Agility as a growth factor - insights from Mikko Virtanen, Agile Day CEO
For many modern, Agile-powered companies, building a people-focused and flexible work environment is key to success. Leaders believe it boosts employee engagement and leads to great business results. That’s why organizations are eager to try new management styles and tools to improve their operations. So, what do they need to succeed with the Agile approach? In this week’s “Around the Product Development,” we talked with Mikko Virtanen, an expert in agile transformation with over 20 years of experience. Our topic is how to use business agility to grow. Enjoy!
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Matt: Hi everyone, and welcome to Around the Product Development, our weekly show featuring lively discussions on hot topics in digital product creation. We talk about everything from monetization to innovation, all within 25 minutes. No fluff, just actual insights from digital product practitioners, mostly members of the Agile Product Builders Community (APBC). The APBC is a Slack community powered by Boulder, comprising digital product creatives and consultants. This week, we’ll discuss agility as a growth factor with our guest, Mikko Virtanen.
Mikko has over 20 years of experience in leading IT development, business, and growth, using his expertise to transform companies and achieve unprecedented results. Together with the Growing Agile Day team, he aims to change how organizations work and accelerate the transition to human and future-fit organizations. Note that when we talk about Agile, we don’t mean Agile in the software sense, but Mikko will share more on that. Mikko, welcome to the talk.
Mikko: Thanks, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be here. I feel lucky that I was traveling in Poland a couple of weeks ago and met these great people in Gliwice who dare to do things differently. Today, I’m here with you in their webinar. Happy to be here.
Matt: Sounds very cool. Thank you for being here, Mikko. Maybe just to get started, can you share a little bit about yourself, who you are, what Agile Day is basically, and well, I already mentioned 20 years of experience. That’s quite a lot. So I’m always curious, how did you come to where you are at the moment?
Mikko: Yeah, Mikko Virtanen is my name. How did I come to where I am today? It’s a long story, but you said it’s 25 minutes, so I need to keep it short. I have a long history in IT services. I’ve been running these kinds of services, businesses, and companies for some 15-20 years in all kinds of roles. Leading teams, leading projects, doing a lot of sales myself, and leading sales teams. Sales has always been a passion for me. But even closer to my heart has always been the way to lead a company. If I call it management paradigms or cultures or ways of leading an organization, that has always been something I’ve been thinking about, testing, learning, and practicing. Even from the early days when I was in the military in Finland for eleven months, I learned one perspective of leadership. Coming from an introverted background as an engineer to a leadership role, I have been doing those things a lot and then learning a lot, testing things about how to lead companies and teams differently. Now, we are building a product in a SaaS company. What excites me about building this product is that it has a soul about how companies operate and what kind of leadership is used in the company. So that’s what we do. The product itself is an operating platform for modern, future-oriented, well-managed software development service companies. The name of the product and company is Agile Day.
Matt: I already mentioned the term human and future-fit organizations. It’s something I think you’re working towards. What do we have to think about when we say human and future-fit organizations? Let’s say I’m just a regular employee at a company. What should I imagine under human and future-fit?
Mikko: What does it look like? I think it starts even with the core beliefs about running a company or business. Is it just an economic equation, like a machine or a factory, or do we think it’s about the people? We want to create a place where people can be the best version of themselves, and the whole company can be as great as the teams and individuals in it. It’s about this way of thinking. What I have learned is that when we find a way to help all those people flourish and be the best version of themselves together with great colleagues, amazing business results follow.
The things we typically expect to achieve, like growth, profitability, and high margins, actually come when you dare to make things people-centric.
People are the greatest assets; they are the only assets you have in the services business.
It’s about running this business in a human-centric, people-centric manner and making it a place where people can be the best version of themselves with the right kind of motivation. They need a purpose, mastery of the things they do, and the needed autonomy to drive towards something meaningful. As a consequence, amazing business results can follow for the company.
Matt: Yeah, and I assume achieving all these things isn’t easy for companies, right? Somehow they get lost, or maybe companies are not aware of them. That’s also where your proposition comes in, I think. Do you know why it is so difficult for many companies to be human-centric and future-fit?
Mikko: It’s honestly difficult. We have one journey where we practice this and learn in a laboratory. This is my perspective on it. I think the reason it’s so difficult or demanding is because of history and culture. What was taught to us in universities in the last century, in the nineties, was all about management with KPIs and creating structures to control business. That was the metaphor for leading companies.
The universities and schools have been teaching us to do things in a way that’s not very human-centric. The leaders we see around us, who might be from the sixties or seventies, also behave like that. It comes with the culture and tradition, making it hard to break the norms and dare to do things differently. When people around you and old structures might be fighting against your beliefs, it becomes even more challenging. The environment makes it difficult and demanding.
Smaller companies, by nature, are typically more agile and people-centric. Larger companies can be more hierarchical, siloed, and bureaucratic. Of course, there are differences in both directions. The culture and countries are also different. But it’s an interesting thing overall. More and more companies are catching this people-centric mode, coming up every day in different countries.
This is a mega trend, shifting from the old command-control mode to a more people-centric, transparent mode of operation.
Matt: You mentioned cultural differences in different countries. How does that look from your experience? Is there a concrete difference, or is it more like a continental thing?
Mikko: I’ll give a disclaimer: it’s not black and white. But if I generalize, I come from Finland, and I’ve lived in Sweden. I know the Nordics well. The Nordics are very people-centric and democratic in general. Many successful companies and digital agencies there are people-centric. In Southern and Eastern Europe, there’s a different cultural background. In Poland, for example, the Catholic Church and communism have an impact on company cultures. But many young, international CEOs are driving change towards more people-centric models. In the Netherlands, you have movements like Corporate Rebels and companies like Buurtzorg, which are great examples. So I would assume your country is far along in this. In Asia, particularly India, the cultural background is different, and they are quite far from this kind of thinking. It’s an exploration journey for me, meeting companies in different countries daily and seeing a lot of interesting things.
Matt: I always try to be modest, but I think you’re right about the Netherlands. There are many examples here, perhaps because it’s a small country and easier to implement. Who knows? Not burning my fingers on that today. To go back to the topic of this talk, we’re talking about agility as a growth factor. This is super interesting for everyone because everyone wants to grow. All companies search for growth, whether financial or otherwise. I mentioned at the beginning that we’re not talking about agility in the software sense. Maybe you can share your understanding of agility and how it connects to company growth. How does that work?
Mikko: If I say the word “agile“ on the street and ask for interpretations, most people think about Scrum, SAFe, and productivity. That’s what people think these days. But if I take agility, it can mean almost anything. In our context, what we mean is business agility. Maybe if I draw something here.
If a company is hierarchical, like this, with leaders at the top and others below, it’s siloed and bureaucratic with many rules. Leaders exercise command-control leadership. Such a company is not agile or adaptive. We live in a VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. If you’re rigid, not agile and adaptive, you won’t succeed. This environment makes it difficult. Generations from the seventies to millennials and beyond need different leadership models. Leading the younger generation with old models is a problem; they’ll leave your company. Business agility is changing operations to something different. Our mission was to create a network of teams, organic and adaptive, like a bird flock. This model allows for fast adaptation to customer needs and changes. Business agility means creating an organization like this—teams and individuals who can adapt and serve clients effectively, making it a place where people enjoy working and can have meaningful roles.
Matt: Human-centric, right? We come back to that part again. Do you think technology can help people work this way? Is it possible to create more agility using software? Especially now, people are critical about online versus offline. I’m curious about that.
Mikko: I love this question. It’s spot on for me now as we build a platform. Do I believe a tool alone can change a company? No. A tool won’t change the company culture if the person using it doesn’t believe in the same principles, can’t leave behind command-control leadership. But it can help. A tool can accelerate the journey for those who believe in these principles. Our platform is opinionated to this model. When managers believe and understand that this is the secret sauce for success, technology can enable companies to be more people-centric, transparent, and autonomous.
Matt: How does your tool help? Is it transparency? Access to information? How does it look in practice?
Mikko: Our tool is an operating platform, the core system for a company. It covers essential things for consultancy companies: people, their skills, certifications, managing allocations, maintaining high utilization and billing ratios, efficient sales, CVs, and everything. Business dynamics don’t change without margins and high billing ratios. Even if I talk about people-centric aspects, we need hard KPIs. Our platform covers these essentials with transparency and autonomy. All people in the company can access the data, see sales, colleagues’ skills, allocations, and influence decisions. Transparency leads to higher trust and autonomy, making the whole engine more effective, achieving higher growth and utilization numbers with a collaborative approach.
Matt: That was my follow-up question. You mentioned earlier that growth can accelerate by doing so. Have you seen this in practice? Are there downsides to more agility in a company?
Mikko: In my experience, when we transformed our own operations in consultancy, we grew from 200 to 700 people in four years. It was profitable growth with low attrition and good NPS survey results. Companies growing now, despite industry challenges, are more like this—adaptive, effective, not siloed, with collaborative approaches. They sell more solutions and take responsibility, which correlates with this mode of operation. They are better equipped for changes, moving faster with better information flow, sensing changes earlier like a bird flock.
Matt: Mikko, we are nearing the end of our talk. I have two more questions. If a listener wants to make their organization more agile, what steps should they take? Do they get a tool first or talk to someone? How does it look in your experience?
Mikko: You can contact us, and we can share our learnings and show you the tool. We can discuss your company’s situation. If you’re a reader, there are books like Frederick Laloux’s “Reinventing Organizations” and the “Corporate Rebels“ books. Always contact us, and we can have a conversation, share our learnings, and see what we can find together.
Matt: How was your journey? Was it the same way - reading books? How did you discover this better way to organize your company?
Mikko: Actually, we didn’t start with books. We started with the challenge of making this happen. My co-CEO and I spent time together, thinking about what we truly believe in leading organizations. We created themes of transparency and more based on our beliefs. When we started operating like that, we found books confirming our assumptions, which was good. We fell in love with those books.
Matt: So you figured it out yourself first, then found others had similar ideas. Nice. This was our time. One more question. You mentioned books like Frederick Laloux’s and Corporate Rebels’. How can people contact you? LinkedIn, website?
Mikko: Follow us on LinkedIn. We share insights from our journey and learnings. We write ebooks, like operating sales in a collaborative, transparent team-of-teams model. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit our website, where you can book meetings directly from Calendly. We’re here for you.
Matt: Thank you for sharing. In the resources in Zoom, you can find Agile Day’s website and all the information. Miko, thank you so much. On a personal level, I share your worldview about organizational operations. It’s nice to meet someone with the same idea, working for the future. Thank you for joining.
Mikko: Thanks, Matt. I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you have a background with holacracy, so you understand what I’m talking about. Good luck with Olympic football. The Orange team has always been my favorite.
Matt: Thank you. Thank you again for joining. For the audience, thank you for joining. You can find resources under the resources tab to contact Mikko or Agile Day. Keep an eye on our website and LinkedIn for the next event. Thank you again, Miko. Have a nice day, and everyone in the audience, bye-bye.
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