Sari Baldauf: A life beyond Nokia

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By Teija Sutinen
     
      With the resignation late last week of Sari Baldauf, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Nokia Networks, the Finnish business firmament lost its brightest equal-opportunity star.
      Baldauf’s name has always been the one to bring out to silence anyone who dared question the prospects for Finnish women to get ahead in the workplace.
      "What’s that you say? Glass ceiling, is there? Oh yeah? Sure, and who just got voted in as the most influential female executive in Europe, then? Who has been one of the most highly-paid executives in Finland for the past umpteen years, then? Hmm?"
     
Success did not come by itself, and being female did not play a decisive role in it. Sari Baldauf, 49, has a career stretching back more than two decades in Nokia, and she has been in a number of windy places. She joined the company in 1983, at the time when Kari Kairamo was President and CEO.
      She started out as a strategic planner. Like the current CEO Jorma Ollila, she was among those Kairamo protégés in the "new guard" of young Nokia executives, carefully groomed for demanding tasks ahead.
      Towards the end of the 1980s, Baldauf moved over to the newly-created Nokia Telecommunications, where she was soon given responsibility for the still relatively small Cellular Systems. Jorma Ollila appointed her to the Group Executive Board in 1994, not long after he had taken over at the helm.
      In the latter half of the 1990s, Nokia engaged in a systematic policy of rotating board members through different tasks in the company, and Baldauf spent the better part of two years (1997 and 1998) heading Nokia’s Asia-Pacific operations.
      She then returned to the networks fold, becoming President of Nokia Networks in July 1998.
     
A couple of years before that, in 1996, Baldauf prompted both admiration and a measure of consternation by taking a six-month sabbatical from the Nokia Executive Board. She travelled extensively and explored Asian cultures, which she clearly appreciates.
      The half-year away from the office was a powerful signal that Baldauf had other things in her life beside her work, and that she was prepared to make her own decisions, regardless of possible mutterings from those around her. Seen in this light, it is not so difficult to believe that the future prospect of the Nokia Presidency or a similar appointment does not quicken her heart so much.
      The Nokia CEO (or in Ollila’s case, the Chairman and CEO) must be constantly in the public eye and answering for his actions to the company’s shareholders. Baldauf, for her part, seems to appreciate more concrete achievements, working with people.
      As a manager, she is described as a two-tone type. She is sensitive, has a sound grasp of situations, sends out encouraging letters to her subordinates, and she knows how to listen. Then again, when need be, she is capable of being extremely tough and determined.
     
Baldauf found herself up against a wall in the spring of 2003, when she was obliged to prune (fairly savagely) Nokia Networks, the very unit she had herself been instrumental in building up, in the wake of the international collapse of the wireless networks market.
      The streamlining process worked - Networks, at one time the sick man of Nokia, is now back in profit.
     
Sari Baldauf clings tightly to her privacy outside of work. Her life away from Nokia includes a holiday home (the late edition tabloid Ilta-Sanomat describes it as "a luxury villa") in Tammisaari on Finland’s south coast, and the children of her siblings, to whom she is a devoted and dedicated auntie.
      Baldauf herself is divorced and has no children.
      She is interested in the role of supporting good causes, but she keeps a determinedly low profile as a philanthropist.
      A trust-fund set up with the Finnish Cultural Foundation is hidden behind the discreet form of her maiden name, S.Niiranen.
      One of the board-member positions she holds dear is her involvement with the Baltimore-based International Youth Foundation, which works in 60 countries around the world "to improve the conditions and prospects for young people where they live, learn, work, and play".
      On the business front, her only directorship is on the board of the media concern SanomaWSOY, of which Helsingin Sanomat itself is a part.
      If she so wished it, Baldauf would certainly be welcomed into as many boardrooms as she cared to occupy.
     
Right now she has expressed an interest in the Italian language, which she wishes to study further.
      Those who know Sari Baldauf do not anticipate that her plans for Italian will stop at mere dabbling.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.12.2004


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Resignations at Nokia Networks; Baldauf announces departure (3.12.2004)

Links:
  Nokia, Group Executive Board: Sari Baldauf

TEIJA SUTINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
teija.sutinen@hs.fi