Saving Finland, Saving Nokia? Stephen Elop!
Not every technology company had a great 2011. For sure, not every CEO can be a Steve Jobs, Gee-Sung Choi, or Steve Ballmer. For every success in big business, there has to be a company that is losing its market share and usually the person blamed when that happens is the CEO. 2011 was just that kind of year for Stephen Elop.
Stephen Elop is the CEO and President of Nokia. Just as in politics, where a current President might well be blamed for a problem they did not cause and are not able to solve fast enough, Stephen Elop assumed the mantle of leadership at Nokia when the company was rapidly losing its market dominance in the mobile phone market. In fact, Elop acknowledged just how bad Nokia’s position in the global smartphone market was in a now-legendary “Burning Platform” memo. But the Board of Directors of Nokia did not put Elop in charge to simply critique the company’s problems! Instead, Nokia, which accounts for a sizable portion of Finland’s economy, chose Stephen Elop to save the company.
Stephen Elop came to Nokia fresh from leading Microsoft’s Business Division. During his tenure at the head of the Business Division, Elop ushered the Microsoft Office 2010 product line to market. Before working for Microsoft, Elop worked in business executive positions for software companies Macromedia and Juniper Networks. That Elop was attracted to those companies makes a great deal of sense. When Stephen Elop was studying at McMaster University, he helped to lay the Ethernet cable that created one of Canada’s first Internet networks! He graduated from McMaster University in 1986.
With all of that experience behind him, Stephen Elop leaped at the chance to run Nokia. Despite the criticism of Nokia in his “Burning Platform” memo, Elop has worked hard in his first year as Nokia’s CEO to stop Nokia’s downslide in the international smartphone market. As one of his first concrete acts, Elop dumped Nokia’s longtime operating system, Symbian. In his mandate for the company, Symbian was discontinued as the operating system for Nokia smartphones. Elop quickly partnered Nokia with Microsoft to adopt the Windows Phone 7 as the new operating system.
While it is too early to tell if Elop’s gambit will pay off for Nokia, one thing is clear. Nokia’s former CEO, Olli–Pekka Kallasvuo, acted paralyzed while Samsung and Apple clobbered Nokia in mobile phone production and Apple and Google (with their Android OS) eroded Nokia’s smartphone OS market share. Stephen Elop is a man of action and he represents the best chance to save Nokia!
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