Creativity Is a Verb
Mato Valtonen on creative action, collective spirit, Finnish absurdity, and why ideas matter only when someone starts doing
Creativity is often presented as a noun. It is something a person possesses. A talent, a characteristic, an ability to produce ideas. Organizations try to measure it, recruit it, manage it and occasionally summon it into conference rooms for an afternoon workshop.
Mato Valtonen sees it differently. “The most important thing to remember is that to create is a verb,” he says. “It means doing. It does not mean that I have ideas. Everyone has ideas. The person who starts making something happen needs courage.”
This distinction runs through a life that has moved between music, film, entrepreneurship, writing, public speaking, technology ventures, cultural export, and projects that seemed too strange, reckless, or improbable to make sense at first.
Valtonen is best known internationally through Sleepy Sleepers and Leningrad Cowboys, two bands that transformed Finnish absurdity into something recognisable far beyond Finland. But looking only at the spectacle misses the deeper pattern.
His story is not about being eccentric for the sake of eccentricity. It is about motion.
Start before everything is clear. See what happens. Bring others with you. Learn from the consequences. And when the direction is wrong, do not remain trapped merely because you have already begun.
For Valtonen, creativity is not the ownership of an idea. It is the willingness to act on it.
The school of creative action
Valtonen describes Sleepy Sleepers as his primary school of creativity. The band was outrageous, unpredictable, frequently tasteless and almost impossible to separate from the atmosphere it created around itself. The more outrageous the group became, the more tickets and records it sold.
The lesson was not that every ridiculous idea would succeed. The lesson was that things could be done. “You do not have to think everything through to the end,” Valtonen says. “You just start doing it. Movement is more important.”
An unusual idea appears. Instead of immediately analysing all the reasons why it might fail, someone says: let us begin. Once action starts, unexpected things happen. Some of them are useful. Some are foolish. Some lead in the wrong direction.
Valtonen has never been particularly afraid of abandoning an idea that does not work. He describes himself as someone who can leave things behind rather than endlessly forcing a failed direction to continue.
This may be one of the less celebrated dimensions of creativity. Creative courage is not only the courage to begin. It is also the courage to stop.
Organizations often become attached to their own ideas. A project gains a budget, a team, a name, and internal prestige. After that, admitting that the direction is wrong becomes psychologically difficult. People defend what they have already invested in, even when the evidence begins to point elsewhere.
Valtonen’s approach is more fluid. Begin. Observe. Adjust. Abandon what does not work. Try something else. The idea does not deserve loyalty merely because it was once exciting.
Opening a window in the mouldy house
Sleepy Sleepers emerged from a Finland very different from the country known today.
Valtonen describes the Finland of that period with a striking metaphor. It was like a mouldy house whose residents no longer noticed the smell. They had lived inside it for so long that the atmosphere appeared normal. A visitor entering from outside might immediately sense that something was wrong.
He is referring partly to Finland’s cautious political and cultural relationship with the Soviet Union. Sleepy Sleepers looked instead toward the United States and deliberately chose to swim against the prevailing current.
Valtonen does not describe this as a carefully constructed political strategy. The band was more like a disturbance. But disturbances can perform a cultural function. In his metaphor, Sleepy Sleepers opened a small window in the attic of the mouldy house. It did not rebuild the whole building. It simply allowed a little fresh air to enter.
Innovation is often described as the creation of something new. But sometimes its first role is to disrupt an atmosphere that has become invisible to those living inside it.
A strange joke, a provocative performance, an unexpected business model, or a person refusing to behave according to convention can reveal that the existing order is not inevitable.
The disturbance makes the room visible. Once people notice the air, they can begin to imagine something different.
The changing price of disturbance
Being a cultural troublemaker has become more complicated.
In the era of Sleepy Sleepers, it was relatively easy to stand apart from the Finnish mainstream. Society was more unified, and deviation was easier to recognise. A band could provoke the centre because there was still something resembling a common centre to provoke.
Today, Valtonen sees a more fragmented society. Social media has created countless smaller groups, each capable of producing its own wave of outrage. Almost any public experiment can trigger a storm from somewhere. The consequence is not necessarily greater courage or wider debate. It may instead produce caution.
People learn to avoid saying things aloud. They operate below the radar. They do their work quietly, knowing that visibility may bring a disproportionate reaction.
Valtonen is not active on social media and has no desire to join. This creates an interesting tension. Innovation requires deviation, but public deviation has become increasingly costly. The same digital systems that allow unusual ideas to spread can also punish ambiguity, humour, experimentation, and mistakes.
Absurdity once challenged a relatively stable mainstream. Now it enters a fragmented environment in which every audience may interpret it through a different moral, political, or cultural frame.
The need for creative disturbance has not disappeared. But the conditions around it have changed.
Humour as a memory technology
Humour runs through almost everything Valtonen does, but he does not romanticise it.
He notes that humour often works by elevating the person telling the joke at someone else’s expense. We mock a person, a group, a city, or a type of behaviour, and in doing so imply that we stand above it.
The most noble form of humour, in his view, is learning to laugh at oneself. This requires accepting the absurdity of one’s own position. No matter how serious the role or impressive the title, there is something ridiculous in every human situation. Life becomes more bearable when we recognise that.
Humour is also a practical communication tool. Valtonen has spent years speaking professionally, often hiding small humorous hooks inside his presentations. The hooks are not there merely to entertain. They create memory.
He recalls listening to a speaker whose presentation seemed excellent in the moment. Valtonen and his colleague admired the content, praised the speaker, and agreed that the presentation was full of important ideas.
Approximately an hour and a half later, they could not remember a single thing the person had said. The content had no hooks. Valtonen’s conclusion is direct: if you want people to remember an important message, you must give their memory something to hold. A surprising phrase, an unusual image, a moment of laughter, or an unexpected turn may remain long after the formal content has faded.
This matters far beyond public speaking. Companies often communicate as if neutrality were the same thing as credibility. Presentations are filled with safe words, predictable images, and carefully polished claims. The result may be technically correct and professionally acceptable, yet almost completely forgettable.
Humour introduces risk and memorability requires some form of deviation. If nothing in the message surprises the audience, very little may survive.
Creativity is not the idea
Valtonen sees no fundamental distinction between artistic creativity and business creativity. The context changes. One person makes music, another directs a film, another develops a company, another creates a performance. But the underlying creative process remains similar.
There is an idea, followed by the willingness to push it forward and see what begins to happen. Creative activity often surprises the creator too. Something appears that could not have been fully predicted at the beginning.
This is why the verb matters. Ideas alone do not create music, companies, films, cultural movements, or new services. They are unrealised possibilities.
Creation requires contact with reality. The idea must encounter materials, people, money, schedules, resistance, misunderstanding, practical limitations, and the unpredictable responses of the world. Only then does it become something other than an internal thought.
For Valtonen, the important dividing line is not between artistic and commercial creativity. It is between imagining and doing.
“We” is the most important word
The lightness and absurdity in Valtonen’s work can obscure another side of his thinking: a deep belief in collective responsibility. He considers “we” one of the most beautiful and important words in the Finnish language.
This became especially important during the collapse of WAPit Ltd, the mobile technology company he co-founded during the early years of mobile internet.
The company grew rapidly and followed its plan, but the wider technology market changed around it. The mobile telecom auctions and the excesses of the technology boom absorbed enormous sums of capital. Investors became cautious, previously promised financing disappeared, and WAPit ran out of time shortly before its financial projections suggested that income could have exceeded expenditure.
Valtonen rejects the simple interpretation that the company was merely too early or had pursued a fundamentally wrong plan. The surrounding environment changed with devastating speed.
The most revealing part of the story is not the market failure. It is how the company handled the crisis internally.
Valtonen argues that a difficult moment is precisely when creative leadership is needed. The first task is to admit that the situation is difficult. The second is to involve the whole group in considering what can still be done.
Some leaders find this almost impossible. They feel responsible for carrying the problem alone. They say, “I will take care of this,” rather than, “We will face this together.” WAPit chose the second approach.
The company discussed the situation openly with its staff. People were included as the crisis developed. When the final announcement came and approximately 120 employees learned that the company had gone bankrupt, the chief executive finished his address and the employees stood up and applauded.
It was not applause for the bankruptcy. It was recognition of the way people had been treated. The company had failed financially, but the community had not disintegrated into bitterness. Former employees continued to meet for Christmas celebrations years later.
In an age when organizational culture is often discussed through slogans and employee surveys, this story offers a far more demanding test. Culture is not what an organization says about itself when things are going well. Culture is what remains when there is no good news left to give.
Giving failure a face
The collapse of WAPit became national news. Valtonen knew the bankruptcy would attract attention, and he was concerned that Antti Piippo, the company’s chairman and a prominent industrial figure, would become the main target of the coverage. He therefore decided to take every media request himself. No matter which newspaper or programme called, Valtonen responded.
At the time, bankruptcy in Finland still carried a powerful stigma. A failed entrepreneur was expected to disappear, begin drinking, or otherwise retreat from public life. The assumption was that failure should be hidden.
Valtonen did the opposite. His initial motive was practical: protect someone else from the media pressure. But the result was culturally significant. By appearing publicly and talking openly, he gave the bankruptcy a human face.
The narrative began to change. Instead of disappearing in shame, he acknowledged what had happened. The failure did not become a virtue, but neither did it end his legitimacy as an entrepreneur or public figure. This was not a calculated innovation strategy. Valtonen describes it as an emergency solution.
Many meaningful shifts begin exactly this way. A person acts differently because the conventional response is no longer useful and only later does the broader significance become visible.
The experience was still extremely painful. Before the bankruptcy, Valtonen suffered from severe sleep problems and briefly needed medication. Later, writing the story into the book Noh, sano naakka ku nokka katkes became a therapeutic process.
He knew that every word needed to be truthful. The people who had lost their jobs would read it. Writing forced him to go through the whole experience, make it public, and place it into a form he could live with.
Creativity did not erase the pain. It helped transform the pain into something that could be understood and shared.
The people who breathe life into the fire
Innovation is rarely an individual sport.
Even a person working alone needs others as collaborators, interpreters, critics, or mirrors. Large and improbable projects require something more: a group that is willing to believe together.
Valtonen says such groups need people who can breathe life into the fire. They see the small ember of an idea and keep blowing until it becomes a flame. They help others believe that the thing being attempted is possible.
During the Sleepy Sleepers years, Valtonen often played the role of interpreter between different personalities. When one member said something harshly, he might explain to another what the person probably meant. He tried to keep the group together because the band mattered profoundly to him. This required diplomacy rather than spectacle.
Creative teams often celebrate visible roles: the founder, the front person, the visionary, the person who presents the idea to the world. But groups also depend on less visible figures who notice tension before it becomes conflict.
They smell the first trace of smoke and quietly resolve the issue before anyone else realises there was a problem. These people may be musicians, technicians, managers, assistants, or informal mediators. The formal title is not important.
Their contribution is the maintenance of the collective. Without them, creative energy fragments.
Every team is a band
Valtonen uses the band as a model for understanding any team.
There is a singer who attracts attention. A guitarist who may try to steal some of it. A drummer, a bassist, technicians, road crew, and people whose work is scarcely noticed until they are absent. The bassist may receive little attention. Remove the bassist, however and the whole performance changes. Every role contributes something different.
The same applies to a company, a project group, or an innovation ecosystem. The aim is not for everyone to play the same instrument. The value comes from distinct forms of expertise.
Difference alone does not create music. When the drummer counts in, everyone must begin playing the same song, in the same key and rhythm. This is the crucial point.
Modern organizations frequently celebrate multidisciplinary collaboration while underestimating the difficulty of achieving a shared direction. An ecosystem may contain companies, investors, public officials, researchers, planners, financiers, builders, and political actors. Each has a legitimate role and its own logic. But they may still be playing different songs.
Financial incentives can bring the actors into the same room without creating a shared understanding. Each participant may have a reason to join, yet the whole remains incoherent.
A successful band does not eliminate the individuality of its members. It gives their differences a common composition. When the right people begin playing the same song, the audience starts moving.
Creativity does not excuse bad collaboration
Valtonen’s observations about building a house provide a less flattering image of multidisciplinary work.
A soil specialist completes an investigation. The foundation crew arrives and criticises the soil work. The structural builders arrive and criticise the foundations. Electricians, plumbers, and carpenters arrive and criticise what everyone before them has done.
At the same time, each professional praises earlier projects in which everything supposedly worked faster and better. The schedule expands. The budget grows. Everyone emphasises their own excellence by diminishing someone else’s contribution.
Valtonen sees a similarity between this behaviour and certain forms of humour: both can become ways of placing oneself above another person.
This pattern is not uniquely Finnish, but Finnish work culture may intensify it through a reluctance to offer positive feedback. People point out what is wrong or say nothing at all.
Complex projects cannot succeed through sequential criticism. The people involved must understand that they are contributing to the same result. Expertise becomes destructive when every specialist protects their own identity by treating the work of others as inferior.
Being good at one’s instrument is not enough. One must also listen to the band.
Finnish absurdity as an advantage
Finland’s most internationally memorable cultural exports are often strange.
Aki Kaurismäki’s films. Heavy metal bands. Wife carrying. Air guitar championships. Sauna rituals. Leningrad Cowboys. Sparse conversations consisting almost entirely of silence and grunts.
Valtonen tells a story about foreign journalists visiting Finland during the period when Nokia, Leningrad Cowboys, and Santa Claus were attracting international attention. For one German-speaking television group, he created a scene intended to capture something essentially Finnish. He entered a bar and sat beside actor Matti Pellonpää. The two exchanged little more than a pair of grunts. Subtitles transformed the sounds into an apparently long and meaningful conversation.
The scene became popular in German-speaking Europe. Its humour came from the distance between what was spoken and what was supposedly communicated. It exaggerated Finnish silence, but the exaggeration also contained recognition.
Valtonen believes Finland still has plenty of productive madness. And it should not be hidden.
Finnish companies often try to present themselves internationally through competence, reliability, engineering, and understatement. These are real strengths. But they may not be enough to make an organization memorable.
The characteristics that attract global attention are often the unconventional ones: dark humour, improbable competitions, musical extremity, awkward silence, and the ability to take something absurd completely seriously.
What if this strangeness is not a national embarrassment to be polished away? What if it is an underused creative advantage?
Valtonen puts the thought bluntly: Mad people move the world forward. The wise merely keep it standing. Both are needed. But only one group changes the direction.
Turn the camera around
When asked what advice he would give young people, Valtonen is cautious.
He recognises the absurdity of an older person confidently explaining to the young how they should live in a world fundamentally different from the one in which he grew up.
Some principles, however, remain. One is to move away from the constant focus on the self. Valtonen sees a culture dominated by “me”: people pointing cameras at themselves, documenting their appearance, meals, and experiences while paying less attention to the world around them.
His advice is simple: Turn the camera around. Look at what is in front of you.
He illustrates the point through birdwatching. His wife is a nature photographer, and his colleague Tom Pöysti is highly knowledgeable about birds. When Valtonen walks with them, they constantly notice birds that he does not see.
Eventually, he realised why. He was looking only at the path, watching the stones and roots so that he would not stumble. When he raised his gaze, the environment changed. Birds, trees, structures, and details that had always been present became visible.
Creative attention begins with this movement. Lift your eyes. Look further away. Use your senses. Notice the roofline, the sound, the person at the edge of the room, the unfamiliar book, the detail that does not fit, and the possibility hidden around the corner.
The world contains more than we see when our attention is fixed on our own next step.
Curiosity and the ability to tolerate difference
A recurring pattern across conversations with innovators is the importance of looking beyond one’s established interests.
Go to the shelf in the bookstore you have never visited. Read something that does not appear immediately relevant. Explore art, engineering, nature, history, culture, and people whose worldview differs from your own.
This is not simply a method for collecting more ideas. It is a way of expanding the boundaries of what the mind can recognise.
Valtonen connects curiosity to tolerance. Cultures and societies begin to weaken when they narrow the range of people and ideas, they are willing to accept. Once a community decides that only one kind of person, appearance, or way of thinking is legitimate, it loses the productive mixture from which renewal emerges.
Innovation requires the ability to tolerate difference. Not every unusual idea is good. Not every provocation is useful. Not every conflict produces progress.
But a culture unable to coexist with unfamiliar people and perspectives eventually stops surprising itself. And when surprise disappears, creativity becomes repetition.
The verb that changes things
Mato Valtonen’s career could easily be described through the visible events: bands, films, companies, books, performances, failures, scandals, and unlikely international adventures.
But beneath them is a remarkably consistent way of thinking: Begin before everything is certain. Do not confuse an idea with creation. Keep the group together. Say “we” when circumstances become difficult. Give people something they can remember. Allow madness to disrupt what has become stale. Recognise when the direction is wrong. And lift your gaze from the path long enough to notice the world around you.
Creativity is not a possession. It is a decision repeated in action. An idea alone changes nothing. The world begins to move only when someone accepts the risk of turning the idea into a verb.
Publications
Books written by Mato Valtonen
- Noh, sano naakka ku nokka katkes, Tammi, 2001
Valtonen’s debut book recounts the rise and collapse of WAPit and his experience of entrepreneurship, rapid growth, bankruptcy, and public failure. - Riding the Wireless Wave, Nokia, 2003
An English-language publication connected to the early development of wireless services and the mobile technology era. - Sinun luovuutesi – Omistajan ohjekirja, Tammi, 2011
A practical and humorous exploration of creativity and how individuals can recognise and use their own creative capacity. - Rakkaani alkoholi, Tammi, 2011
A personal examination of alcohol, Finnish culture, and Valtonen’s own relationship with drinking. - Elämä on aprillia, Tammi, 2012
A collection of stories and observations shaped by Valtonen’s characteristic humour and unconventional life experience. - Suomen laki, Mainostoimisto Dynamo, 2013
- Kun Suomi-rock puri ja löi, Bazar, 2015
A book about Finnish rock culture and the people, events, and attitudes that shaped it. - Katujen kaunottaret, Bazar, 2015
A book centred on remarkable vehicles, motoring culture, and the stories surrounding them. - Omaan käyttöön, Bazar, 2016
- Bottom Clubm Bazar, 2019
- Jääkarhu Patrick – Operaatio Tassunjälki, Otava, 2020
A children’s book featuring Patrick the polar bear. - 112 oivallusta elämästä, Readme.fi, 2024
A collection of concise insights and observations about life, work, people, and experience.
Books about Mato Valtonen
- Jytinää Eestissä, Johnny Kniga, 2003
- Uutta matoa koukkuun, Paasilinna, 2014
- Hullunrohkea monitoimielämä, Docendo, 2021
A biography covering Valtonen’s career with Sleepy Sleepers and Leningrad Cowboys, his entrepreneurial projects, travels, performances, cultural ventures, and the setbacks encountered along the way.