Black Belt in Business | Aslak de Silva | Neuvottelija 412

Summary

Who he is. Aslak de Silva was CEO of Nordic Business Forum from March 2018 to February 2022, steering the events company through the pandemic, then CEO of Selfly Store during Stora Enso’s sale process, and now works at Maventa. He trained in the Korean martial art Han Moo Do for more than 15 years, fought about a hundred full-contact bouts and won a world championship in the United States in 2000. His philosophy, The Black Belt in Leadership, is a book, a podcast and a set of belt courses for managers.

Pressure and panic. His strength in change, he says, is that it does not throw him: “In a full-contact fight the other guy is trying to knock you out, and panicking doesn’t help.” Someone has to be the calm one; calm spreads, and then the team can think and experiment again. But no fight is won without trying something, so risks are analysed rather than avoided.

Fitness, rest and staged goals. “The stupidest reason to lose a fight is poor fitness.” De Silva runs stairs until he gives up and studies what he tells himself at that moment. At 47, his challenge is 40,000 pull-ups in ten years, about 11 a day. Fitness is not a necessity for a leader, he says, but it helps with pressure, and it requires rest; he thinks in cycles of the moment, the season and the decade.

People first. Having sat on six management teams, four times as CEO, he starts every change from people: personal contact with everyone, openness about his own mistakes, and getting close to the quiet ones. “Nobody hands you the black belt”: fighters need many training partners and coaches, and a high belt means coaching others. The signs of the wrong leader are blaming the team and silent meetings: “Leadership is about whether you have followers.”

Owners and boards. A CEO should be honest with the board, take its tips, and still lead on his own line; if the board is unhappy, it can make its own decisions. Strategy changes on the way. De Silva admires Paul Polman for building long-term value without sacrificing the short term, and admits he would not have dared to do the same.

Calibrating confidence. Coaching Sweden in a Han Moo Do international against Finland, he told his last fighter, four points down, that he would get four points. He did, the bout was level, and the minute’s break was too short to raise the target: Sweden lost by one point. The lesson: set confidence at the level that wins, not the level that satisfies.

Loyalty and AI. Miettinen describes advising Nordbanken in the Merita merger at Credit Suisse while privately hoping the deal would fail, and the unforeseeable ending in which Nordea moved to Helsinki in 2018. De Silva has built a pilot AI coach on his philosophy with Lovable, around six martial-arts leadership types, and does not yet know whether it is a business.

A note on the source

The summary rests on the episode’s Finnish auto-generated captions, which garble names, so quotations are translated for sense rather than verbatim. Several figures are de Silva’s own and not supported in the episode: his fight record, Unilever’s value growth under Polman, and Nordic Business Forum’s audience numbers. The headline of the AI-edition write-up uses Mike Tyson’s “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” as a frame; Tyson is not mentioned in the episode.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Musta vyö bisneksessä | Aslak de Silva | Neuvottelija 412. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.

In depth

The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.