I think part of the difference in perspective is that many people would say that it didn’t matter who the CEO was; Nokia didn’t have the DNA to do smartphones.

I think part of the difference in perspective is that many people would say that it didn’t matter who the CEO was; Nokia didn’t have the DNA to do smartphones. In the same way that Motorola didn’t. I think any possible governance issues are really overshadowed by the intrinsic difficulty of dealing with paradigm shift. Expertise in radio, hardware, baseband and all sorts of other great stuff didn’t translate well into phones getting bigger than computers used to be and managing the software complexity that came along with it. They did the old school engineering super well but it wasn’t enough. Yes there’s enormous history there and they did a bunch of things that presaged the modern smartphone but it needed a different kind of company and a different engineering culture to build the things that took over the market. Maybe they could have done it with a visionary type CEO but it would take an extraordinary person to have turned that ship around. In retrospect the iceberg and the flaws in the ship are obvious but Nokia was a very successful company and those are the hardest to change. In any case this is why I would argue that comparing Nokia with Tesla is wrong; Tesla has its flaws but it seems likely that it’s on the right side of the paradigm shift.