"Ari Jaaksi built his career at Nokia, rising through the company’s leadership ranks during its most transformative years. From there he stepped directly into executive roles at major international companies—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and McAfee among them—shaping technology and products at the highest levels of global business. A lifelong corporate leader, Jaaksi balanced the intensity of boardrooms with the rhythms of family life, and the cultural contrasts of Finland and the United States.
Photography, by contrast, is a recent discovery—yet it has become a way to reinterpret his past. In Both Sides Now, Jaaksi revisits decades of diaries kept throughout his executive career and places them alongside new film photographs. The diaries capture the immediacy of decisions, travel, and private reflections; the photographs, quiet and tactile, offer space for perspective and clarity.
Adding perspective is a foreword by Jon Rubinstein—Silicon Valley icon, longtime product leader, and Steve Jobs’ right hand in building Apple’s most influential devices. Rubinstein, who worked alongside Jaaksi in the technology trenches, recalls Ari as a brilliant team leader at the cutting edge of innovation. In his words, this book reveals a side of Jaaksi few have seen: an artist with as much command behind the lens as in the boardroom.
Together, text and image reveal how seemingly opposing worlds—corporate and familial, American and Finnish, textual and visual—illuminate one another. Jaaksi’s voice remains candid, thoughtful, and deeply human throughout.
Both Sides Now is both a memoir and a visual meditation, showing how even a life defined by business can open into art. It affirms what Rubinstein recognizes: that Ari Jaaksi embodies rare breadth—executive chops, artistic vision, and a gift for self-reflection—and that only by looking at both sides can we see the full story."
