--- title: "Why Banks, Armies and AI All Fall Into the Same Trap | Erik Åkesson, Elaine Stirling" titleOriginal: "Why Banks, Armies and AI All Fall Into the Same Trap | Erik Åkesson Elaine Stirling | Negotiator 391" episodeNumber: "db-723" guest: "Erik Åkesson, Elaine Stirling" datePublished: 2026-06-26 duration: "01:16:45" youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU" captionsVtt: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake/captions.en.vtt captionsSrt: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake/captions.en.srt originalLanguage: "en" topics: ["ai_enterprise_tech","leadership_governance"] subtitleMethod: "publisher-english-cues-imported-and-qa" provenance: "local SBV curated by Sami Miettinen (Neuvottelija-Subtitles folder)" fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake" canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake/ --- # Why Banks, Armies and AI All Fall Into the Same Trap | Erik Åkesson, Elaine Stirling ## Chapters - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=0s) Legacy and the Calista's paradox themes intro by Sami - [2:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=163s) Welcoming Erik Åkesson and Elaine Stirling - [3:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=215s) Elaine introduces her writing life - [4:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=255s) Erik on army banking and reinvention - [6:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=373s) Who Calista is and her inheritance - [7:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=424s) Fiction about real leadership and legacy - [7:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=473s) Origins in the legacy white papers - [10:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=607s) How a blueberry photo united them - [11:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=718s) Keith Johnstone and the power of improv - [13:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=815s) Calista the goddess and magical realism - [14:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=868s) The four main types of legacy - [16:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=975s) Three parts novella facts and voices - [17:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1057s) Fourteen perspectives and Palantir using improv - [19:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1153s) How consultants run as is analysis - [22:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1335s) Calista inherits the company's deep problems - [22:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1364s) The consultant who admires the military - [24:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1462s) Healthcare treated as expensive sick care - [26:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1565s) Erik's weight gain in London banking - [28:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1720s) Data driven recovery with a coach - [30:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1816s) Why banks must stay conservative - [30:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1844s) Aviation safety and the halo effect - [32:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1921s) Where banks could safely allow failure - [33:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1989s) Magical realism across distant time zones - [35:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2117s) Elaine's path from romance to novels - [39:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2356s) Like Sophie's World did for philosophy - [39:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2393s) The hero's journey and its archetypes - [42:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2531s) Writing clearly for non native readers - [44:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2677s) Exposition and Calista stepping into leadership - [46:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2779s) Big dreams versus comfortable small goals - [48:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2918s) What banks can learn from others - [50:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3034s) Meeting the general and military legacy - [52:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3134s) Why storing drones makes no sense - [54:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3278s) Headquarters as the military's group strategy - [57:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3443s) Rotating leaders between strategy and frontline - [58:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3502s) Conscription meritocracy and weak European armies - [1:00:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3633s) The same legacy trap hits AI - [1:02:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3767s) Sami's AI workers and agent chains - [1:04:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3868s) What remains for humans with AI - [1:05:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3959s) Building a second brain with agents - [1:06:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3984s) Teaching agents base truths like children - [1:07:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4074s) Why militaries hire only fresh graduates - [1:08:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4122s) The optimal rate of change explained - [1:10:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4232s) The omelette and acceptable side effects - [1:11:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4287s) Short tenure incentives block real change - [1:12:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4357s) Fixing broken teams without firing anyone - [1:13:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4405s) Efficient frontier and Finland killing volatility - [1:15:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4501s) Risk aversion and Europe's highest unemployment - [1:16:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4596s) Closing thoughts and thanks ## Summary Erik Åkesson and Elaine Stirling join Sami Miettinen to talk about legacy, the invisible inheritance of old systems, cultures and decisions that quietly shapes the choices an organization has left. Their book Calista's Paradox tells the story of a young jewelry designer who suddenly inherits a 120 year old gemstone company and every problem that comes with it, while a second layer turns the novella into a practical handbook on facing the past. The conversation moves from banking and aviation to the military, showing how a strong safety culture can spread too far and how the same legacy traps catch banks, armies and now artificial intelligence. Erik argues that the smartest move is rarely to burn down the old structure but to use new tools, including AI, to lift the value of everything already in place. Along the way they explore as is analysis, the hero's journey, the optimal rate of change and why risk aversion may be quietly strangling the Finnish economy. ## Transcript *English transcript derived from validated English subtitles ([WebVTT](https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake/captions.en.vtt) · [SRT](https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake/captions.en.srt)). Timestamps link to the original video.* [**00:00**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=0s) This is an English language episode with Erik and Elaine, both of whom can speak some Finnish. However, the topic legacy and its problems is so important that we cover the episode in English. old Cobol software that still runs an investment bank. Things that we do out of habit, a fear we inherited from our parents or a 100-year-old family company that suddenly lands on your shoulders even though you never asked for it. That is what we call legacy. It is situation your history has placed you in and it shapes the choices you have left far more than we care to admit. And here lies the paradox. The past can be a chain that holds you in place, but it can also be a resource, weapon to fight with today. It all depends on whether we use it and whether we dare to look it in the eye. Do today's guests have built their lives work on exactly this. Erick [**01:02**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=62s) Åkesson is a Swede who lives in Finland. Behind him are 20 years in banking, captaining ships, military carrier, and constant reinvention of himself to the extent that he now lives here in Finland. Elaine Sterling is a second generation Finnish Canadian writer. She has published a dozen novels translated into 13 languages and spent years teaching executives to write with clarity. What brought them together was a coincidence and a bucket of blueberries. Together in just four months they wrote the book called Galista's Paradox. It is the story of a young woman who inherits a 100-year-old gemstone company problems and all and has to face everything the past has left behind. But beneath that runs something much larger. The book is also a handbook on these events. Some laws are universal. In a bank that has no choice but to be compliant. In an [**02:07**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=127s) airline where safety comes before everything else. In an army that fights today's wars with whatever equipment it happens to have. And in artificial intelligence which does not replace the old but fundamentally reshapes it. Today we talk about why the past is so hard to get to let go of. Why we are afraid of risk and how you move on from an old structure without burning the whole house to the ground. Welcome to the negotiator channel. I am Sami Metin. Let's begin. Okay. Welcome to the negotiator channel. Uh we have a guests from the west end in Finland. Uh Ericson. Hi there. Uh you're originally from uh Sweden, right? Yes. Uh and uh we have uh Ela Sterling from Canada. That's right. Uh where from Canada? Uh near Toronto, a city called Hamilton. Perfect. And uh nothing to do with the Hamilton the US uh uh treasurer. No, this guy was a loyalist from the from the UK. Oh, [**03:13**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=193s) okay. There we go. But that's good. Uh we are being recording this uh uh on the day after the Fins won yet another gold medal and uh Canada and Sweden did a bit less. [laughter] Yeah. But um this is about your book uh Kalista's uh paradox. Um but uh first if you can tell uh the audience a little bit more about yourself. Yeah, ladies first. Sure. Uh I have been a writer most of my adult life. I'm a second generation Finnish Canadian which didn't really seem relevant until very recently. Spent formative years in Central and South America and decided I would rather be Mexican than Canadian at the age of four. Um then as as an adult writer I wrote fiction um published 12 novels, a poetry collection and a business book and then the um what happened then there was co and I just sort of coasted until I met this fellow. Okay. And Eric. Yeah. So Eric uh I am Swedish. I live in Finland but uh I I have a couple of I have started off my careers a couple [**04:18**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=258s) of times. I did the army back in the day when Sweden still had an army. Then I moved to Norway and I have a captain's degree. So that's like the one only cool thing with me. I can actually drive all ships now no matter how big and anywhere in the world. Uh but key takeaway from these years was that that was not for me. I went back took a like a masters of finance and then I studied in some countries Germany, Switzerland and then I started in London. I worked in the big banks for six years HSBC and then Royal Bank of Scotland and then I was in Nordia that all Nordic people know what it is in Copenhagen. Then I moved to Sweden. I was in Dansky Bank in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. And that was 20 years of banking right there. So I dare say I know something about banking. That's fair to say. And then I did a startup myself. So I have done true startuping tech startup in the garage and then I have I moved from there to being a tech consultant. So that is I do three things at the moment. I work for bearing point which is a tech uh consulting firm where my job is to speak to sea level bank executives about their tech problems [**05:19**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=319s) and how we can help. Then the second thing I do is that I have Eric Ventures which is my own preed venture fund where I buy early day startups preferably fintech and three I am an author together with Elaine and we have just launched our first book and actually we will do a lot more books because we are becoming a publishing house. Perfect. And uh I have to I have to do this. So, so I get this as a a guest uh gift u so so a custom slogan uh and the front is of course branding but on the back it says um you don't get what you uh deserve you get what you negotiate which is my book's subtitle and talking about the books and their uh titles uh your book's name is Kalista's paradox but it doesn't actually say in the book what who is Kalista and who who is what what what is Kalista's paradox well it does say who Kalistas is but it doesn't specifically spell out what the paradox is. So, in terms of Kalistas, Elaine, why don't you? Yes. Kalista is a 26-year-old jewelry designer who has a fairly successful life in central Europe uh with account [**06:27**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=387s) as an account manager and her father suddenly dies and she inherits a 120-y old gemstone company. She didn't want the job. She knows nothing about being a CEO or a shareholder or a board member. And her first experience of the company is that it is larded with problems uh issues that just go on for centuries. And and I like to use the tagline of Dante meets Doctor Who in modern-day corporate because she takes some time travel trips to find out the origins of the legacy of uh the Gemstone Company, which legacy being Eric's. Yeah. Specialty. Uh yeah. So I have to correct myself. It's true. This is a a fiction uh about the lady called Kalista. But then uh the kind of the theme of the book kind of conjures like a Greek uh Kalista Sparatus is like the Pandora's book. So something something grand from the uh the uh Athens. Yes. So uh but this is uh actually about [**07:29**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=449s) a kind of a fiction book on the real situations people face when they are inheriting companies or getting thrust in the leadership positions. And I can tell you that the story of legacy which is the theme throughout and you have with you there some if you hold up the purple one. So for those of you that are interested in banking there was a purple three years ago we wrote a uh a white paper from bearing point where I work partly. uh it's about the Nordic bank in 2033 and how to get there. The interesting thing there it was a forward-looking piece on how bank technology is difficult and the feedback was that we met about 50 CEOs with that and the feedback was very pretty much the same. And they said, "We would love to follow your advice, but we can't because there's so much legacy problems." And then it dawned on us that this legacy is something that we all knew, but we had never really articulated. And then we set out, me and the co-author of the first one, Miko Aub, previous CEO of Axia Bank. And we started to talk to people that we know. And then we wrote the next white paper there a year and a half ago about legacy. And we did that together [**08:32**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=512s) with a large group of very good people. I would dare say, you know, not maybe necessarily me, but at least everyone else is very good. So uh I am me I have 20 years of banking. I I know a lot about banking legacy problems. Miko has been CEO of a bank. He knows more about legacy problems in banks. And then we got Mikaskin the former CFO of Finire. He wrote a piece about aviation legacy. They have lots of similar but different problems. And then we got one of the Finnish top generals Yuri Ratasalo one lion general. He wrote about military legacy problematics. And we had I know Yusla a psychotherapist that is written about many books about inherited traumas. Inherited traumas are very interesting because they are someone else's you know it's an experience that you have had that's not yours and it still affects you and she has written books about that and that is your own personal psychological legacy situation. So that piece right there is very sort of dry in the tone and it targets seale executives. uh then we met more than 100 CEOs that's a lot during a year [**09:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=577s) and we then collected more and more war stories sort of examples and we enriched this story and the feedback was basically unanimous that guys this is really good you should do a book and then we decided to do a book and there were some hoops and loops and not every one of the co-authors previously had time for a book so uh I set out myself and then slightly randomly on the internet I came across Elaine That's a really funny story that you might tell your maybe. Yes. Yes. So, um, the algorithm being what it is on LinkedIn, you just get these random people and I happened to land on a photo of a young Syrian teenager holding a bucket of blueberries. And the the poster who the who was Eric said that uh this young man, he had sponsored him as a refugee and the poor fellow wasn't able to find work. could we please uh help him out by buying these this bucket of blueberries? And I had this it's not a deja vu I suppose a flashback or something something maybe legacy related but because I remembered that my four grandparents had come from Finland to [**10:41**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=641s) Canada in the 1920s and my father being an only child first generation u immigrant child his true joy was going into the bush of northern Ontario and picking blueberries. I looked at that and it's so odd that it's come full circle that now Finland is a receiving country of refugees. So I spontaneously posted and said if I lived closer I'd buy those blueberries. And Eric being one to act very quickly on on impulse connected with me and saw that I'd been a that I'm a writer and that I also had 18 years of teaching corporate executives how to write. He said, "Uh, I I I see what your experience is and I'm looking to write a book. I wonder if you could give me some tips and pointers." Well, I did a lot more than that. Yeah. And uh the book is about um combining the facts with fiction and also teaching with the kind of a natural progression on the real case which is the Kalista paradox and kind of a transformative journey. Uh Ela you you mentioned you teach um people to write. I mean that kind of reminds something we discussed on the on our lunch and [**11:46**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=706s) u my favorite Canadian it is Keith Johnston and I did the master class with him in in London and uh um to is improvisation and uh part of the this journey and tell me a little bit about the Keith Johnston. Well Keith Johnston is the god of improv as you know and we are so proud that he lived in Canada. He was British to begin with, but uh uh he he taught theater first and realized that that the the joy of storytelling and spontaneity is is suppressed right out of us in in the uh education system. And he had he created uh systems that gets it back into our we get back into our spontaneous selves. So he created an entire foundation of of improvisation that is famous around the world. uh he had uh uh theater in Calgary until very recently he passed sadly but every person who has studied improv including myself we we all start with Keith Johnson and Violet Viola Spolan in [**12:47**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=767s) the states those were the two um masters so yeah and um so you need to combine also in my book on negotiation it's kind of a hero's journey so kind of a classic buildup story so is there something like a like bringing the arch types and kind of learning from the age-old wisdom you have which you have incorporated in the book very much so and I want to just uh circle back to the improv for a moment because what I've learned working working with improv is as you have as well it it works in every setting in life settings Eric is a very fast thinker and a fast talker and I learned through improv to just respond respond respond and it really got us through writing the book in a record time of four months did the complete book and then I have completely forgotten what was your next question Oh, the journey. Yes. So, Kalista was Kalista was originally a goddess. And so, I I used her name partly for the musicality. Um, but she also turned out to be a very misunderstood huntress. She was uh she was suppressed by the the gods and Zeus as they as they very often [**13:52**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=832s) were. But she was a survivor. And so, Kalista in our in our novella is very much a survivor as well. The archetypes are there. And uh I would I would add that it's magical realism. Some people don't know what that is. They confuse it with fantasy, but it's actually a very deeply rooted um archetype of particularly Latin America, which where I had spent some formative years. So yeah, I I can see see that the like well but but the Eric if you bring this back to the like the [clears throat] concrete things. Um what kind of a what are the most uh common legacy problems uh companies have? Well, so [clears throat] legacy can be defined in many ways. So you can have legacy sort of many departments or you can bucket them differently. The the one that is easiest to understand and it depends on who you ask. But first of all, if you ask the common man on the street, they would if they think about the word at all, they will usually talk about some king back in the day maybe conquered a lot of land and that will be his legacy. You will [**14:53**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=893s) be remembered for something. That's usually how people talk about work. For a consultant in tech, legacy is immediately the outdated tech stack. That's what you immediately hit. So bankers and and consultants. But legacy can also be cultural. you know all the structures we have in our mind and you can find process legacy this is the way we do it here and then people never question it so you can have quest and then you can have your own psychological legacy uh you know you're scared of something because of something that happened and now so you can't do certain things you know with the easiest one being you're afraid of spiders and so you cannot go and visit the zoo that's a legacy problem you have then so these are at least the four obvious legacy situation now uh the book that we have written here is it it there is three parts in the book. So, and it's very interesting because I have learned a lot and that's sort of maybe also a generic interesting thing about books. What is the main book buying audience? Uh it's actually younger women sort of 18 to 20 35. And that's [**15:54**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=954s) what Elaine said to me first, Eric, if we're going to do a book, we should write a book that somebody is going to buy. And the way is to get it on many different genres. So, it can be a management book, but it should be a novella. Otherwise you will send maximum 5,000 copies globally and we are obviously going to aim to sell at least a million books. So you know why not? So and then we need to target the so we we decided to have a a book that would be in many layers. So the that book there has three parts. The first is a novella and if you like nollas you can read novella and you can ignore the rest and you will still find it very enjoyable and then you will learn something about legacy but you will not explicitly think about it. But if you read the second part which you can also read in isolation if you are a fact student you don't want to read any nollas you can get a lot of out of that too but the real learning we believe if you read the first the story and in the story you will come ac you know this Kalista will has to tries to rescue the company she comes across many situations that they appear easy to solve at first but when she starts [**16:55**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1015s) to look at it the history is dragging this down and then when you read the second part of facts that will sort of look at the examples that so basically you can read the story and you will see the surface but then when you read the second part you will open the layers and you can maybe read it again and see it differently and then the third part is 14 very different point of view on legacy people that have had legacy problems people that managed to get out of them people that have seen somebody else in but 14 very different kind of people you should say some more about that yes well especially coming back to Keith Johnston because one of the contributing authors is Will Luera who is an American improv teacher well known around the world he's even taught the Saudi royal family and he specifically uses uh improv in his in his article as a means of overcoming legacy of of facing it and coming to coming to grips with it and bringing out new skills such as [**17:55**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1075s) curiosity and spontaneity that that really speaks to improv. Uh we also have film and TV people and and business people. There's one woman whose names withheld by request because her family legacy is so horrendous. Um a great variety of people who are brave enough to tell their story. M and then uh of course it's important to see how many ways 14 ways or or more you can uh get stuck in time but then you need to be um uh solution oriented and um I mean um um the first book Palanter gives to the new people is Keith Johnson's improent theater. I don't know if that's cute or worrying but Volunteer is one of the most successful uh consulting uh transformational companies with AI. So they go to company whether it's a military complex or whether it's a company and then they fix it from the legacy systems uh using AI. uh but uh you don't necessarily need to use artificial [**18:58**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1138s) intelligence but you you need to move from your uh legacy problems to uh it can be disruptive future but it can be also just fixing the systems how do you do that then what kind of guidance you give to how to fix yeah and that's of course very difficult but what the one important thing is this when you are a consultant like I am part-time is uh or partly so bearing point for example in any consulting firm They will come in and then they will do some sort of as is you know well first of all if a company has problems of any kind they will ask first themselves can we live with this situation and if the answer is yes we can live with it it's not optimal but then you live with it because there are so many other problems to fix but if the answer is we can't live with this well then you fix it yourself or you try to fix it yourself and if that doesn't work you basically ask yourself again but oh that was difficult but could we live with it anyway and if the answer is still no you get some help essentially That's when you call the consultants. So by definition, consultants will never be called in when things are good. So we will always come in and face [**20:01**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1201s) an elegancy situation of some of some kind. And the first thing is always and some sort of asis analysis. What is the current state that is usually very shallow and quick because people are eager to move on and sort of dwelling in the past will look counterproductive and uh and people believe you are up to no good and you're wasting their money for talking about stuff they already know. uh but an as is as is analysis will happen but it's in my experience way too shallow far more often and then there will be a target state people will say target state is the word you need to use a lot if you are a consultant you know the target state it basically means where you want to get to and then you will define they will spend you know you will have millions of dollars in consulting fees and hundreds of hours internally that are not built for that will go into this target state and then you will make a strategy which is essentially how how to get from here to there like a string of plans to get there and then you will make assumptions about the asis. Yeah, the asis analysis were probably right. So that's where we are and and then you move from there. The problem is that what if you only look at the symptoms of the illness but not at the illness itself. So it [**21:04**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1264s) turns out that you are not here, you are there. Well, the strategy that was supposed to take you from here to there will then take you there. And even if you are here but for different reasons, maybe you choose the wrong methods. So you end up only there and not all the way there. So what we are arguing uh is that when you set out on change journeys spend a bit more you know instead of spending 100 you know if you have 100 resources or money or whatever rather than spending 50 of it on target state and 50 on strategy and only sort of 0 point nothing on the asis analysis do 45 10 but upgrade the effort put on asis analysis properly so that you actually know where you are and why and we believe that is happening way too seldom. And that is a good advice on any change journey that we believe or I believe people do wrong. Yeah. Then on this Kalista's fictional story uh she was inheriting a family business on the on jewelry. I mean is um this inheritance and [**22:05**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1325s) getting generational responsibility and inheriting somebody with the power uh and and the jewelry uh do those two things carry specific weight in the book? They do very much. Yes. So the the gemstone business has uh environmental issues and and employment and indigenous issues that had not been dealt with and uh she is it's landed on her on her shoulders. So she seeks out the aid of a disillusioned consultant who has given up on corporate because he's been trying to instill new levels of knowledge in corporations that that have been resistant. And I'll use a specific example that he most admires military for their legacy and their their um willingness to take it on and recognize the limitations and the world is so resistant to listening to anything from military. We have such black and white perceptions of these extremes. But Kalista is the one person who [**23:06**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1386s) listens and that's all he's ever wanted is just one person to listen to what he believes is true. He has this mantra that the corporation that addresses legacy will outrun all competition. Trouble is he hasn't taken care of himself. He has a physical legacy and he may not live long enough to be able to give her the advice she needs and to see her through to the end of her journey. Yeah, that's also a personal theme. Eric, you mentioned um your past life and and health uh but also the the banking world where you were with a lot of kind of a legal legacy which is particularly toxic. uh can you talk about the health aspects and the banking legal problems? Yeah, there is one uh there's one chapter of the it goes under healthc care legacy and in the book we have a couple of examples. So I give a personal point of view of one individual's legacy situation. But then we have a health coach in Austin that writes it more on a systematic level. And then we have a guy called so we have Zach Rosenova. He is a health coach in Austin, Texas. Extremely good guy. [**24:08**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1448s) And he has written this about how people get stuck and why. And then we have Matias Fanul. He's doing his PhD now in health care public sort of public how to organize healthcare. And he looks at health care as a systematic ear error. How we actually treat health care as sick care. Essentially we spend now there you know there's a certain amount of tax money available for different things. Among that a slice goes to healthare but healthcare is sick care the way it is done now. We essentially wait for people to get ill and when they get real ill we put them into these factories for treating them. It's called hospitals and there we treat them expensively and then we rehab them expensively and we send them back as good taxpayers. But actually from a taxpayers point of view, we should really take some of that money out and put it into preventive care so people don't get as ill. And there is sort of consensus on that this is the right thing to do. But no politician can win any elections by saying I will shut some hospitals now down now and actually yes some people will die in the next decade but after that we will have far better health condition for [**25:09**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1509s) all of us because there will be less smoking, less drinking, more running but nobody can win an election like that. So that shift will not happen. uh in terms of if I look at that so these are the three pieces on the healthcare if I look at one example I have put in there myself is I used to be I'm 52 now and uh well it is what it is it's a sort of a numerical fact but I started off I did loads of sports when I was young ice hockey and football and this and that and tennis and handball and everything else and sailing and at some point I also did a lot of karate so full contact karate so really brutal stuff where you better know if you if you step in unfit you will literally be knocked out fully knocked out kicked to the head and you can really hurt yourself. So I was pure muscle only 76 kilos with virtually no fat because I had to be below 80 otherwise it was heavy weight and then you literally get killed. So it couldn't happen because 80 is unlimited. You can meet people at 120 30 kilos. So at that point I was extremely fit and I remember I got my first job in banking and I thought aha I'm a banker now. I bought an Armani suit. I remember it. Uh that suit fit for less than two weeks because I put on 10 kilos like that when I moved to London. [**26:13**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1573s) Uh because I started in corporate finance is like the worst place you can be in terms of hours. So uh I started as an M&A analyst in a big London bank and I worked insane hours sort of 16 18 hours every day including weekends and they made damn sure that you didn't sleep much and training and eating and everything fell apart immediately. So I put on 10 kilos immediately in the first few months and then I was in London for six years. I put on another 10 kilos. So I came back like 20 kilos heavier net and muscle mass mass dropped too. So probably 24 kilos of pure fat added really [snorts] bad. Uh and that combined with and also one of the reasons for that was that I moved from M&A to trade floor stuff for an exchange and commodity derivative sales trading structuring. So it's very very competitive environments where you have to be in at 6:00. You work sort of 12 hour days and you travel and that's that's the easy days because you're on the trade floor but half of the time you're traveling. Then you work 18our days where drinking is half of the job. So you put on you wreck your health totally with extreme amounts of calories, no training, [**27:15**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1635s) no sleep and loads of alcohol. That's extremely toxic combo. So I basically became quite fat and definitely very unfit and I had lots of problems with that. But you don't it happens gradually so you don't notice it. But then after some unfortunate events I decided I need to do something with this. And that's the journey that I described because I realized that I had sort of cornered myself in this physical personal legacy [ __ ] situation where I was in a hole that I just kept digging and I not only had to stop digging I had to find a way out and that's what this chapter describes how I was very deliberately observed my legacy and the interesting thing is that when I did that it's just around the time when I started to write the original legacy uh white paper [clears throat] so in the process when I see Now two years later writing a book I realized that what I did was that I had a legacy problem. I applied a very thorough legacy analysis. Without that I would not have been able have been able to find the right methodology and eventually this Zach Rosanova Austin Texas. I will can I do some ad for Zach Rosenova? Definitely. If you have a [**28:21**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1701s) health problem, uh, if you're fit and you want to be, if you are fat and you want to be fit and you work way too much and you're sort of 50 and you're willing to spend a bit of money on fixing it, find Zack Rosanova on LinkedIn and connect and say hi from me. Um, he will basically give you all the tools you need to have a datadriven approach to fix nutrition, sleep, training, stress levels, everything. So now I dropped 20 kilos in a year and put on lots of muscles and I am where I want to be. That could not have been Yeah. And um uh that's um also what I did between the marriages, get a personal trainer and get the get back in the business. Uh so I and and I also was in Craig Swiss and other banks. So I absolutely know what you're talking about and also get a bit of a weight myself there. Uh but then the other question was about the then the uh the legacy and banking. I mean you you done the corporate finance and derivatives but uh we all know I also been in the in in the RBS and Norda by the way and uh I I was in the RBS times when they had [**29:22**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1762s) already failed. So clearly they had some bad risk management on the M&A but then you have other type of uh legacy problems like you have a too eager uh regulator who prevents everything and wants just like admin and uh that's another thing. How how do you see the banking and risk management that and that's also and please Ela tell me if I forget something and you know do interrupt me the the um the the one interesting thing is this when we start to look at this you realize that these different sectors like banking and aviation and military they have their own legacy problems and situations and they solve them to some degree in different ways but there are some really good learnings across of course I am a banker and I am a uh consulting to banker so I think a lot But what can bankers learn from them? But there are other learnings too. But if I sort of answer that first, a legacy problem within banking. Uh banks are very conservative and they should be uh because we all want the payment systems to always work. We want the mortgage lending [**30:23**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1823s) to continue and so on. Uh and people complain uh at the banks are so conservative. But hey, I can tell you it's better than the alternative. uh you know all the complainers should think about the payment system failing for a few days because somebody failed fast a little bit here and there. Uh it is actually in the interest of all of us that the banking system works really well and it's very well protected that that's why it's so heavily regulated. The problem is the following and here is a learning from aviation in aviation is also heavily regulated and for a very good reason. We don't want the airplanes to fall down so we die. So everybody can agree that it's really good that they have extremely strong safety first culture in aviation. Everybody loves it. So do I. So do them. The problem is this that there is sort of a negative halo effect of this that you know the all the people in an aviation company they will work in the same offices and they will talk to each other and then the people that do the website that are supposed to create the how you buy a ticket. They undergo the same scrutiny on safety culture. I know of one aviation company out there that had as a corporate policy. They had three priorities. first safety, [**31:29**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1889s) number two is uh punctuality, and number three is service. It's always in that order. Safety first and then be on time and then service your clients. That makes a lot of sense when you think about let's never fall down with the planes. And the problem is that if you are responsible for the website to develop the new customer journeys for how to buy tickets, safety is not maybe really so important and you could allow for more fail fast culture in that part. And we have the same. So, so how to segregate a very very strong safety culture from other parts of the bank and deliberately deliberately let some parts of the organization live with higher risk. It should be a management decision and in the banks we have the same. Everyone knows in a bank that compliance and regulation and credit they rule everything and for good reasons. It shouldn't stop working and you shouldn't lend money to people that don't pay back. And the problem is that somewhere else in the bank you will have somebody working on the client UX and there will be some products that aren't that systemically important as payments and you can actually allow for some failing and trial [**32:31**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=1951s) and error there but it doesn't happen because the safety culture and the in aviation and in the case of banking the compliance will rule everything all the time and nobody critically thinks about the fact that is this part of the bank really that crucially important like corporate finance is not systemically important. Mhm. payments is but still they have to do the same and I think there you should have some critical thinking about that. That's one learning from aviation. Yeah. Ela then uh since you have written those other books and you spend time in in Latin America for example the the magical realism is interesting. I mean Gabriela Garcia Marquez and the 100 years solitude and then in the trivial and um Paulo Coyle that I don't know if that's [laughter] but but you can have a trivial learnings even from that kind of journeys or or high high brow uh uh culture but I guess we living in a kind of magical realism ourselves we have the sort [**33:33**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2013s) of hard uh facts happening uh but then you need to take improvisation and see the take some kind of a magical journey of what could be and uh use your imagination to to make the world a better place or whatever you want to achieve strategically. Uh did you use that magical realism uh themes on this book? I absolutely had to magical realism plus improv because I could not have survived those explanations of legacy otherwise because we were an ocean apart and I'm seven hours behind. He would um he would arrange teams uh teams meetings with all of these experts, everyone from the brigadier general of the Finnish armed forces to the aviation fellow and and and many others. And it would be 3 in the morning for me and I would be hearing things like negative halo effect and having no idea what that is and thinking okay if that was magical realism it would probably mean this. So I had this whole other fantastical process going on as I was absorbing this uh really with zero comprehension. In fact, Eric says it very often that you really know writing, but [**34:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2077s) you're so clueless about other [laughter] things. And he's right. And he's right. And and it's the ideal world for a fiction writer because uh you have to go into it with a beginner's mind. Much like improv, you don't pre-plan. You you're in the scene. You got to deal with the scene. [snorts] So it for for me the experience of absorbing that information was very much Kalista's experience in suddenly walking into uh Lex's pub giving a bit of the story away and uh finding out that it was much more than a pub. It was actually a portal to other worlds. Mhm. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the other books. Do are they series or uh yeah some are out of print. Um the I started off as a romance writer which was the last thing I'd planned. I was a new mom uh with a baby and I had given up a really good corporate no corporate government job as uh as an immigration counselor and I was so offended when I brought the birth bag home because they had a harlequin romance in [**35:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2137s) there. I thought what did they think that my brain is just going to die because I'm a new mother? And I must have bitched about it for quite a long time because my my husband said, "If would you just stop grumbling about it and just write one cuz you've read so many books." So I well, okay, I will. And uh I I spent three years writing a bunch of manuscripts that were all rejected. And just as I was on the verge, like I was really getting getting the hang of it, my husband left the house. And so suddenly I was a single mom with no job and a bunch of rejected manuscripts. And somehow the gods, thank the gods, 3 months later I sold my first two books, published 10, uh, translated into 13 languages and I was able to raise my kids and pay the mortgage and and it was a very good start. And it also teaches you to write fast or fail fast or however you might put it in the business world. And then uh, I thought I'd do something serious. So I I gave up writing romance novels to write the great historical novel about a a famous woman in South America. [**36:38**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2198s) And I spent 14 years failing. I mean literally failing. And while I was failing at that I was teaching corporate. So there were these parallel streams going on that I didn't realize that the corporate would then then uh give me the skill set to be able to communicate with people like like Eric because I had to stand in front of classrooms with 40 people from all different industries and levels who didn't know how to write an active sentence and would never start a sentence with I and just thought that writing was boring. And so there was a lot of u a lot of life lessons there and and gave me the kind of resilience that I needed to complete this project with Eric. Yeah, that's that's something. Yeah, but there's like in Argentina there was like a F Finnish colony and it's a [clears throat] that's in all old old times people tried crazy [ __ ] and they did some succeeded, some didn't. Yeah. Yeah. The romance novels. I'm not the expert of that genre. My wife is in the book business, but I remember she get like the early uh publishing [**37:40**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2260s) copy of the the Twilight and then she was reading and then she said like, "Summit, why can't you be a vampire?" [laughter] So the expectations of the women say those vampires. Yeah. [snorts] Yeah. Yeah. But um yeah, good on the Kalista uh does the sort of hero's journey and uh takes on the legacy and brings her own talents to the table and then mixes the that with the legacy of the company to to try to transform it and and encounter some magical realism there. Uh so which of the three parts you think is the sort of the most important? The fiction obviously. [laughter] Yeah, I guess to be I'm very known for I'm very diplomatic always. [laughter] So it depends on who you are I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you well clearly if you if you are a facts guy then the second part is but if you are a novel reader than the first one is I think the third [**38:42**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2322s) one is actually they are very short. They are sort of two three four pages each. So they are more easy to consume in that sense. You can read them and then maybe if you start to read one ah that was of me you can drop it and do the next. But I have a hard time to think that, you know, one of the 14 point of views should be appealing to everyone. Yes. The universality of the book is what I'm most proud of is that everyone who picks it up will find something that they will relate to that, oh, I have been through that. That's legacy. I had no idea that was legacy. So, yeah, it's an enlightening experience. And we've we've been told and and come to believe that um Kalista's paradox does for legacy what Sophie's World did for philosophy not that many years ago. And which is why we were very careful about giving it a a name so that legacy will be forever associated with the the the phrase Kalista's paradox much like Vuko's pendulum AAM's razor Archimedes principle. So we were going with that theme. Yeah. Yeah, I loved Sophia as well, Norwegian guy. But uh I mean it was I I had studied philosophy as a as a sort of a young [**39:48**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2388s) person but that kind of was a very nice way of uh telling retelling the history of the philosophy and also in a kind of hero's journey way. I mean Joseph Campl had this theory that we all live these arch types and uh then there's like a particularly appealing way of telling stories which is the hero's journey or growth story. So is this also a growth story? Oh very much. Yeah. Hero's journey. I was a huge fan of Joseph Campbell back in the day. So once you start absorbing him you you never get it out of your system. You realize it's an intrinsic part of each of us. Yeah. Yes. So, we're going to encounter the mentor and the shapeshift. That's right. The refusal of the call, the false du. The false dawn. Yeah. And go through it all. Eric, you you if you this says nothing to you, think of Star Wars. Okay. [laughter] [laughter] Literary professors here. So, yeah. But it's it's a very interesting genre. I mean [**40:50**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2450s) there's of course the danger that you you kind of um if you do it in three parts you say well here's the story and now I'll explain it to the dummies. Is that that kind of book? Well yes and no. I think it's more like you can read them separately. You don't have to read the second part. The story is interesting in itself but then unless you are unusually sharp you're going to miss some of the underlying layers. M I think when you read the second part I think the dream would be the following. Somebody reads the story and thinks oh that was a good story really interesting and there were some problems there and but yeah okay let's continue and then they read the second part and the third and then they read the first post again and they feel that they are reading a new book basically that sort of ooh it was black and white and now it's in color. I didn't see how this sort of came from there because that's one of the things that also comes up in the story that the whole family business builds on the myth of the legendary founder that turns out to not be so glorious. Uh so you know you have these legacy situations that people build [**41:54**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2514s) on things and then when you sort of unearth what things are really like and people have to question the path of the past. your your comment about legacy for dummies reminds me of what Erica said about my writing when I first wrote wrote the initial drafts. Um he he said uh well first of all you're not a very good writer Elaine because [laughter] you haven't really touched on legacy at all and and he didn't understand the concept of a first draft but we were yelling at each other too much for me to even explain that to him. But what he did help me come to understand is that I do tend to write longer words. that is just my sty my style of writing and I was uh obliged to learn to write in a simpler style for the non-English-speaking or the non-native English-speaking population and we do see this as a global read. So I'm very grateful to him that he's taught me this whole new level and it's not a level for dummies at all. It's a level of clarity that perhaps I didn't have before because I do love complex sentences quotes [**42:55**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2575s) along the way that are not for you know daylight but you know I will not effing dumb down this to please people like you but I think you know what I tried to say to Lane and I think that's sort of universal maybe universal thing for uh highlevel native English speakers that there are people out there that aren't dumb like I'm not so dumb but ling English is like my second language And some of these very long words that they use is like and I still have lived in London actually, you know, I speak decent English and I've lived in London for six years. You will find very few people that have English as a second language that are better than I am. So I said, use me as a proxy. If I don't get it, nobody will get it other than other real native speakers. And that was a bit of an anger moment for Elaine that couldn't use these really long words that no, at least I didn't understand. And I think it uh Elaine struggled to get uh you know you would have like the perfect word in store for like okay I will I will have this word and it will be what I want and then I said but I don't get that word and she would have to use like some less cool word and I [**43:58**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2638s) think that might have disturbed you a little bit. I did, but then I I adjusted to it and actually came to enjoy it. And as when we were at the book launch the other night, we had um a senior woman, a CEO of a of a prominent insurance company come up to me afterwards and say, "I think this is written at exactly the level for um high school or upper elementary school children to begin to learn uh English and and complex concepts uh in English so that uh it was the right level of reading." So, I was very pleased with that. Yeah. and uh and it uh sort of let's uh toy with Eric. Uh so uh when when I was learned to uh write I I very much uh like the guy called Laas Eric who had this art of dramatic writing and his uh book's uh theme was that um every great book will have exposure uh uh expo system management. So that means that you have to have a great theme and great books have a theme where you have a transition. For example, Shakespeare, all books have a [snorts] this expos [**45:00**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2700s) the management of the of the underlying theme. For example, uh Romeo and Juliet is about uh how Lava conquures everything uh including death. So you start with two stupid teenagers and you end up with the mana who sacrifices himself for love. So he he does like this growth and it's different kind of a journey than the the hero's journey. So I I I'm saying that the this uh grand theme of this book is the legacy. So you have a person who starts at the under the uh uh sort of base level of legacy and then learns through the book that and she takes on leadership. That's the ultimate goal is she takes on the role of leadership which she had never seen in herself or imagined in herself. Didn't even want it but she takes that on. Yeah. Yeah. and sort of guided by this consultant in the book that helps her to sort of start to believe and trust in herself. And I think that's very important. I think I think maybe that is specifically maybe it's a Finnish thing like the lack of confidence in stuff like come on do it you can do it. I think way too many [**46:04**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2764s) people hesitate like when we when we wrote this book there was many moments when people told first me when I was alone that this can't be done and come on Eric you going to do a big and I remember when I said to some people that the aim is to sell a million copies I was I was like laughed at I was made a laughing stock they thought it was insanely funny and that I dared to think about that and I think it's just pathetic not to like why not so and it makes me angry that people are trying to put their boundaries on me I'm not going to take that [ __ ] And the thing is this that maybe you set out to say, "Oh, the goal is to send 1,000 books." And then you do 10,000 and you call it a roaring success cuz you're 10 times above the So what if I aim for a million and sell only 100,000? Then am I a failure then? But I still send 10 times more than them. They define themselves as a success only because they have so pathetic goals. That's that makes me sort of sad and angry. And I think as a foreigner in Finland, I think you know you can allow yourself to dream more a little bit. There's nothing wrong. And there's a very big difference between dreams and illusions. Dreams can come true. So they are okay. And you I invest in dreams but illusions I don't invest in because [**47:10**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2830s) they can't come true. It's very important to know the difference. Yeah. Still coming back to this um um exposition. And uh I mean I I love Milan Kundara's books because he takes some grandio philosophical theme from niche and then the whole book is about manage managing the expose uh onto that idea and exploring it and even in the sort of kind of micro level the chapters can be about that theme kind of moving but then uh a lot a lot longest time I thought that like you have to have like the Joseph Campbell's uh stuff and then combined with this kind management of the grand team and the movement and uh and uh skip everything else. But then that's why I started doing impro because it's not that you have to have the you have to take the breaks out uh from the main story and uh just go crazy. Yes. And and you have to accept what your scene partner gives you and and run with it. Yeah. You Yes. You can't block it. And then that's part of the book's [**48:11**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2891s) themes I guess the kind of a scenario management. So if you bound by a legacy and path dependency and this is the things we do here you might say like you Eric said well we think we are here we need to get there we just future cast ourselves there by step by step but that can be a mirage you could be completely somewhere else and you have to think of the scenarios and the world doesn't give you easy path it gives you randomness yes I think you know and I would like to say a few words I'm now just thinking back at what what can what can you learn from these industries. So if the first one we we're thinking that this safety [clears throat] first culture from aviation is the same as the credit compliance culture in banking. Others can learn from that and sort of look at in your industry. Can you separate what is systemically important and has to be run with an extremely high level of of sort of trust and stability and where can you and you need as management you need to be quite explicit about that and say actually dear company we know that in this part we can never [**49:13**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=2953s) fail but actually we have decided that there we can fail and and I think so otherwise these people don't dare to fail so so that distinction another thing uh that uh there are two things I would like to sort of say then one is the concept that we about optimal rate of change. Mhm. And the optimal rate of anything is quite interesting and in this case optimal rate of change. But if I'll get into that but before that a few words on so in the process of writing the first legacy white paper and by the way for those of you that want to you know if you want to read about legacy the easiest way is to buy Kalista's paradox and read it. If you want to dig down deeply you can go to you can go into Google or anything and search bearing point legacy white paper and you will get to a page where you can download that report for free. then you can dig down even deeper. Um but when we were writing that uh we had the pleasure of then working with Yuri Raitasal which is an very intelligent individual. I sleep a bit better at night now actually when I know what kind of because I did the army back in 1994 and I wasn't sort of overly impressed with like the lieutenant [**50:14**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3014s) sort of general you know intellectual ability. I was kind of thinking sometimes are these guys going to lead me in war? How will that end? Mhm. But now I know what the top brass looks like and how they think and I sleep a little bit better now. Uh I'm very very impressed about sort of the intellectual capacity of these people. And uh Yuri first time we had a lunch with Yuri. Me and Miku. We had a lunch with Yuri and he sat down and said well thank you for explaining what legacy is. I know it military capacity planning on a senior level is about thinking in the decades. Legacy management is pretty much what I do. Uh I for me legacy is positive because it means that we have something to fight the war with today. Mhm. And I think that's a very sort of interesting viewpoint. He viewed this as a as a positive not as a problem not an aggregation of [ __ ] that can deal with. He said well there's an aggregation of war material so we can defend ourselves. Isn't that good? Then we want to improve on it of course. But the military have they they stand you know because of the technical nature of the systems and the interoperability between different systems [**51:18**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3078s) they have a lot of path dependency. So once you steer down some route you exclude others. And he said that so if if the enemy comes for us today we will defend ourselves with the weaponry that we dig out of the mountains now and it will be anything from new back to 40 50 years old. But the human body doesn't know if it get if it gets killed by a 100-y old bullet or a hypermodern rocket for 100 million from outer space. You just die. Mhm. So it's irrelevant. You you what you need is the killing power economically because you have and that's a very harsh way to view it view it. But you have limited resources to kill the enemy. So you need to kill with a limited resources as little as possible. So what they said what he said is that we will fight now with the material we have now. We will not fight with the drones we will buy in 2 years cuz we don't have them now. And the other interesting thing there is that everybody tells uh the military that you should buy more drones why did you buy F-35? Oh my god, how stupid. Yeah. The difference is that a drone nowadays has about 3 months technical lifespan because the the [**52:20**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3140s) opposite side it will take them roughly and they see it in Ukraine now all the time and I'm not speaking as me. This is all knowledge derived from a general. So it is not me inventing this. What we can see now in Ukraine is that the the other when you have a new drone type the other enemy the enemy will take about 3 months max to figure out how to take them down electronically or with some other way. So if you buy a drone today the coolest you can find and you wait for 3 months and you send it up near the board line it will be taken out immediately. So to buy drones and store them is totally pointless. What you need to do is to reserve monetary capacity for future flexibility. You need to have ability to buy and you need to make sure that there is industrial power to build then that's why this industrial like the buildup of the western uh military complex is so important because we don't know now what we will fight within 10 years but we need to have the ability to build it then because we can't buy it now and even we could buy it now it would be stupid because by then it would be outdated but the big jet like the jet fighter the F-35 for example it [**53:21**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3201s) is actually many it's a jet fighter yeah that's what meets the eye but actually it's a flying weapons platform. It's a fly it's a part it's a hub of the intelligence uh collection platform. It's an integrated communication platform. And the interesting thing is why once you buy into that you exclude many other it will also define what missiles do I have to buy now 30 years from now. So when they buy the F-35 they essentially dictate what Finland will defend itself with 30 years from now. Mhm. And what the general said is this that right now there's a war going on in Ukraine and and Russia is sending older and older material into battle and people sort of cheer that on and they believe that it's a sign of that they will lose and maybe they will maybe they won't but what is what is sure is that they will wipe out the legacy stack of guns and ammo and they have a remarkable ability that to rebuild that now 30 years from now they will have a hyperodern army free of legacy and we will roughly have the same stuff we have Now the people living 30 years from now should be really worried if they don't modernize the army now because [**54:23**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3263s) it's [clears throat] a relative game. So that's the one thing now because legacy is so important in the military context then they are you know whether this is something they have thought about and decided or if it's an evolutionary thing nobody really knows but what they do is that they are very aware of the importance of the long-term decisions. So what they have is a separate think tank for that. It's called the headquarters. And the interesting thing is that every corporate, every big corporate would have a group strategy. Now the interesting thing is this and I have actually been in the group strategy of a bank and I was surrounded by the sort of the consulting reject club. A lot of ex consultants that couldn't move up so they moved out in there and then you were s sitting there working on the strategy with other people and I was the only one that had ever been in a bank and then I was thinking that's very strange but that's what happens. You have group strategy with x amount of ex consultants they have never been in the business and then they decide on the above for the business and then but in the military every single general started in the army nobody has started somewhere else. So what happens is this you start as a conscript [**55:25**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3325s) and then you move up and when you are sort of after 10 years or so you're a major then they will say if you're promising enough hey you are promising we are the kind of thought material leadership kind of person we want to think about the future capabilities so why don't you take a you know a posting in the headquarters that's essentially their group strategy they take the smartest people after 10 years for a first stint there and then they are major and they maybe get become colonel there and then they work on these long-term strategic decisions But they have spent 10 years in the business. That's not the case in the group strategy of most corporates. You will have the clueless consultants there. And that is a lesson that we think that they can learn from. Try to take some of the you can have the rate really good consultants too because they have other skill sets in terms of planning and driving change and all that kind of stuff. But the domain knowledge is not really up to scratch. What we think is that take some of the best people from the business and put them in these functions for a while. The problem is then that you will take the best P&L producing capacity out of production for a while. So the business will scream you no don't don't [**56:27**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3387s) take these guys they are the best. Are they going to be doing these powerpoints now? Yeah well what are you going to do then? Take the dumb people. Then you will certainly have a bad future. So you have to take the liberty and you need to celebrate these people. You say we have elevated these guys to here. Now after 5 years there knowledge their current knowledge about the business is now eroding after 5 years in the headquarters. So they send them back as colonels then now they are a colonel and they are a brigade commander or something like that. So they top up again in a different function on frontline expertise and then they are back and then they are back again maybe as a like jury was he was the commander of a brigade. So in peace time 3,500 soldiers and I've actually been invited to an artiller artillery drill out there. Very very impressive to see and if there would be war he would have 35,000. Um and now he's back in headquarters again. So if you look at the LinkedIn profiles of top brass you will see that they move in and out of the actual business. That doesn't happen in the corporates. We have lots to unpack there. I I I think I agree [**57:34**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3454s) with you on the uh kind of no no need to build uh store current drones things. We need to build build the capacity to have a factories to build and the logistics to build it. So that's uh the then of course if Ukraine would decide to attack any European country, they would just wipe anything because they are by far the best army in the world at the moment with the modern uh drones. So then you would u maybe a little bit uh regret that you didn't have at least something to count to the drone waves but that's very very unlikely. Uh I think the aggressor is more more likely to come from uh renewed Russia. Um but then uh on the Finnish army uh I mean we have a conscription so so we actually have a meritocracy. So I have spoken with a lot of the um uh top brass as well and they I I think it's safe to say that if you have a salaried army they are run by more idiots because then you the pool of the uh you have there in the command channel is not meritocratic whilst in Finland we it's conscription so it's it builds up on on the best on the best of the best. [**58:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3517s) Of course you have kind of a top gun culture in America and like elite elite marines and stuff. So which is a which is a a separate uh subset of good but in a lot of the European countries that's not the case. You have a hopeless uh kind of a [snorts] salaried personnel. Nobody takes it seriously. There's no merit crisis. So Europe is very dangerously uh inefficient in the in the art of war. And in addition to that, you know, because so until like 30 years ago or so, the the enemy the whole purpose of the armies was to defend our own territory against a big AR sort of open field tank war against Russia. That was the purpose of the army. Then that threat sort of disappeared. Mhm. And then little by little people were like, well, do we really need all these? No, we don't. Sweden famously decided not to have it or much of it, but we needed something. And then what we did but there was no war nearby and Russia would become nice. So what do we need them for? Well, there are people in Afghanistan that need some Swedish soft power projected to them and teach [**59:40**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3580s) them democracy and other things and also stop them immediately from killing each other right now, but in the long term they should become more sort of European. So we started to actually have we had an army not for the purpose or scale of war to defend the country now that way. Instead they were going to project the country's values somewhere else in the world. So you started to have desert camo and Swedish soldiers. That doesn't fly so well in the Swedish woods with this brown camo and so on. And the whole warfare is different and it's all about sort of keeping tribes apart talking to leaders semi- diplomacy. That's not what you read. You know, go ask Ukraine if they need that. No. So the whole purpose of the army, they were way too small and they were for the wrong purpose. And now we are stuck with that as a legacy problem. But there's one other interesting thing where I think that we can learn from this and the drone discussion is very interesting because I think there is a good parallel to to AI in the banks for example and probably many others too. So what I see as a consultant is that everyone is very keen on AI because it's so hot and we need to do it. The problem is that people don't know really exactly how to do it and the implementation [**60:44**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3644s) problems are well known for yourself. Yes. So of course you know everything but uh you know me and the rest of the world are utly clueless but um the problem is that I think that people try to sort of showcase a lot what they can do. So they select certain they pour the resources into quite narrow use cases that become a little bit pointless. Maybe they look fancy there is a chatbot and so on that this customer service can speak to but the interesting thing is that you still have an enormous legacy stack of pro the processes that run right now. Mhm. And they will, whether you like it or not, persist for some years, maybe three, maybe 10, I believe many more than that. But the interesting, if you have a drone in the army context, you can send it up and you can drop a grenade on somebody, it will have very limited explosive power right there. And then it might kill one or two soldiers. So, and that's bad, of course, but that's one hell of an expensive bullet to send that $1,000 drone there. Then you have over here hundreds of old cannons from 1970 with an unlimited supply of really old crappy shells and they are a little bit inaccurate [**61:49**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3709s) and uh but if you use that drone to send it up, take a photo, go down and automatic communicate with all these guns so that all of the So if that little drone is used not to consume itself but instead to elevate the enormous amount of legacy material you have by even 2%. that fighting power increase of the drone becomes dramatically bigger. So use the drone strategically for enhancing the val value of the existing enormous amount of legacy. That's what our general said to us that is sort of a better way to use the drones in that sense. And when I think of it as a banker rather than to create yet another uh AIdriven chatbot that nobody wants to speak to look how AI can enhance all the processes in the lending how to do credit decisioning better all the existing things you should apply AI to lift the value of all of that I think is how the value of AI would become higher fast yeah and uh we had a little bit of a discussion on the AI dystopia and I think since [**62:50**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3770s) I'm so frankly good user of AI I have several AI workers who are very good high quality and I can actually delegate them tasks not not as task lists and uh just uh actually enhance the my my uh day-to-day uh work skills. Um for example, this morning I had a weekly report on the EU um AI act. So it will scan all the legislative changes and uh it will make a uh um markup uh changes to the uh policy of Translink in like you should edit this based on this because this is the findings on the EU negotiation process and and the compass program. So it's very relatively easy for me to do that kind of a uh persistent uh jobs here there and everywhere and uh scan various um uh industries and uh opportunities stock picking global changes uh so and then of course you can do like what you in your example the one drone did for the Finnish artillery so you will [**63:54**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3834s) have a infinite chain of agents enhancing all kinds of things and it's only a matter of the imagination of what I have and then the quality of the tools that I put in place that you can take. [snorts] And now we come to the kind of the uh dystopia discussion. Now Elaine, you you've been writing uh fiction and now non-fiction and uh about the need for lava and harleen type of books. I mean will there be kind of a something left for the us humans to do in the age of AI? Yes, we will still fall in love. We will still look into another person's eyes and feel the world move. That is going to go on. And we are at heart. We are all creatives. And I believe there's going to be a [clears throat] not a not a back what is that backlash. Not that a circling around back to realizing that we really want authenticity and we will learn to recognize that and appreciate it which we have not for many decades. we've just sped up the world and sped it up and so [**64:57**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3897s) that we can't even enjoy success for more than a millisecond and I was talking to Eric about that today that he is [clears throat] such a fast learner and operator that and he succeeds moment by moment [clears throat] excuse me but he doesn't take time to just wow I succeeded with that and I think all of us as humanity are going to relearn that skill and and that's why personally I prefer to write myself I don't use those tools I probably will in admin situations as our publishing company grows. But for writing that that is my truest joy to be able to elevate out of this the mundane into a kind of time space or a timelessness which Kalista is uh given the opportunity to do as as she manages her heroes journey. Yeah. I think one thing uh what I learned on my hero's journey on the AI is that uh in last December like many many many times ago in ancient time when people didn't know anything about AI in December 2025 I started building my second brain so my thinking was that [**66:01**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=3961s) then I needed like a better notebook so I'll put important things like I store them and then then I use the AI to enhance them but it was more like a replicating my knowledge base and my situations but uh now this here um more and more I'm uh leaning on these AI workers which don't do that they have their own memory very uh well curated and own learning systems but they still lean on me for like the like the base truth so so important things I I I teach them like I would for kids like this is this is base truth uh keep this in as a sort of a in your mind unless I I I learn better the truths And once you do that persistently over time, use them to sort of explore the world on your task and improve their own tasks and and uh and anchor their like a base through to my thinking. Then it becomes quite a beautiful system and it's a better than you and it's definitely better than the just the AI. Yeah. It's it's a system. Yes. Yes. Learning better truths as you [**67:06**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4026s) go along. That's fabulous. a really spiral rise to infinity and and then this this will change like what Eric was saying about the uh droids or or the or the military power or competencies. You got to have a legacy truths and but then you can like reframe them and uh use the even the old stuff in a better way and more efficient way and uh it's a system. So I'm building a system of human AI intelligence. So I I think that's maybe something where the our hero Kalista could join. Maybe she could meet or her her kid could meet AI and start this journey from the from the beginning. Well, we do plan to have sequels on Kalista because she's just beginning. Yes. Yes. I think there there's one interesting thing with that as a final note on the military. There's one very key difference between the military and all other organizations and that is that military can never recruit other than graduates. They can only take graduates then they can never recruit more to tell that what you know you cannot go oh [ __ ] we have some bad colonels let's hire [**68:07**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4087s) some from some other army no but corporates do it all the time so you know go tell you know I don't know so take and take Microsoft whatever the highest HR person in Microsoft and tell them as of now you can only regra graduate fresh graduates is the only recarious you can ever do forever I think a couple of things would change with a the how many they hire and b how well they train them and then how much you invest in your people now that failure becomes so costly. I think you know I don't have a good answer to that. I just think it's a very interesting observation. Uh one more point that I would like to make which I think is very interesting is the optimal rate of change that we have introduced here in the white paper that we talk about here. So for for anybody with finance background you will have an in the portfolio theory there will be an efficient frontier where you have you can choose between this this possible return with that volatility and you are indifferent between sort of that and other combinations of risk and volatility or volatility and return that you are indifferent with. So something similar applies and that's [**69:11**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4151s) thinking we took down to change management. So the thing is the following society will move at some sort of pace that would be in the in the portfolio theory of finance that would basically be the risk-free return of the government sort of the base rate that you can get risk-f free and that's society's rate of change. So if you move slower than society that might work for a tiny while but pretty soon you will basically be out of business because there are so many better alternatives. So that is the minimum level of speed you need to have and that you can have without causing much trauma to the organization. you got hey guys we need to move as fast as society people will go yeah that sounds smart let's do it and then you don't have to fire anybody you just do stuff the problem is that most people have a higher ambition level than that and that's how development happens so then the big bosses will say we need faster because we need to outperform the competition so we need to move faster than the average and that's when you need to start to put some pressure on organization somebody is going to feel squeezed uh and eventually you can push so hard that everyone burns out. You can put so high change pace that every single person burns out. That's not good [**70:16**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4216s) either. But you need to find that balance between the speed and the side effect. So you know that we have come sometimes when you explain explain complex uh concepts the easiest is to take a super mundane example and I usually take an omeolet. If you are going to do an omelette you have to break the eggs. We all get that. So that's the minimum sort of drama otherwise there is no omeolet the but you can do an omeolet without breaking the eggs killing the chicken setting fire to the farm and kill the farmer you don't need all that to do an omeolet so the question is what is the right balance how much sort of side effects are you willing to do and I think that what there comes the problem in the risk averse businesses such as banking that the the good choice for the senior management is to oh I get paid a million euros a year for this job. Another four years and I'm done. Whoa. Um the and a big change program will be an 8-year thing and they are the big change programs core banking system changes are sort of 8 10 years or more and all the costs are frontloaded [**71:21**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4281s) and all the benefits are far loaded. So you end up in a situation and then thinking about the average time of a CEO is around 4.7 years. Same with the board member. So now if you start if you're a new board member or if you're a new CEO it will take a year to figure out what to do and you likely now have three and a half years left in the job and then your choices are hm should I kick the can down the road and things kind of work and it won't be my fault and I don't rock the boat and there are no big costs here and things work and I get paid lots of money per year or should I launch this massive transformation product for for the benefit of the future and I have three and a half years left and all the costs with and in that three and a half years and then the benefits will land with the next guy if it goes right if it goes wrong it will go wrong faster and it will be my fault. M it's a very easy decision to decide to kick the car down the road then and sort of and that's why a lot of these things don't happen because people don't have the long the benefit the the incentives are not in favor of supporting the long-term transformational bets and I think that people need to when they set out on big change journeys they need to have this discussion that [**72:26**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4346s) if we're going to push change fast how much side effects are we willing to take because right now that is sort of an unpleasant discussion we you know and I have done many big change journeys myself I have I been given a number of failed teams that I've had to clean up. H and the bosses all just said, they send you out like this. Hey, Eric, fix this team is broken. Fix it. I'm like, okay, I'll do it, but don't make them angry. Okay, I will try. And then a year goes and I go, I have to suck this and these guys cuz they refuse and they reject and they stop all the people that want to make progress. So, I'm going to have to suck them. So, I'll do it. So, I do it. And then they there is havoc in the Nordic. You know, it's very difficult to suck people in the Nordics. So, you're not even allowed. I've been in organizations where you're not even allowed to use the sword. They said, "Eric, you know, you be you were calling to me and said, Eric, you you said you suggested that some people might lose their jobs." I'm like, "Yeah, of course." That we don't talk like that in this organization. And guess what? A year later, they had to sack 20%. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's a good analogies there. I'm a finance uh man myself on the efficient frontier. [**73:31**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4411s) So you have a risk-free rate and then the uh very risky business with high beta but you still kind of make a first as a investor or or company your choice in what kind of risk level uh versus risk-free return you want to take what kind of a base volatility you're willing to accept and you can pick a safe uh uh regulated um infrastructure business where you have leisfolio yeah or portfolio or then you can go all in in some sort of a really uh distributive uh new technology And but then I think the Finnish society has um and that's I know that's the oet hate in in Finland. I mean uh is that the whole society has built all kinds of ways to kill the volatility and for example the options we killed options with the taxation. So they become completely unusable in Finland. Now this u right-wing gun has actually reintroduced them. So, so we now can use options again to because those will be the tools that can be uh create the help the CEO [**74:34**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4474s) to take the risk beyond his like a three four year uh short-term risk-taking uh timetable and uh get some benefit from the uh transformative journey he or she has taken in in her time of office by cashing on the options and and then uh but we we we as a society we have been very much focused on like killing risk everywhere and that's why we are slowly being killed in the Finnish economy. Yeah, you have your Europe's highest unemployment of 10 and a half% and you know as a foreigner here having lived in eight or seven countries I lived first in Sweden then I lived in Norway then in Germany then in Switzerland and then in England selling to all the Nordics from England for six years then I lived in Denmark, Sweden and Finland again. So I have actually and I have four kids all born in different countries. One in London, one in Copenhagen, one in Sweden and one in Finland. I actually I'm one of the few people that can have an opinion because I have seen the alternatives and I am not surprised you have the highest unemployment in Europe given the extreme risk aversion that people have. Yeah. And that's why we I I now it feels this government even if it's just [**75:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvPktgHRNU&t=4537s) moved slowly [snorts] uh it's still changing those kind of fundamental structural problems uh they've been kind of the the negative legacy of of Finland. But uh let's not take it too much in the politics. I I think the important thing is we we change the society by changing the people and and the companies and uh this book Galistister's paradox uh is excellent way to achieve that almost like a handbook on that. So thank you um uh for your visit Eric uh Okason and Delane Sterling. Um I propose we have a short uh discussion on the inside channel. Uh and I propose we pick two completely different topics. uh one from Ela we talk more about the uh improvisation and the art of writing dramatic writing and Eric I think we should talk about the London city and the city boys London scene thank no we will spare that but as a reminder Finland is the world champion in ISO once again matsunden [laughter] matsund okay thank you guys thank you thank --- Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Why Banks, Armies and AI All Fall Into the Same Trap | Erik Åkesson, Elaine Stirling, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/723-why-banks-armies-and-ai-all-fall-into-the-same-trap-erik-ake/, 2026-06-26. For quotes include episode db-723 and timestamp.