Nokia Admits Giving Misleading Information About Elop's Compensation

What exactly is the benefit of this plan for the Board of Directors? Is it literally the assumption that they were paid far in excess of the money they (I assumed) lost due to the stock tanking.

And finally in a well run market, what is supposed to keep this kind of thing from happening? It seems like having the Board of Directors essentially scuttle a company for their own payoffs is not in the markets best interest, so i assume some mechanism is in place to try to reduce the likelihood of this occurrance.

He tries to frame the decline of Nokia, its sale, and the market responding positively to that sale, as an "unusual" sequence of events. And therefore explainable only by an internal conspiracy, not the failure of Nokia's business. But when you factor out the ominous tone, there's really nothing unusual about that sequence.

Nokia was already in trouble when they brought on board Elop. He was their hatchet man. It shouldn't be that surprising that they incentivized him to handle the sale of the company well if it came to that.

It seems awfully strange that Nokia's board would incentivise the decline of their own company, but I disagree that the sequence of events that played out was unlikely: Nokia was way behind Apple and Android when Elop joined, and the devastating fall in market-share and share price, followed by acquisition, is more-or-less the same thing that's played out with Blackberry.

But to say that Elop sank Nokia is to ignore the trend of the company's financial performance leading up to that point.

(minor edit, redundancy)

This should be the headline, especially since it's far more insightful than the fact that it was a simple oversight.

Driving Nokia off a cliff or flushing Nokia down the toilet would also be acceptable.

One has to wonder where the line gets drawn between ignorance and malice.

* The board approached Elop to take on a risky position: a failing company losing marketshare.

* Elop says, "Well - I'm willing to give it a shot, but this is pretty bad. I need something in the contract that will allow me to actually make some money in the event that all else fails, and sale is the only option."

The CEO in this kind of structure does not unilaterally make major business decisions. He is advised by the board - in fact he serves at the whim of the board - and they generally can stop anything they don't agree with.

Now if we had a scenario where every board member had asimilar clause, then the idea that he deliberately drove the company into the ground would have more merit. But to me it just seems like a clause that any reasonable person would want before taking the helm of a sinking ship.

The snarky tone of the author is getting in the way of the message, it is obvious he is a Finn and is emotionally invested in Nokia. Please do some analysis for us, you are writing on Forbes, rather than regurgitating original article, 1) what was the share price drop, 2) How was it accomplished, 3)How the share bounced back and how was it accomplished. It would make the collusion of quid pro quo more obvious. Right now, it can be a mere coincidence too.

There is nothing unusual in it other than the emotions sparked by the names of the companies involved in the planned sale.

I think the new Blackberry CEO had a similar offer. In case of a buyout, he ges paid.