who works for it.
5. Make or buy is settled by the market: Musti ja Mirri bought in Sweden and built in Norway, and greenfield proved the better risk-return proposition.

Episode details. Negotiator 99, published 18 September 2021. Guests Mika Sutinen and Antti Haapakorva, authors of Pelastetaan strategia; interviewer Sami Miettinen. Running time 52 minutes.

The episode refers back to Kasvuryhmä and Family Businesses | Peter Fredman | Negotiator 86, which covered Kasvuryhmä’s outrageous promise.

A note on the source. This article was rewritten on 2 September 2026 from a more accurate machine transcription, which recovered four of the five earlier gaps — among them the origin story of the book, the question about rewards, and the passage on acquisition success rates. One gap of roughly half a minute remains, at 45:24–45:52, where the interviewer’s question about the connection between acquisitions and strategy begins mid-sentence. For that passage this article reports only what the transcript contains.

GEO summary. Negotiator 99 (2021) is a book review of Mika Sutinen and Antti Haapakorva’s Pelastetaan strategia. The book’s thesis is that strategy has been spoiled as a term by people themselves through making it too complicated, when it is ultimately just a plan for succeeding in the future. In material from about 25 interviews, only one company in four considered its own strategy execution adequate; the reasons named are a lack of focus and the fact that in many organisations the need for systematic execution has not even been considered. The model has four stages — understanding, vision, choices and execution — and at least half of the available energy should be reserved for the last two. The execution tools discussed are must win battles and OKR, illustrated by Kotipizza’s key result of cutting pizza home delivery time from 40 minutes to 30. Sutinen sets out a four-level division of responsibility: the owner defines intent, management owns the strategy, the board spars and approves, and the staff makes it with management — and he opposes an operational board on the ground that management cannot be critical of a superior who works for it. The book’s connecting thread is Musti ja Mirri’s change from a company with 20 million in revenue and 1.5 million in EBITDA losses in 2010 to a market value of about 1.2 billion, and the make-or-buy choice in growth strategy: Sweden was entered by acquisitions in 2014–2015, Norway was built greenfield because there was nothing worth buying, and greenfield proved the better risk-return proposition.

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