Dr. Petri I. Salonen Views on Life, Entrepreneurship, and Software Business

Living a Life of International Business

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We have a provisional date for the upcoming book Rohkeasti maailmalle

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I just returned from Finland and had a good meeting with my publisher Talentum. We agreed that the manuscript needs to be done by mid-February and the provisional publication month is May 2010. I am in the final process of interviews of many interesting emigrants and expats that want to share their story. These people include professionals from different countries; from Asia, Africa, South-America, Europe, US etc. I have to say that this book has been fun to write as it has so many interesting things that I am able to share. I am also going to have an international version of the book as it will have broader appeal for sure. This upcoming week I have scheduled many new interviews and will select the most interesting ones as profiles in the end of the book.

Also, I am in the process of building an educational program around these topics as they are extremely important lessons that can be learned from people that have done it, seen it and ready to share what they know and feel about living outside their respective country. I have been in a fortunate position to know people around the world and all of these connections and discussions I have had has accumulated knowledge and experiences that one can’t buy from anywhere.

The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World by Dominique Moisi

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One of my favorite Sunday programs in CNN is Fareed Zakaria’s program GPS. He is not only a good reporter, he has a tremendous understanding of the current world situation and he brings very interesting people to his show. Each week he makes book recommendations and this week one book specifically caught my attention. A book from Dominique Moisi called The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World and I purchased it immediately to my Kindle DX and the book is amazing! It gives a good view of the world today and how things relate to each other. Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World is also an excellent book and I highly recommend it!

Both of these books are an inspiration to my Rohkeasti maailmalle book!

The Power of Interviews when working on a book: new perspectives from each interview

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Today I made two interviews, father and son, they both live in Dallas and they have also lived in the UK. It was fascinating to get two perspectives of living abroad; one from a father that did the decision and one from the son that had to go with the decision. Yesterday I interviewed a person that lives in Madrid, Spain and has lived there since -93.

From an authors perspective, each interview brings new perspective to people’s lives and I am so grateful that these people give the time for this. However, each person has felt the interview to be very interesting as they have not been thinking and reflecting on many of the things that I ask. My plan is to include a person from each continent as part of the interview.. Africa, Asia, Europe, LATAM, USA, Canada. This gives a nice flavor of perspectives of how people feel when living outside their own native country. What has been very interesting to recognize is that everybody has something new to bring to the table, each story is “one of the kind” and this makes my new book so much interesting as well.

Looking for expats and immigrants to be interviewed in an upcoming book

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I am in the process of doing interviews to my upcoming book from Talentum. This book is about living a life outside your own native country with all of the different things that you will be facing during the years. I am looking for individuals, families to be interviewed in topics such as:

1) Reasons for moving abroad

2) How have you been able to balance your new life with your career outside your own native country

3) How do you deal with the fact that you can’t be active with your family back home

4) How do you deal with the fact that your parents are aging and you are not able to help them out?

There are lots of things that you do not think about when you move abroad and this new book will deal with lots of these issues, but will also give lots of good advice, advice that I did not have when I moved to US more than 10 years ago from my native Finland.

Announcing the topic of my new upcoming book from Talentum

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It is time to reveal the name of my new upcoming book. We have agreed it to be ” Rohkeasti maailmalle – onnistu liike-elämässä ja ihmisenä”. If one translates it to English, it is close to following: “Bravely out into the wide world – become successful in business and as a person”. My first book “Onnistu suuressa maailmassa – opas globaaleille kilpakentille” (Become successful in the big world –  guide to global competitive markets) came out to book stores in January 2008 and I feel that this new book is a continued effort to discuss about international business, but now from another perspective and this perspective has to do with how you live your life outside your native country.

 I am very excited about this book as it includes so much accumulated experience from tens/hundreds of people that I have met during the years living outside my own native country. During the weekend before last, I spent the 2 days in my Helsinki flat working on the final table of contents, its structure and I feel very happy how it flows. I will reveal more about the structure soon, so stay tuned!

Copying with family when living across the Atlantic can be hard

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When we  emigrate to a new country, we do not typically think about how to deal with our aging parents and other family members back home in your native country. I am sitting in a tram in Helsinki on my way to my wife’s mother who has been very illa for quite a while. How does one support the family if the travel takes 18 hours one way? How does one take the message when getting a call in the middle of the night that somebody has passed away like we did when my wife’s dad passed away 5 years ago? We do feel helpless and powerless and no money on this earth will make that better as money cannot buy precense, money can buy help that has nothing to do with love or passion for a person.

How does an author find interesting topics to write about?

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I am sitting in a tram in Helsinki, the sun is shining and I have a bunch of Russian tourists around me on their way to downtown Helsinki (city-center). Observing the environment, wondering how I can transform this environment to my new upcoming book is what I am thinking about. Businesspeople such as me have numerous days in different places around the world and this is something that I have decided to use effectively.

I bought a book (The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality)  to my Kindle DX from an author (Lee Gutkind) that describes the process of writing a nonfiction book; what goes in ones mind and what kind of life one can expect when living an authors life. I highly recommend this book for people that want to learn and have an interest to become an author.

 

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Another one is from the worldfamous Stephen King whose book On writing explains how his life as an author feels and looks like. Both of these books can be found from Amazon.com.

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My second book project on its way

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I am currently in Finland and will be meeting with my publisher to discuss about my upcoming book that will be my second book from the same publisher. I have been thinking/contemplating and pondering about the content and it is pretty much in my head now and I have to get it on paper as well… I am very excited about this new project and the content will be very timely for many of us!

The agony of an author and the joy of having a clear picture in one’s head

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I am sitting in Helsinki, Finland and writing on my second book (first one was released in December 2007) and I have been contemplating on this book for quite a while and during the long first of May weekend here in Helsinki, everything became so clear to me. I know exactly the why’s, to whom, and the rest and now I am just getting everything written…. The agony of a writer and the joy of getting things cleared in one’s mind are mysterious….

Experiences of Harvard Business School by a student: Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton

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I have always been fascinated about university campuses, whether it is my own school (Helsinki School of Economics) or University of Paris, Sorbonne. These campuses has a magic into it and I find my own internal piece among the mostly beautiful buildings that they have. A British journalist Philip Delves Broughton has documented his experiences in Harvard Business School during his 2 year tenure. His experiences not only of the school, but also the teaching and other students has been narrated in the very interesting book “Ahead of the Curve” that is now available either as a Kindle book or as a hard copy. I own both versions. As I have been doing some book reviews in Finnish in my Finnish blog, I decided to share some of these video clips also in English. Stay tuned for more.