– Dear Alexander, first of all I want to thank you for your participation in the jury for the Courage and Wisdom contest. I hope it was interesting.
I wonder if you could express your opinion of what you have seen and how it agrees with your experience of consultancy in Russian companies.
– To my mind, Russia has enormous opportunities for creating new businesses. The Stockholm School of Economics’ graduates have proved to be “passionaria” (passionate), by which I mean they do not wait for a situation to arise: they create it.
The majority of our clients are “different” Russians: those who own fast-growing companies in Russia, and would-be captains of Russian business; the other face of the Russian economy.
– All the contest participants – both hired top managers and company owners – are SSE Russia graduates. They have a lot in common. In your opinion, how do the people and projects you came across during the contest reflect the tendencies of the Russian market?
– It seems to me that the common characteristics of the Stockholm School graduates is that they are goal-orientated and they aim to achieve this. These are valuable qualities for their own business, and for working at a global corporation as well. Unfortunately, there is not a single SSE graduate in our company yet. I hope this situation will change this year.
– Have you noticed some distinctive features?
– Yes, I like the creative approach to developing business ideas.
– How do you value the development of new business theories and ideas? How important are innovations and what place do they have in businessmen’s minds and deals?
– Nowadays the world is changing very quickly. Business patterns become outdated very quickly, as products used to. Now we do not speak about innovations in products or services, but innovations in business. Look, just 5 years ago nobody knew Google, and now they are world leaders in the IT industry. What is more important is that they have revolutionary ideas! There is no shortage of capital in the world, there is a shortage of ideas.
– Do you often come across really original business ideas? Have they been profound? What is the aspect of them that comes to life?
– Our company works for the owners of the best Russian companies. We help them to take decisions that affect the costs of the business. Normally, the owner has more ideas than means to achieve their goals. A big company can rarely make an optimal decision, as every option is influenced by too many inside political factors. Our objective is to help owners make reasonable decisions by taking into consideration all of the risks involved. Our principle advantage is independence, and our recommendations are based on fact.
– Would you like to add something you find relevant about examples of courage and wisdom in business.
– Courage and wisdom in business are two sides of the same coin. Whilst in the early ‘90s the majority of businesses did not require anything but courage, now they need wisdom. The market has become more competitive and it is now important to turn a bright idea into a business project. Almost all of the innovative ideas that have changed our lives could have been buried by skeptics and analysts as they would have demonstrated their likelihood of failure. I advise you to be sceptical about sceptics.
Interviewed by Yury Voskresenskiy | 
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