Generosity, rooted in love, courage and equality, shapes the Moomin ethos, underpinning not just the brand, but the business.
In this episode, Jess Miles speaks with Paul Savage and Janne Tienari, co-authors of Moomin Management: Redefining Generosity, about what business can learn from Tove Jansson’s beloved troll creatures.
They discuss the Moomin principles for businesses around people management, strategic partnerships, digitisation and more, to create organisations that are kinder, curious and more successful.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Paul Savage is Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship at United Arab Emirates University. Janne Tienari is Professor of Management and Organisation at Hanken School of Economics.
Moomin Management is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £19.99.
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Image credit: Elin Melaas on Unsplash
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:15 – Who are the Moomins?
01:55 – What’s your involvement with the Moomin organisation?
05:38 – Can you explain what the Moomin ecosystem looks like?
09:19 – Did the Moomin characters or the business come first?
10:50 – Can you talk about generosity and the Moomin business?
16:52 – Does the ethos of generosity make things faster?
19:56 – Can you tell us about the emotion, relationality and humour at Moomin?
24:44 – Why are parties so important at Moomin?
27:32 – What first steps can people take to be a bit more Moomin?
30:34 – How would Moomin deal with challenges businesses are currently facing like hybrid working and AI?
35:55 – What’s the one thing you want people to take away from the book?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Jess Miles: Welcome to the Transforming Society podcast. My name is Jess Miles and in this episode I’m speaking to Paul Savage who’s assistant professor in entrepreneurship at United Arab Emirates University, and Janne Tienari, professor of management and organization at Hanken School of Economics. Together they have written ‘Moomin Management: Redefining Generosity’ a new book published by Bristol University Press about what business can learn from the beloved troll creatures of Moominvalley that have captivated hearts worldwide since the 1940s.
Focusing on generosity as a key principle, this is a management guide that champions caring for people as vital for a thriving organization and emphasizes passion, comfort and collaboration. The book covers branding, strategy, technology, partnerships, people management, and much more. Today, we’ll explore some of the broader Moomin principles for businesses and look at how we can begin to incorporate them into the way we operate to create something that’s warmer, more fun, and of course, more successful.
So welcome, Janne and Paul. Thank you for giving us some time today to talk about the book. So this seems like a daft question to start with, but for anyone who may not know who are the Moomins?
Paul Savage: They are a family of trolls who originally lived in behind the stove of a cabin. They change sizes, but generally speaking, they’re the size of your thumb. They have a tremendous number of friends and extended family, but the core Moomins themselves, they look a little bit like hippopotamus or hippopotami with a large snout. Their friends range from all sorts of different creatures.
JM: And so what’s your involvement with the Moomin organization? And how did you come to write this book? It’s quite unusual as an academic press, that we’re talking about something like Moomins in the context of business.
Janne Tienari: Well, Paul and I, we’ve known each other for quite some time, and a few years back, I remember we were having lunch, and I asked Paul what he’s been up to, and he told me about his ethnographic study at Moomin, and I thought, that’s fascinating as a Finn. I know how hugely popular they are here and strangely enough, in places like Japan, but they’ve been around in the UK since the early 50s.
Tove Jansson, the creator of Moomin who was a great artist and writer, she began to do comic strips for a tabloid in Britain, Evening News I think it was. And I’ve kind of never been a Moomin fan myself. But we got talking with Paul and I was thinking, okay, right, here’s a window of opportunity. I could not think of any studies or popular books on how the Moomin business is managed.
And then I googled around and talked to people, and I was proved right. So I was kind of hooked with this book idea to do sort of justice to the business and the way it’s managed and look into the business through different perspectives. And when taking kind of a comprehensive take in this book and, when I found out that the values for Moomin business are love, equality and courage, I was hooked.
So I guess, would you agree, Paul, that we just had to do it, engage in this kind of labor of love?
PS: Absolutely. And from my side, I came out of 20 years in logistics. So a very, I would say, a little bit of a cutthroat business, international shipping and warehousing, trucking. And so when I sat down and basically sat there for a year and watched them, I was very surprised by a lot of what they were doing and that’s why I brought it up with Janne.
Just a couple of examples that took me aback a bit, and that’s sort of where the whole discussion started with writing a book.
JM: What were the examples that took you aback?
PS: The biggest one, and I think really the catalyst for further discussion was someone who was ill, who had, of course in Finland, the right to be on sick leave and to receive a certain amount of her pay. But it wasn’t going to be enough because of some circumstances in her life that had just changed. A particular, yeah, unique situation, perhaps. And rather than, say, like most do in Finland, don’t worry, the system takes care of you. We do have a very good social welfare system in Finland, but it’s sometimes not enough. And the owners, the managing director, stepped in and said, don’t worry, we will, you know, keep things the way they are. You come to work, you don’t come to work.
You do what you need to do. but your salary stays the same. And going through chemo, obviously having to be out of the office for weeks. But she, her own story was that if I didn’t have the possibility to come back into the office, I would have lost my sanity because I needed to be with people.
JM: Yeah.
PS: And it’s just a beautiful story.
JM: Yeah, it really is. So the Moomin business, it’s a bit of an ecosystem, isn’t it? Can you explain a little bit, just to give us the context of what that ecosystem looks like?
JT: Well, there is Moomin characters, which is very much at the core of this ecosystem, as we call it. Moomin is basically trading in copyright so that they’re nurturing this art based brand based on Tove Jansson’s heritage, that treasure trove, selling licenses for using its registered trademarks. And then there’s rights and brands, who’s the licensing agent. And there are some other companies and daughter companies and so forth.
But the ecosystem is changing as as far as we know. But it’s this idea of working together, across boundaries. I think, that that’s kind of characteristics of the Moomin way.
JM: How many people does Moomin employ, roughly just to get an idea of the scale of it?
JT: That this is family business. So it’s the Jansson family business. And I think that Moomin characters, that some 70 people.
JM: Oh, okay.
JT: Would you say, Paul?
PS: Yeah. Sort of in the extended what I would call the core group of companies, which I believe just recently, like in the last month, there’s they may have merged into the parent group, but yeah, about 70 people. And the funny thing is the immediate companies that they started include a publishing arm. It includes a commercial arm because originally the Moomin characters limited couldn’t for some reason have the commercial arm directly under it, within in-house, as it were, and then a content production company.
And the funny thing is, they just called it The Publisher. The next company was called All Things Commerce, and the next one All Things Content. And that kind of irony and simplicity runs through the organization over and over again.
JM: I love that. I really love that! It’s so unusual like not trying to be too clever about things, but just being straightforward and clear.
JT: I think what struck me early on with the Moomin business and how it’s managed, it’s kind of sort of building on this heritage of the Moominvalley and respect for each other. Equality, family, friendship, adventure. And what I started to follow was kind of examples of how this Moomin philosophy can be seen in the way they operate and manage.
But having said that, of course the moominvalley is also about frictions and tensions and rebels, so we’re not denying that. I think that’s part of, you know, life, but it’s this kind of ability to make up, as it were, that’s, I think quite characteristic to the Moomin business and its key figures, like, you know, Paul, he did the study and he’s, you know, friends with the many of these people.
But I remain an outsider. So we were sort of basing our work on this kind of insider, outsider dynamic, kind of, you know, the discussions we had along the way helped us to develop these, core ideas like, like generosity and so forth.
JM: Yeah, that works really well. Can I just ask as well, did the Moomin characters come before the business, or did the business come before the characters? The business must be kind of mirroring the world that Tove Jansson made with the characters.
JT: The story of Tove Jansson and how she came up with the idea of Moomin, sketch them first on the walls of the outhouse, or the lavatory, at this family summer cottage and, I think she had this kind of interesting talent, she was visually talented. She was also verbally talented, but she as far as I can tell, she also had this business acumen as well.
So the business side was there pretty much from the beginning, but it was very much the art first and then the business. But but, you know, a lot of things happened already in the late 40s, early 50s. I mentioned, you know, comic strips for a British tabloid and so forth. So it’s this kind of enduring ability to balance between art and business.
That’s what really struck me with the Moomin philosophy and Tove Jansson as well. But of course, you know, you can read this and interpret this in in many different ways, I’m sure. So this is just my reading and our reading of, you know, what the Moomin are all about.
JM: Yeah. Of course. So the subtitle of the book is Redefining Generosity, and the book is really about how this generosity characterizes the Moomin business. Can we talk a little bit about generosity specifically?
PS: So I’ve been looking at it from more of an academic point of view recently going all the way back to Aristotle or Aristotle, however, it’s pronounced in our language. And the idea that through time we see the evolution of generosity. It should be given at the right time to the right person, under the right conditions, and this sort of judgment, that it’s a waste to be generous unless it’s used properly.
And that’s sort of where it starts. It changes, you know, over the millennia, basically, to I need to be generous, not because of you and what you need, but because of me and who I am. So basically driven by your virtues. And so the idea that we can be generous, quite often in modern business, it falls into philanthropy.
It falls into how the wealthy, for whatever reason, have accumulated a tremendous amount of wealth. Then they share it as they choose, with people they deem, or with movements that they deem are relevant to their own beliefs. So we’ve taken, in a sense, generosity and said, well, you can’t really be generous at work so much because you have to be fair.
You have to be equal. If I give to the both of you €100 simply because one of you needs €100, I’m obligated to give everyone €100. And this is a dynamic that inside the company. I didn’t really see the same thing. What I saw was that people were taken, as they were with their needs, and there was a certain flexibility that I found really marvelous to watch.
And if you had a good reason for something, you might have to argue for it. But if it was reasonable, if it was accepted by, you know, the management, they absolutely supported it. And again, you know, as Janne mentioned, we’re not trying to paint the managers of this company and the owners of this company as some sort of superheroes.
They would definitely push back on that. But the fact that even with all of the tensions of running a global business, working in a very tight schedule, there is this element of generosity which is seeing the other person and allowing them to see you in a way.
JT: Yeah. We started to discuss this quite early on, didn’t we, Paul? And, we wanted to take distance to heroes because, Tove Jansson was suspicious of heroes and, we started to think about generosity as something that’s always done together. So kind of lies between rather than individuals. And, it sort of finds meaning in given circumstances and conditions.
And, it’s also quite impossible to sort of carve out and measure on its own, you know, in simple business terms. So, you know, sometimes generosity leads to great things, but it can also fail and disappoint. That’s life. But we understand generosity is something we shared. A shared management practice. And I guess that’s the redefining bit in the subtitle.
So it emerges in relations, interaction between people, between people spaces and technologies. And you know, I think it’s, well, managing with generosity is about creating conditions that enable and give rise to acts of generosity. So that’s how we look at generosity in this book.
JM: That redefinition of it is really interesting because I expect there may be people listening to this now running businesses going, well, I am generous to my employees. We do do generosity in our business. But perhaps the difference with Moomin is that relational, shared, interactive bit rather than generosity as being something given to employees by an employer. Is that is that where Moomin’s different?
Do you think?
JT: Yeah, I think that’s a fair interpretation. Definitely. So it’s not charity as Paul mentions. It’s something else. It’s it’s kind of, you know, shared practice, if you like, within the organization that enables to do things and often quite fast, which, I think Paul found in his study and I learned early on that one of the core capabilities of Moomin is to, you know, sometimes do things remarkably fast.
JM: Really? Can you give an example of that?
PS: I just have the example this morning in I sent an image of a bookstore here in Dubai that has a display of Moomin that they’ve just put up at the front of the store. I sent a photo to the managing director at Moomin and said, ah, just so you know, this is what’s going on here in the United Arab Emirates. Within maybe four minutes, receiving back. Great to see. Thank you. This response rate is, for somebody like me who deliberately waits to and thinks, I found it a little bit overwhelming. And then hearing about things that we’ve spoken about or I’d seen in a meeting last week had already then moved forward. And were already, for example, moving into the market within 2 or 3 weeks were things that I have not seen before.
JM: Is there something in this ethos of generosity that makes things faster?
JT: Well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s, it’s a good question. My example would have been, Paul’s done most of the research that underlies the book, but I did do some interviews, and I interviewed a few external advisers who advised Moomin on issues of sustainability and responsibility, for example, and in our interview came up, you know, early on that they were kind of intrigued by the same thing that Paul’s describing now.
That the people within the organization, they seem to have their act together pretty fast and sort of, take on, the joint work and advice that was developed in this, consultancy project. So we do have examples along the way in the book, but it’s very difficult also to sort of pinpoint because this kind of speed is everywhere there.
PS: But I wonder, though, if this idea of the generosity as a sign of like, respect and recognition for somebody’s abilities inside the organisation. Then suddenly you don’t have to check, which means you’ve said you know how to do your job if you’re an expert, we’re that’s why we brought you on board. And this is something that that they say quite often we work with people who know what they’re doing.
So then we can just trust them to go and do it. That elimination of bureaucracy, in a way, seems to work really well.
JM: Is that reflected in the job roles as well? So I remember in the book, people aren’t really given job titles that are abstract or distant from what they’re doing, aren’t they? They’re employed for the particular task that they’re doing rather than for a particular role with a job title. Is that right? That might add to it as well. Yeah, because that also shows respect for what someone actually does, doesn’t it?
And trust in them that they can do that work.
JT: Yeah. And me as sort of a management scholar interested in strategy and strategy work and all that and being sort of quite suspicious myself of all sorts of strange measurement exercises and metrics and how people are sort of kept on their toes in the organization by measuring not only their performance, but how they do the job. And as far as I understood, a lot of this is absent at Moomins.
So people are not measured for the hell of measuring. Would you agree with this, Paul?
PS: Absolutely. And there is an allergy to that kind of basically numericalisation of everything, that everything should be a number and it should go up, is is anathema there at the office, they follow the numbers and they follow them very closely. But at the end of the day, they know what they’re doing and they won’t allow the numbers to be the final say in what they’re going to do and how they’re going to be.
JM: Something else I kept thinking about as I read the book, was the extent to which emotion and this relationality that we’ve spoken about and also humor, are fundamental to Moomin, and love is one of the company values. So business so often feels individualistic and quite hard, austere, and a place where you have to suppress your emotions. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that side of Moomin.
JT: Yeah, I mean, this is another great question. And I think, what is relationality and humor are explicitly discussed in the book. And we do highlight love and how that sort of plays into strategy work, for example. And it’s a very unusual corporate value. But emotions overall, they’re present in the chapters, but often somewhat implicitly, I would say.
And, yet Paul tells me that he observed and witnessed a lot of emotions at Moomin. Emotional encounters between people, emotional outbursts, sort of shared emotions like passion. And I find that particularly intriguing here. The passionate relationships that people have with Moomin not only within the organization, but as consumers and customers and partners or licensees, it tends to get quite passionate.
And, of course, Moomin is a brand business, and it’s about nurturing the brand and sort of being true enough to the brand and the heritage of Tove Jansson. That’s the key issue. And there’s a lot of emotion around that, of course. So I’m going around your question a little bit because I don’t really have a specific answer. Paul might have one.
PS: I think the biggest or quickest example is during the Covid times. We were doing an online workshop and, I was sitting and watching and asking questions just how they were thinking about things. And there was a there was somebody made a side comment about the tension that they’re feeling in the organization and what the root of that is.
And then they all started sort of like popcorn, saying the same thing in Swedish, which translates to party debt, that there’s an enormous debt that is not getting paid, and that debt is only paid by having a party. This is Tove Jansson. This is in the books. The Moomin characters absolutely love a party. They love food. They love spending time around a big table filled with people.
That is exactly how the organization does it is they have parties, they bring everybody together. They often have costume parties of different sorts. And, you know, like Janne mentioned, being perhaps a bit cynical or, suspicious, myself as well, coming out of the field that I was working in, the company would offer you a Christmas party that was just better not to go to.
But these are different, they, you know, they take their team to a special place that that means a lot to them. And they all get to do what they want to do. In a way, it’s it’s an interesting set up. And I don’t mean all of them, but just this idea that we all need to spend time together.
And this was something that Sofia Jansson, so she’s the, was the main shareholder after her aunt passed away. And, Sofia said that, you know, we need to see each other. We need to be with each other in good times so that later on, when it gets really stressful and I phone somebody they know, it’s me and it’s just me as a human.
It’s not me as, you know, Sofia the boss. And this also allows them to come to her with their needs because she knows them outside of the work processes.
JT: I’m glad that you brought up the notion of parties. That’s something that we discussed quite a bit, throughout the process of writing the book. And, that’s the reason why we don’t have a conclusions chapter in the book, but we have a chapter titled Let’s Party. So that’s kind of the final piece in the puzzle, if you like.
You know, maybe you can even call it managing through parties. I don’t know if that’s a fair comment, but but it did cross my mind.
JM: That did make me smile a lot that last chapter. And isn’t it funny how like, I suppose the three of us come to this with, like, cynicism, and you go ‘what, really? Parties? Really?’ but then it makes sense. So if everyone was a bit stressed out and fed up and under pressure at Moomin, they’d have a party just to get everyone together.
JT: Yeah. I never been to these parties myself. I’m the outsider. But Paul has. So he has, experience, you know, about the atmosphere, about the emotions in these parties that he just described.
JM: Because we’re so used to just having, like, we have, like our one Christmas party a year, don’t we? And it feels a bit like, because we have to not that it’s not enjoyable, but I suppose you have to get the atmosphere and the tone right and things as well, don’t you.
PS: And a level of a level of commitment by the senior management. Even though it’s a small organization. So it’s a company where there might be, you know, between 50 and 100 people at a party. The most memorable one was the, basically it was supposed to be like a Moulin Rouge theme or a French theme, something, something.
JT: Paris.
PS: Paris? Yeah, it was Paris. And, the brand new CFO from Sweden who hadn’t met anyone yet, and he was about a meter 95, very tall. So whatever. Six foot six, six foot seven. He came in dressed as Paris Hilton. And he, of course, made the argument that he had misunderstood the email and misunderstood the invitation.
But of course he didn’t. He had understood that his new employers of basically three days had a great sense of humor, and he walked into from Stockholm to Helsinki, showed up in Helsinki with an invitation to be accepted as he is. And it was amazing the effect to see somebody take that kind of risk in the first week of their employment.
Just it was great.
JM: It’s amazing. I think you should write like a guide for leaders on hosting parties or something like that.
JT: Actually, we have discussed this.
JM: Oh have you?
JT: But it’s not such a far out thought. But we’ll see what we can do.
JM: It’s one of the hardest things to do as management, I think, is organize an effective work gathering that has that everyone actually enjoys and has good outcomes. And, I think that’d be fascinating.
JT: Yeah. And here we’re back to the Moomin philosophy. And, there’s a lot of parties and a lot of partying in the Moomin books. And we’re told that Tove Jansson, the creator of Moomin, loved parties. So it’s kind of in the DNA, as it were.
JM: I’m going to jump on to another question I had actually because it kind of relates to this. So managers in business, listening to this podcast could be thinking like Moomin is such a unique organization, and they have to have Tove Jansson, they have these characters, they have this art and longevity and thinking about things like organizing parties, like they might feel like they just haven’t got the time or the resource to cultivate any world that’s even slightly similar to this.
So kind of what would you say to them? What first steps could they take to start being a bit more Moomin?
JT: I don’t think it’s really our place to start to guide the readers in how they are supposed to read the book. But, now that you asked, I mean, it’s it’s an interesting thought. No time and no resources to manage better. Having said that, I don’t think it’s a good idea to copy, other’s ideas anyway, whatever they may be.
And it’s not really about cultivating a similar world and way of being. That’s not really the point here. What we hope is that everyone will find inspiration in the book. Something that they find useful. And what that inspiration is is not likely to be the same for all. So each reader really must do the thinking themselves and, you know, like in reading any management guide of this sort and, you know, see what resonates and what does not, you know, make up your own mind.
But I think if you kind of think that you don’t have time and resources to do better, maybe you should think again, because we’re not really advocating a grand shift in mindsets here. It’s more about developing practices, these kind of recurring activities, the doings of generosity, where, you know, you can inject something important. And, we emphasize generosity there.
And there are plenty of examples throughout the book. And, it’s really comprehensive, from branding to strategic partnerships to strategy work to engaging with new technologies to people management. So generosity does not necessarily take the same form throughout the book. It’s about creating conditions for generosity to, blossom, really. But I mean, that’s a great question. And I’ve talked to people about it and, that’s quite often what you sort of, do when you encounter something like this, something that’s a bit out of the ordinary.
But I’d just like to encourage, you know, everyone to think for themselves. You know.
JM: Reading the book is just an opportunity to reflect, I suppose, isn’t it?
JT: Absolutely.
JM: And look at all the different areas. There isn’t time in this podcast to bring through all the different areas of business that are covered in the book, but it is all sorts of things like technology, strategy, like you say, the people management bit. Again, this might be really hard to do, but I wanted to see if again, thinking of listeners and it’s not a straight application from Moomin to any other business, but I thought it’d be interesting to think about some of the challenges that businesses are facing now and then, almost thinking, what might Moomin do with these kinds of examples?
So the two I thought about as I was writing the questions was, how would Moomins, like possibly manage hybrid working? And also how would Moomin engage with things like AI? Like can you digitize generously? Don’t know if you have you have any thoughts on that?
PS: I think on the on the first question about hybrid work because I was there, you know, through that Covid and then through the end of Covid, as they were coming back to the office, there was obviously discussions about that. Should we be here? Where should we be? Can we be located wherever? And it was a different answer for different circumstances.
So in general, they wanted people back because they have that culture of I know you and you and I can solve a problem and move forward in 2.5 minutes if you’re here and if you’re not here, I don’t I don’t call on you in the same way. I don’t just step over to your desk. So I think in general, the question about hybrid work goes back to almost a discussion about what is it to be in an organization with one another, what is it we’re trying to do, and what would be a good way to do it?
But because at least myself, coming from originally from Canada, we’re very individualistic. And so if it doesn’t suit me, then it doesn’t suit. And and this is something that perhaps in more, in a family based business or in a business that’s trying to be run a certain way, there is a commitment to one another that makes it much more communal.
JM: Right? Yeah.
JT: Engaging with new technologies is something that really interested me a lot. You know, it has huge opportunities, but also its risks. And, taking the heritage of Tove Jansson, which is two dimensional and making it three dimensional, it is is something of a strategic move, I think. And, the way they do it is really intriguing. And always having this starting point, whether it’s, you know, developing video games or mobile phone games, whatever, with the, partners is to ask, could this happen in Moominvalley?
So again, we’re sort of back to this heritage and back to the philosophy. But from a business point of view, of course, especially if you’re talking about a brand based business like Moomin, there are inevitable compromises that you need to be making. Perhaps you know who to work with, you know, and with some companies you don’t really know.
So, new associations being associated in the eyes of consumers and business partners with new organizations and brands, that comes with opportunities. But it’s also risky, especially as people are quite passionate about Moomin. So that’s how I look at it. And, there’s a whole chapter on this, you know, going into virtual worlds and sort of taking this Moomin ethos of adventure and, you know, just seeing what happens.
But, it is intriguing. I don’t really know about AI. AI’s sort of indirectly, you know, in our text, but, Paul, you might have something on this.
PS: I was thinking about it, and the example for the entertainment industry is, of course, companies like Disney Pixar who are able to use AI to create new material to create new characters, new stories, and the difference there is that this organization has, I mean, 21 years of comic strips with a lot of material that can then be turned into three dimensional elements. At the same time, they don’t create anything new.
JM: True. Yeah.
PS: No new core material. And there’s a beauty there that I think is important. in this particular case.
JT: Yeah, maybe generosity helps there sort of engaging in this balancing act of newness and nostalgia, if you like. And, I think it’s just, a key question moving forward for the Moomin business.
JM: There is something there, though, isn’t there, about being adventurous and embracing these new technologies and things like that, but also businesses remembering what they have got and kind of trying not to lose that at the same time as being excited and moving forward. I have one final question, and that’s just if there was one thing that people took away from the book, what would you want that to be?
Oh, I also wanted to ask you both what you are working on now as well.
PS: The one thing that I hope that people take away when I hand them the book, or when I hear that they’ve ordered it, is that they’ll make an effort in their relationships, both at work and at home, to be a bit more gentle and kind to the people around them and to themselves, and perhaps the latter even more than the former, in many cases. That kindness and generosity towards yourself is important. My work at the moment is in the area of Emirati startups and entrepreneurship and the culture here is really supportive of them doing a lot of new things. They want new activities. Generosity is very much a part of the culture. So I’m not speaking about anything new here.
It’s just beautiful to try to see how does this then match where I’m coming from and what can I learn from them in this culture?
JT: Yeah, my message would be just simply to give generosity a chance and to do good business by doing good things, because that’s what Moomin have been doing for a long time. It has been successful. It has, you know, grown profitably. There’s one thing that Paul and I are working on now, related to the Moomin, we are writing an academic paper based on his study.
And it’s on humor. Humor is something that, I find fascinating, especially in relation to management, because it’s kind of a superpower, but also the Achilles heel of Moomin. It can inspire and help achieve things, but it can also separate and hurt. So it is a constant balancing act, like, managing generosity is, I suppose. And we want to elaborate on, you know, dig, dig a little deeper into humor and management at Moomin.
So that’s what we’re working on right now and maybe parties at some point, but we don’t know about that yet.
JM: I can’t wait to read these things. Oh, thank you both. There is something quite magical about it, isn’t there? I don’t think, I’ve smiled a lot in this podcast. I’m not sure I often smile when I do our podcast, but it’s been a pleasure. Thank you. So, ‘Moomin Management: Redefining Generosity’ by Paul Savage and Janne Tienari is published by Bristol University Press.
You can find out more on our website bristoluniversitypress.co.uk and you can get 25% off the book and all our books if you sign up to our mailing list. Thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much, both of you. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
JT: Thank you. It’s our pleasure. Thanks for asking.