WILD GEESE Tom Farrell, vice president Nokia, Middle East:Travel was as much a necessity as a choice overseas after Tom Farrell graduated as an engineer in 1993 – now he finds himself working at Nokia at a time of profound change, writes JOANNE HUNT
FROM FRANCE TO London, from Finland to Dubai, Tom Farrell’s career path has taken him far. Now vice-president of Nokia in the Middle East, he attributes his first foray overseas to “itchy feet”.
Graduating from UCC with a degree in engineering in 1993, a time when unemployment in Ireland was higher than it is now, travel was as much a necessity as a choice. “In my engineering class of 60 people, I think only 12 or 15 of us had jobs on graduation day and almost all of those were overseas,” he recalls.
His first job was with predecessor to Accenture, Anderson Consulting. Based in their technology practice in the south of France, he describes it as “a very glamorous start to my career, but I think I was too young to appreciate it”.
Spending six years there, working on technology projects around Europe, he transferred to Accenture’s London office and then to Dublin, spending more than nine years with the company in total. By then, he wanted a change and set his sights on joining a large technology company.
“I am an engineer at heart and I love technology, but equally I love figuring out how to commercialise it and put it into the hands of as many people as possible,” he says.
Deciding to go back to business school in 2003, he completed an MBA at Insead in Singapore and France. With his Finnish wife six months pregnant with their first child, accepting a role with Nokia at its Finnish headquarters on graduation was a no-brainer. Farrell sees many similarities between Finland and Ireland.
“Finland is a small country on the edge of Europe, it’s got five million people, it’s separated from mainland Europe by water and it has some history with the neighbours down through the years that creates a certain psychology – so they are quite similar.”
With incubating telecoms giants such as Nokia and Ericsson, how does he account for the early dominance of the Nordic countries in telecommunications?
“Think about it: if a metre of snow falls at night, things need to work the next day to make sure life goes on. The physical environment, the nature of the place forces you to make sure things work. That efficiency in the north comes from a lot of pragmatic needs.”
With the country’s heavy investment in education and research and development, Farrell also praises the Finns’ ability to think long term, and their focus on sustainability.
Working in Helsinki in various directorships, Farrell made his move to Dubai with the company last year. Working first as general manager for the Lower Gulf region of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, he became Nokia’s vice-president of the Middle East this year. The role is an ambition come to pass.
“That’s why I left consulting, I wanted to run a local business in a local market, which is what I am doing right now.”
He says the sentiment in the markets he oversees is all about “the latest, the greatest, the highest, the biggest, the most expensive. This whole place is just driven by the notion of the sky is the limit”.
While in the early 1990s, Nokia was the upstart disrupter of the fixed-line telecoms market, new smartphone players have in turn disrupted its device dominance in recent years. But Farrell takes a typically Finnish, long-term view.
“It’s important to put things in perspective. There are seven billion people on the planet. Five billion have a mobile phone of one type or another and one billion have a smartphone. It’s early days.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint. Industrial history teaches us that nothing ever stays the same for very long in our industry.”
He says Nokia accepted that structural and competitive dynamics in the mobile phone industry required a new strategy and says the company’s partnership with Microsoft, using the Windows Phone operating system in its smartphones such as the Lumia, is a key part of this new strategy.
“It’s a fantastic time to be with Nokia. We are going through a profound change as a company. The transition to the new Nokia and Microsoft eco-system is a tough one, but the strategy is working. It’s early days in this new phase of the industry . . . as I like to tell the team, it’s like 1989 again.”
For Irish companies wanting to enter international markets, he says the diaspora provides a valuable network.
“We are in all walks of life and I have never met an Irish person abroad who is not willing to take a phone call if it helps, especially in these times.
“Competition is all about having an edge, so if tapping into the diaspora provides a competitive advantage or insight, then why not?”
