Leadership Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri’s line reads like a polite correction to the lone-wolf myth that politics still sells to voters. Coming from a career politician, it’s less self-help than operating manual: if you treat the other side’s worldview as noise, you don’t just miss moral nuance, you lose leverage. “Without accepting the other person’s thinking” doesn’t mean surrendering your principles; it means granting the other party the dignity of being rational in their own frame. That small act is strategic. It turns opponents from obstacles into variables you can actually work with.

The subtext is transactional, almost Nordic in its restraint: outcomes are built out of consent, not conquest. Holkeri smuggles in a hard truth about democratic life - power is distributed, legitimacy is negotiated, and even the strongest mandate hits procedural walls. “You need the other’s help to get results” is a reminder that institutions are designed to force interdependence: coalitions, committees, parliamentary arithmetic, the slow grind of compromise.

Context matters. Holkeri governed in a Finnish political culture shaped by coalition-building and, in the Cold War shadow, careful calibration between competing interests. His later work as a diplomat (including in the Balkans) would only reinforce the lesson: durable agreements require understanding the stories people tell themselves about what’s at stake. The line works because it reframes empathy as a tool of statecraft, not a soft virtue - and because it quietly implies the alternative: refuse to engage the other’s thinking, and you don’t get purity, you get paralysis.