Marten Mickos: The Special Value of Individuals

So the question is, what led me to these innovative approaches to management and culture and leadership? I don't know. Maybe it's my lack of discipline, that I don't like to do the same thing over and over again. So I invent a new thing to do just for the sake of doing it, and that somehow then spawns new ways. And I just believe in the very special value of individual human beings. And it so annoys me when I see companies treat human beings like machines. I mean, we have enough machines already. Can't we treat human beings as human beings and treat the machines as machines? But I remember I did a summer internship at one of the largest it, the largest IT company at the time back in Helsinki. And we loved the work there. But one day the middle managers decided that they will decide when we have lunch. I was like, what is this? And I went home that night thinking, I will never work for a large company again unless I've created it myself. But I made an exception with sun, and I loved Sun. Sun had fantastic culture, just an amazing place. And it's sort of sad to see sun not being an independent company anymore, because what they built there was just absolutely outstanding.