Nokia: Where it all went wrong, by it's former CEO | Hacker News Reader

Nokia: Where it all went wrong, by it's former CEO

zdnet.com

1 pointtim3336 comments

One of the biggest mistakes was American style stock options in Nokia and the way it was implemented (to make the VP level management rich and leave others with nothing).

What do ambitious people grown in Nordic culture do when they become rich and financially independent? They either leave to start their own business or pursue other interests with passion. Those who did stay were not the cream of the crop and lost their ambition.

It seems much of the problem was not being as good as Apple/Google/Microsoft at OS development which they needed after the iPhone came out eg.:

[Vanjoki] "was in charge of its MeeGo smartphone OS with 2,000 people serving under him, but still Google managed to get better results with some 500 Android engineers."

Maybe it was an execution problem, too, but I think it was mainly a strategic problem - i.e. the leadership didn't want to try and replace Symbian very quickly. They still thought Symbian could be made into an iOS/Android competitor if they just put touch on it. They thought that was the only real problem with Symbian - not having touch. When in fact there are many other major problems with it, such as being very hard to develop for, and having a big problem from an image point of view (nobody thought Symbian could ever be as good as iOS or Android for touch).

Olli just refuses to take responsibility. He kept dismissing both the iPhone and the adoption of Android for its phones for 4 years after the iPhone came out. That's a ridiculous amount of time in today's tech world.

> In the end, timing is all about intuition.

Saying he needed intuition, is like saying any advanced technology is like "magic". He didn't need intuition to "get it". He just needed to understand the disruption innovation theory and to have read Innovator's Dilemma (seriously, how can any CEO ignore the teachings of that book 10 years after it came out? It should be every large company's BIBLE. If they don't really get it, they should be reading it again every single year until they do).

Ta for the reply. I'll have to read Innovator's Dilemma one day.

I strongly recommend reading Blue Ocean Strategy, too. Innovator's Dilemma focuses on technology mostly, but Blue Ocean is a similar theory that applies to any industry.

They are pretty much the same theory, though. They are not that "new", just much better researched by these two books, and more fleshed out. Peter Drucker was actually talking about this strategy in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship decades ago, although while it was obvious he "got it" himself, his book doesn't do a great job of explaining it to the reader in a way that he can understand it very well and then go and apply it. But I think Innovator's Dilemma and Blue Ocean Strategy authors were inspired by that to research their theories.

Innovator's Solution sequel is also pretty great, if you want to read it after Innovator's Dilemma (especially for the integration/disintegration insights).

But really these books and these theories have taught me so much about how technology companies can succeed or fail, and I think they are so critical to a CEO, especially a large company's CEO, that if I was a board's Chairman, I would not hire a CEO that doesn't have a deep understanding of the disruption innovation theory.

Oh, and btw, Steve Jobs was a big fan of Innovator's Dilemma (it's mentioned somewhere), and I remember thinking years ago that Steve Jobs is the CEO that is applying the most the disruptive innovation/Blue Ocean theory, out of all existing CEOs in the world at the time.

Ta. I had a read of the Amazon reviews at any rate. It takes so long to read an actual book! I'm supposed to be launching a business that's kind of Blue Ocean so we'll see how that goes.

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