Meet the Strategist
I am Suvi Kainulainen. Born and raised in Finland, spent the last 15 years in the USA, and the last decade in the US corporate world.
I started my career as a journalist asking questions, pointing out problems and writing about them. That wasn’t enough. So I attended business school in the United States where I studied management and organizational behavior. After getting my MBA I started working in the healthcare industry. Once I was promoted to run the operations, I went back to school for post-MBA in finance and studied strategy execution at Harvard Business School Online.
As an operations professional, instead of pointing out problems, I was now actually solving them and creating strategies, processes and workflows. But managing operations was the easy part. Building a culture took more effort. Over the years I figured out what actually drives performance, and what doesn't. What makes people want to show up. What we think are productivity problems and what they actually are. The more I found solutions, the more I wanted to understand the science behind why they worked.
This curiosity eventually led me to the University of Pennsylvania where I studied how to optimize human functioning. Penn finally provided me with the language that, to this day, helps me conceptualize problems to science-backed frameworks and solutions that actually work.
Today, I work at the intersection of human performance and organizational strategy. My work is about one thing: agency. Closing the gap between potential and actual. In people and in businesses.
Education
Experience
Someone needs to build this and it should be me.
When I was studying at Penn, I noticed a gap in psychology research: nobody is researching women's agency. Even worse: women's experiences are often interpreted through frameworks that were not developed with them at the center. Many general, widely used frameworks have been developed by men, and this restricts the ability to fully understand agency and agentic behavior in women. Yet, agency is considered one of the key mechanisms and a foundation for optimal human functioning and well-being.
So as my final thesis I built a framework and a measure on agency in women. After I graduated, I had all this research and a pre-tested measure in my hands. I felt responsible to do something about it. That's when Joy Department LLC was born. My vision is to build an ecosystem for women. A system that helps women buy back their time and become better leaders, and provide them with practical tools and support. Whether they are jumping on a 1:1 call with me, attending my program or staying in my community afterwards, I wanted to create a space where high-performing women never have to figure it out alone again.
The business side came after. Because behind every productivity problem is a team of people showing up every day to a system that is solving the wrong problem. Until these businesses are solving the right problems, they are not solving any problems at all. I had to create a better framework for them.