Helsinki

Was there recently for some business meetings. Quite impressed by the statistics of the country. Its eighth largest country of Europe, historically was part of Sweden. May be that explains why all the street names were written in Swedish and in Finnish !

Was a surprise to see tonnes of Chinese people :). May be another factory proposal at China. I stayed much closer to Airport though and nice to have a free airport shuttle :)

Thing I disliked was Finnish food. Bad Bad Bad Bad Bad!

Hotel had the breakfast timings from 4 AM to 10 AM. Yes 4 AM :) My business counterparts there are Helsinki office told me that they are used to have lunch at 10:30-11 AM. I am used to have breakfast at this time on weekends :)

Though my schedule was very tight, we were able to roam around, in local markets and not to forget the Nokia showroom at Helsinki !
One very nice surprise was the cool local music bands performing there. Music has no language and we were glued to that place for nearly an hour ! Amazing talent. Weather was very nice, though 30 minutes of drizzling.


Finland currently numbers 5,302,778 inhabitants and has an average population density of 17 inhabitants per square kilometer. This makes it, after Norway and Iceland, the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Isn't this amazing and Nokia comes from this place.
And last the rickshaw, but in Europe ;)

Best Place to work !

This is another text from the same book. And probably the most imp one for every individual.

And the other Jim Graham story I have is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice.
You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you’re doing push-ups after practice. And when it was all over.
One of the other assistant coaches came over and said, yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he? I said, yeah.
He said, that’s a good thing. He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up.
And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

Fundamentals !

I was reading a book and this is something worth. We all know this and very few apply in day today work. This is applicable to profession, life, relations and in any approach !

OK, let’s talk about football.
My dream was to play in the National Football League, I did not make it to the National Football League, but I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish.
I had a coach, I signed up when I was nine years old. I was the smallest kid in the league, by far. And I had a coach, Jim Graham, who was six-foot-four, he had played linebacker at Penn State. He was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school. And I mean really old school. Like he thought the forward pass was a trick play. And he showed up for practice the first day, and you know, there’s big hulking guy, we were all scared to death of him. And he hadn’t brought any footballs.
How are we going to have practice without any footballs? And one of the other kids said, excuse me coach, but there’s no football.

And Coach Graham said, right, how many men are on a football field at a time? Eleven on a team, twenty-two.
Coach Graham said, all right, and how many people are touching the football at any given time? One of them.
And he said, right, so we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing.

And that’s a really good story because it’s all about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.