---
title: "Negotiation Skills and Ownership — Sami Miettinen and Tero Luoma on Puheenaihe 53"
titleOriginal: "Raha: Neuvottelutaidot ja omistajuus (Sami Miettinen & Tero Luoma) | Puheenaihe 53"
description: "Rami Kurimo puts a negotiation author and an ownership author in the same room and asks whether you can negotiate your way to a million. What comes out is a two-part conversation: the four levers of negotiation and the team roles nobody bothers to agree before walking into the room, and then the distinction Luoma draws between an owner and an investor — the owner is the one who has to negotiate. Underneath both sits the same Finnish problem: too little private capital and too few owners."
format: "podcast"
show: "Puheenaihe"
episode: "53"
hosts: ["Rami Kurimo"]
date: 2020-02-03
duration: "1:18:16"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynrO0TNaNnQ
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/puheenaihe-53-negotiation-skills-and-ownership/
---

# Negotiation Skills and Ownership — Sami Miettinen and Tero Luoma on Puheenaihe 53

**Rami Kurimo** hosts two guests who have each written the book on their half of the subject:
Miettinen on negotiation (*Uusi neuvotteluvalta*, with Juhana Torkki) and **Tero Luoma**, investment
director at Taaleri's private equity funds and chair of several growth-company boards, on ownership
(*Osaava omistaja*). They open by reviewing each other's book rather than their own, and the two
halves of the episode turn out to be the same argument seen from two ends.

## The foundations of negotiating well

Miettinen's opening point is the one he returns to across his work: negotiation, like leading expert
organisations, is learned from nobody except your first bosses — who learned it from theirs — which
makes it almost entirely a matter of chance. What it actually is, is a formal process aimed at a
shared intent expressed as an agreement, and it runs on **four levers: power, analytical rigour,
sociability and principle**. In an organisational context with resources behind it, power dominates,
because money buys degrees of freedom that change everything else.

Luoma frames it instead as a lifelong learning process and reads a negotiation along three axes:
**people** (who is at the table and what is the shared purpose), **substance** (keeping clear what
you are actually pursuing), and **process** (M&A follows a known pattern, and knowing the pattern
lets you read the situation calmly rather than reactively).

They agree there are no born master negotiators — certain traits help, but this is a long
apprenticeship. Miettinen adds an observation about starting conditions: a resourced home and a
society full of safety nets, like Finland's, lets you take risks in negotiation experiments without
catastrophe. In much of the world every risk is a potential fall into a far lower income. It is,
he notes, exactly why the Nordic model produces startup culture and risk-taking — and also a certain
amount of coasting.

## Anchoring

The concrete tip. The world is full of people who believe you shouldn't move first on price. This,
Miettinen says, is simply wrong: it is scientifically demonstrable that you should be the one to
anchor, preferably somewhat aggressively, credibly, and **not in round numbers**.

His worked example is a Helsinki apartment. If you know the area's average is €7,327 per square
metre for flats with a balcony on the third floor with this layout, you can say the hundred-square
flat is worth about €745,000 based on those area prices. If you don't anchor, the other side says
maybe €6,500 would clear — and now you're negotiating down from €650,000. He notes the difficulty is
temperamental: the naturally risk-averse Finn hopes the other party will throw out a good number.

## Emotion, and the fear at the end

Luoma's contribution is the psychological layer, and it is the most practically useful part of the
episode. In a transaction where the seller is an entrepreneur selling their life's work, price and
process eventually give way to whether trust exists between the parties. What he sees repeatedly is
a **psychological fear arriving right at the end**, as the seller registers that something final is
about to happen — and the deal comes together only if you can handle the person as a person.

Miettinen raises the exponent: six founders of different ages, one already retired, three working
hard, one a natural successor, negotiating both with you and with each other about who continues and
who sells — with a shareholders' agreement written ten years ago that describes none of the current
situation. You are not negotiating with one counterparty, as people assume, but with six different
negotiating functions, each with money and feelings at stake.

On your own emotions: the first requirement is simply **knowing how to behave**. Not being
emotionless, but recognising when you are going under and leaving the situation. Manage yourself
before you try to steer the other person.

Luoma's addition is the emotion to audit constantly in yourself: **falling in love with the deal**,
going blind to negative facts because you want to finish it, a state made worse by the tournament
fatigue that arrives on the home straight after months of long days and heavy costs.

Both agree that drama is deliberately built — anger shown properly, a walk-out through slammed
doors, a process driven into crisis to find where the other side's limits are — but that manners
remain the foundation, because a reputation for not being able to behave spreads fast in Finland
and then nobody wants to do business with you. And you must not drive the crisis so deep that you
cannot come back.

## Roles, absence and the third party

Kurimo supplies the episode's best anecdote, from his own childhood: shopping for a mountain bike
with his father, his job was to check the technical side, they targeted bikes already on offer, and
when the salesman asked how it looked he might be enthusiastic — while his father was, every single
time, unimpressed by the price. Around ten years old, he says, he worked out what the routine was.

Miettinen's response is that this — dividing the team's roles — is precisely what Finns don't do:
*for heaven's sake, before people walk into a meeting room with their coats open, discuss the
roles.* It is rarely done and the leverage is large. And it needn't be a caricatured good cop and
bad cop; you can add a **third, absent party** — the grandmother who is paying for the bike and
must be phoned — an escalation authority who is not in the room and must be walked over.

This, he says, is why people like him are used at all: the investment banker negotiates extensively
without the principal present and then subordinates the result to the principal. Negotiating as
owner or chairman yourself, you cannot do that as well.

Luoma turns it into the significant owner's **first strategic choice: are you in the room or not?**
He knows one very substantial Finnish owner he has never once met at a negotiating table — always
represented by a trusted lawyer with a defined mandate, which leaves the real owner free to make the
final call unbound by what was said in the room. The cost is informational: you get the mediated
version rather than the direct one.

The reference point is the Wallenberg motto about influencing without being visible — and Miettinen
ties it back to the fourth lever, **principle**: an institution whose principles have been tested
and visible for a century has a *Wallenberg way* that the market factors in without being told. The
mirror image is the reputational track: in Finland, if you become known as the fellow who bristles
and can't handle it, nobody works with you.

## Steve Jobs, and why the American market is a different game

Kurimo asks about abrasive figures. Miettinen — who interviewed **Risto Siilasmaa** twice for the
book — brings back the lesson he took from those conversations. Cast Jobs as the *brilliant madman*
of his own typology: an uncompromising, near-autistic vision, starting from a blank sheet in a
market big enough that he could pick **AT&T** exclusively and build an entirely uncompromised iPhone
for it, without listening to complaints from Vodafone or Telia about why the phones couldn't be like
this and why the operators shouldn't own the micropayments and the app ecosystem. Nokia, meanwhile,
was fragmented across hundreds of such negotiations. A first mover in a US-sized market plays a
different game than Europeans can, and scaling on Europe's fragmented markets is a different
discipline.

The exception both name is **SaaS** — software as a service, which Miettinen explains for listeners
as a monthly licence model with gross margins around 80 %, where cash flow compounds as licences
accumulate, and which can be scaled even from a Finnish market. His example is the sale of **Lyyti**.

Luoma adds the team point: the CEO of that kind of company needs to be the visionary who charms
investors and staff alike — *the ability to charm with a vision is itself a form of negotiation* —
but the board and management team must then be deliberately diversified with the profiles who make
sure everything is done by the book, which is rarely a visionary's strength.

## Alone or together

Asked what a corporate acquisition has in common with buying a bicycle, Miettinen notes the obvious
difference — your own money after a punishing Finnish tax wedge, versus operating with the owner's
money inside a bureaucracy — but says the methods are the same four levers, and companies can have
principles as explicit as any individual's, citing Bridgewater's rulebook taken to algorithmic level.

Luoma proposes a better dividing line than deal size: **are you acting alone or together?** Alone,
your own money, you answer only to yourself and can move in a straight line. In anything larger you
are an agent — a private equity investor is only the owners' representative, with responsibility
running in several directions at once, which makes the process more interesting and considerably
more complicated. So a two-person business sale resembles a small bike shop's owner selling to a
buyer, and a multi-party bike purchase resembles a multi-party company sale. The variable is the
configuration, not the object.

He notes the same pattern inside families: a first-generation principal owner who acts as though he
still decides alone, and adult children who don't dare voice an opinion despite growing into the
ownership role the decision concerns.

## Ownership, and the line between owner and investor

Luoma's core material. Ownership is usually understood legally and financially, but it also involves
feeling — and above all, the owner defines the reason they own. **Ownership has no intrinsic value;
it is always an instrument** for achieving something.

Which makes every use of money a value choice for the direction you want the world to move — his
example is renewable energy — and equally a choice against the things you decline to fund. Miettinen
extends it: impact investing implies impact *ownership*, and notes that these choices are far easier
with resources behind you, since money is condensed potential to make choices.

The definitional distinction is the sharpest idea in the episode: **an owner gets to and has to
negotiate; an investor mostly doesn't.** The owner's stake is large enough that they must take
positions on the board, on strategy, on whether to put in more money when things go badly. The
investor operates through the exchange and can sell a small holding at any moment with nobody
noticing — it just sinks into the market. A large owner cannot sell and vanish. In practice, both
say, the same person is often both, holding an ownership role in one place and a portfolio
elsewhere, which is why siloing family companies, private equity and listed companies as separate
worlds is a mistake.

Miettinen sketches the stereotypical Finnish wealth curve of his own generation: everyone is born at
zero net worth, earns through wages, spends the first twenty adult years in the asset class called
owner-occupied housing with mortgage repayment as the primary accumulation, starts buying equities
somewhere around forty, and then in retirement, with a bit more money, throws some at risk cases.
He notes the younger generation values home ownership less. Luoma adds the counterweight: freedom is
the point of wealth, but the *form* of your assets determines what you are free from and what you are
tied to — and power brings responsibility, so accumulating does not simply mean doing whatever you
want.

## The Finnish capital problem

This is where the two halves converge, and the numbers are the part worth keeping.

- Finland's wealthiest **1 % owns 13 %** of wealth, against **30 % in Sweden** and **over 40 % in the
  United States** — which Miettinen reads not as a distributional triumph but as evidence that there
  is very little financial capital here, since apartments in owner-occupation are tax-exempt and
  produce no capital income.
- In euros: the Finnish top percentile — roughly 50,000 people — holds about **€1.7 million** each
  including housing, which is usually more than half of it. The Swedish top percentile holds about
  **€6.6 million**, which can be a very good home *plus* a four-million portfolio.
- Of roughly **€100 billion** in annual Finnish tax and contribution revenue, a *Helsingin Sanomat*
  analysis put capital taxes from private individuals at about **€3 billion — three per cent**. His
  point: the rate is world-class already; the mass isn't there.
- Anu Kantola's book analysed a vanishingly small group — a per mille, under 4,000 people — and its
  three-way split into heirs, entrepreneurs and professional managers showed, above all, that Finland
  has very few heirs.
- Luoma's figure on ambition: only **9 % of Finnish companies** describe themselves as clearly
  growth-oriented.

Their diagnosis has a structural half and a mental half. Structurally: high taxation, and a small
home market that forces internationalisation very early, whereas a Swedish company gets a bigger
running start and then, better capitalised, ends up buying the Finnish one rather than the reverse.
Mentally: settling too easily once the flat, the car and the summer cottage are in place.

Miettinen adds two mechanisms. **Family capital** — the friends, family and fools round that carries
a company through the deadly early phase, where a Swedish nephew may raise ten million kronor from
his immediate circle and a good Finnish founding team cannot. And **networks**: he spent twelve years
in London banking where the Finnish population was around 5,000 and, he says, weighted towards au
pairs, against a Swedish population ten times the size running from billionaires to academics, from
which you can help your cousin in Stockholm grow. Finland has a decent spearhead in Silicon Valley
and very thin support in most other growth metropolises.

The remedies they discuss: Sweden's *allemanskonto* tradition, which got ordinary Swedes into
tax-efficient equity saving decades ago and thereby simulated ownership; making economics and
financial skills a compulsory school subject — Miettinen would start at primary level, with
negotiation and leadership at least by upper secondary; and both are warm about **Slush** in
particular, which Luoma credits with giving a new generation the mentality of aiming for the world
rather than the home village, visible now in venture capital inflows. Miettinen's practical
addendum: professionals go to Slush for one-on-ones, not for the panels — his team took over twenty
meetings with SaaS CEOs and chairs, and he watched with some puzzlement the ordinary attendees
sitting politely through the talks.

## Role models and reading

Luoma names **Mika Ihamuotila** — who wrote a doctoral thesis on ownership and then grew Marimekko
as a significant owner — and **Vesa Puttonen** on the academic side, plus Warren Buffett and, from
his own career, Taaleri's founders **Juhani Elomaa** and Kari Haapa. Miettinen names his first bosses
at Kop's investment bank — Eeva Ahdekivi, Jukka Ruuska, Petter Fagernäs — and, later, **Ray Dalio**,
whose *Principles* he reads as evidence that having principles is not in conflict with wealth. His
recent academic favourites are **Acemoglu and Robinson**.

On books: Luoma reads heavily on paper and names **Ludwig von Mises' *Human Action*** as the work
that has most shaped his thinking, along with the first two of Björn Wahlroos' books. Miettinen
listens at double speed on BookBeat, Audible and Storytel and gets through two books a month, which
he argues is what the sharpest people he knows do, and treats the audio revolution as a genuine
democratisation of learning.

## The closing exchanges

Two ideas worth extracting. Kurimo describes the *Smarter Every Day* practice of checking, whenever
you feel certain you are right, whether you have actually understood the other person's logic —
because if you haven't, you cannot know whether they are wrong. Miettinen turns it into a proposal:
politicians should be made to do **steelmanning** instead of the identity-political straw-manning
that is standard, and forced to describe an opponent's policy at its strongest.

The other is Kurimo's own: the better you understand reality as it actually is, the easier it is to
navigate within it — beliefs resting on false assumptions eventually collide with something.
Miettinen ties it straight back to anchoring: correct reference points are the whole game, and
negotiating on bad information means negotiating badly. Which is an argument, he adds, for open
facts, shared numbers and not running Finnish policy on assumptions or American data.

Luoma's summary is that negotiation and ownership are the same kind of thing: a lifelong learning
process you improve by exposing yourself to it, supplemented by reading and by conversations with
people cleverer than you — most of whom, in a country this small, will say yes if you ask.

Original recording (Puheenaihe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynrO0TNaNnQ

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Puheenaihe 53 — Negotiation Skills and Ownership — Sami Miettinen and Tero Luoma on Puheenaihe 53, 2020-02-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynrO0TNaNnQ. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/puheenaihe-53-negotiation-skills-and-ownership/.