11Nov2025
Leader’s Digest | November 2025
by: Heli Hänninen
Welcome to the November 2025 edition of the Leader’s Digest, your monthly guide to business leadership. This time, we’ll explore the topic of business development from different perspectives.
Contents
- Risto Siilasmaa’s keynote: Developing Strategic Foresight
- HBR Article: Is Your Strategy Ready for AI?
- Discussion with Peter Hinssen & April Rinne: Leading Through Change
- Blog: What the Next Generation of Leaders Learned at NBF 2025
- Update: Over 6,500 Tickets Sold for Nordic Business Forum 2026
- Inspirational Quote by Barack Obama
New Leadership Insights
Developing Strategic Foresight
— Full Keynote by Risto Siilasmaa
“Observation alone is just noise. Thinking alone is just theory. By combining the noise and theory into foresight and taking action, you can win.”
– Risto Siilasmaa
At Nordic Business Forum 2025, the former Nokia Chairman and F-Secure founder, Risto Siilasmaa, gave a keynote that every future-ready leader needs to hear. A few key insights from his talk were:
Strategic foresight only matters if you act on what you learn; insight without execution is wasted potential.
Every leader should train 3 muscles continuously: observe trends, think critically, and act decisively.
AI, demographics, and exponential tech growth are reshaping every industry–and ignoring them is not only risky, but reckless.
This is wisdom from someone who’s led through transformation at the highest level.
Is Your Strategy Ready for AI?
— HBR Article by Vijay Govindarajan, Venkat Venkatraman, and Bill Achtmeyer
With AI becoming more and more dominant in every business, growth no longer comes from scale and scope alone. It’s driven by how intelligently you connect knowledge, data, and expertise across your organization. In their recent Harvard Business Review article, Vijay Govindarajan, Venkat Venkatraman, and Bill Achtmeyer introduce three essential questions every company must ask:
1.What is our portfolio logic?
→ Don’t just ask how diversified you are; ask whether your businesses can learn and grow together through shared data and insight.
2. What is our corporate operating model?
→ Move beyond control-based structures to build systems that enable peer-to-peer collaboration and scalable learning.
3. What are our unique algorithms?
→ Combine proprietary data and domain expertise to create cumulative learning advantages no competitor can replicate.
The article opens up these questions and explains how they can be used for rethinking strategy in the intelligence era.
How to Lead Through Constant Change
— Discussion with April Rinne & Peter Hinssen
“The problem is that we have built our companies today for scalable efficiency. What we need to do is build our companies for scalable learning.”
– Peter Hinssen
The HS Visio Live Studio at NBF 2025 hosted a timely discussion on leadership in an era of constant change with April Rinne and Peter Hinssen. Their insights were not only future-oriented but also practical for anyone focused on business development today. Here are a few ideas from their session:
The number one skill for any leader is resilience
Peter emphasized that we live in a “never normal” world, and the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty is now a top leadership skill.
Trust is essential for navigating change
April highlighted that in times of uncertainty, trust—in others, in ourselves, and in the future—is fundamental for progress and collaboration.
Move from scalable efficiency to scalable learning
Referencing John Hagel, Peter noted that organizations must shift from optimizing for efficiency to enabling continuous learning as a core capability.
NBF Spotlight
Join us behind the scenes as we introduce our speakers, share event updates, and more!
What the Next Generation of Leaders Learned at NBF 2025
“The future no longer feels scary or overwhelming. NBF reminded me that growth lasts our whole lifetime.”
That’s what one aspiring leader said after attending Nordic Business Forum 2025.
Thanks to the NBF Future Ticket initiative and Sini Norta, CEO of Finnish Defence House, four young professionals, Stella Aro, Eerika Aro, Ida Viitanen, and Sara Makkonen, joined our event for two days of insights and connections. Here are a few lessons they took away from the event:
→ Curiosity is a core strength
→ Leadership is human and relatable
→ Empathy isn’t soft; it’s strategic
→ Being easy to work with is a competitive edge
→ You don’t need to “fit the mold” to belong
Visit our blog to read all of their learnings and what changed for them after the event.
Over 6,500 Tickets Sold for Nordic Business Forum 2026
It’s been just seven weeks since launching Nordic Business Forum 2026 and over 6,500 tickets are already gone! The excitement is real, and we are so grateful
Next year, we’ll be diving into the theme of The Human Edge, especially from the perspectives of performance, decision-making, and collaboration. We’ll have speakers such as Oprah Winfrey, Steven Bartlett, Angela Duckworth, and Paul Polman stepping on stage to share their insights and experiences on those themes.
If you haven’t secured your seat yet, now’s the time. We’d love for you to join us! ✨
Stop and Think
“Change happens from the bottom, not simply from the top.”
Barack Obama
