I worked at Nokia during OPK and Elop. I always have to cringe when I read these articles blaming everything on him, he’s Finland’s favorite scapegoat. Truth is, the rot set in at Nokia long before Elop arrived. What most people don’t realize was that the issue was not strategic it was cultural and political. Elop could have been the best leader, making the best strategic decisions in the world but it wouldn’t have made any impact at all on the outcome because the people in the company were just the wrong people. Changing the mindset and reskilling a 100k people company is no small feat. The only way Apple was able to turn the ship around in the 90s was through massive lay-offs and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, when Jobs came back he had the luxury of a small lean organization which he could easily change the direction of, had he come back a few years early he would have also probably failed. Nokia was so tightly tied to the Finnish political establishment, it became too big to fail and thus large necessary lay-offs were out of Elop’s reach, even if he had wanted to pursue them. It’s easy to blame one man, fits in nicely with our simple, linear, reductionist, narrative loving minds but the truth here is there was a giant systemic failure. Same thing is going on with Germany’s car industry at the moment with the attempted shift from ICE’s to Electric, the machines, the factories, the value chains, the politics and the culture are all pulling in one direction but the market is pulling in the other. Sometimes the environment just changes and the organizations and entities are so tightly adapted to the old environment that they can’t survive in the new environment and have to perish - no matter who’s at the helm.