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Nokia lost 17 million euros a day it's market value while Elop was CEO of Nokia. I guess he is going down in the history as one of the worst CEO's. Though, some

Nokia lost 17 million euros a day it's market value while Elop was CEO of Nokia. I guess he is going down in the history as one of the worst CEO's. Though, some say he wasn't a mole but was hired to sinking ship but somehow it is hard for me to believe from his actions.

odiroot 11y ago
Also killing the most exciting software platform -- Maemo/Meego. On the other hand we now have Jolla so it's not that bad.
pjmlp 11y ago
He was hired by the Nokia board to do exactly what he did. So blame the greedy board members only looking for their bank accounts. http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-admits-giving-misleading-information-about-elops-compensation/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-a... http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/09/24/nokia-board-criticized-for-incentivizing-elop-to-tank-stock-and-then-get-rescue/ http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/09/24/nokia-board-...
- rbanffy 11y ago
  To destroy the company and reduce its value until someone (how odd it's his previous employer) acquires it? That's a bit hard to swallow.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Most likely because his previous employer was the company that had the better contacts. However I do believe he wasn't a mole rather another manager driven by greed alonside the board members. Once upon a time I worked for that Finn company.
  - ntakasaki 11y ago
    Boards have to approve every major move by a CEO and can fire a CEO at any given time for any or no reason. This person was the chairman of the board, read through his profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila >Prior to joining Nokia in 1985, Ollila worked for eight years in corporate banking at Citibank's London and Helsinki offices, and when he joined Nokia his tasks involved international investment deals. A year later, in 1986, Ollila found himself as head of finance during Nokia's renewal under then CEO Kari Kairamo. He was appointed as chief of the mobile phones section in 1990, and CEO two years later in 1992. When Ollila first came to power, the company had suffered from internal disputes and had had a financial crisis for a number of years. >As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets. >In 1999, Ollila seriously considered taking part in the Finnish presidential election, following a request from a member of the National Coalition Party, Sauli Niinistö[citation needed] who was at that time Finnish finance minister and who later became Speaker of the Finnish Parliament. This was in spite the fact that Ollila belongs to a different party, the Finnish Centre party, which he has been involved with since his activities in student politics at the University of Helsinki[citation needed]. >He was CEO of Nokia from 1999 to 2006. He was succeeded as CEO by Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. On 15 September 2010, he announced he intended to step down from the position of Chairman in 2012[2] and did so on 3 May 2012.[3] >Ollila is the Chairman of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), the most reputed economic and social studies think tank in Finland. Since 2005, he is chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). That doesn't look like someone who would trash a company they built for whatever conspiracy theories people cook up about how Elop got hired. It's funny how Microsoft is ascribed the superpowers of a comic book super villian around these parts while they barely break 3% in the mobile market.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Nokia (as a cell phone company) died the day the iPhone came out. They were too big and bureaucratic to react with competitive products, and there's no way you can turn that around (regardless of CEO) on the timescale that consumer cell-phone purchasing decisions are made. Note that Blackberry, Motorola, and Palm also died, and LG and HTC aren't doing so hot.
    - rbanffy 11y ago
      That's not exactly true. Nokia pretty much owned the featurephone market and had all the right relationships with telcos that were the primary channel. The excuse they were too large and bureaucratic to change does not fly when you are the CEO - he had the power to make the required changes. Nokia also had good technology, on par with Android, at least. The mistake was not to realize that iOS's and Android's strength is not on their technology, but the rich ecosystem built around it.
      - nostrademons 11y ago
        CEOs have less power to steer the ship than you think. The main assets of a corporation in a knowledge industry are the particular skillsets of its employees and the web of personal relationships between them. If the knowledge required to adapt to a market shift doesn't exist within the company, then the only option that a CEO has is to bring it inside the company, and assimilate it into the existing web of relationships without having the existing power structures reject the new talent. This is challenging in the best of times, with the most forceful CEO, and virtually impossible when you've got only a couple years to live, a complacent workforce, and a board that's only interested in salvaging what they can. Assuming that you're right that iOS and Android's strength is their ecosystem rather than their technology, there's no way Nokia could've capitalized on that. They couldn't bring on hardware partners, like Android, because all of the hardware partners were their competitors and wouldn't trust anything they did. They had no expertise in engaging independent developers; Nokia has never had a product where they've had to, and their OS (Symbian) was reportedly a pain in the ass to develop for. And while they knew how to build a mass-market consumer product, they didn't know how to build a mass market consumer platform - first-hand experience of what consumers could do with an open-ended computational device wasn't in their DNA the way it is in Apple & Google's.
freehunter 11y ago
>one of the worst CEO's Leo Apotheker?
- ameen 11y ago
  They're both up there. Having destroyed one of the most promising products (WebOS / Maemo) in recent times among other things.
- hga 11y ago
  HP is much less dead than Nokia. On the other hand, Nokia was in much worse shape, right?
  - pavlov 11y ago
    Nokia isn't dead though. They are a top-tier player in network equipment along with Ericsson and Huawei. The company is profitable, its market cap is around $26 billion USD, and they recently announced a major deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent. They seem to have survived the amputation of the mobile phone division quite well.
    - hga 11y ago
      That's why I said "less dead" ^_^. Buying Alcatel-Lucent suggests to me they aren't all that healthy, based in part on my working at Lucent in 2001 and paying attention to that field since then. And "amputating" what was once more than 2/3rds of the company, going back to 2002, yikes. But, still, you might be right depending on how you define this sort of business health. Scary how their revenue peaked the year the iPhone came out....

odiroot 11y ago

Also killing the most exciting software platform -- Maemo/Meego. On the other hand we now have Jolla so it's not that bad.

pjmlp 11y ago

He was hired by the Nokia board to do exactly what he did. So blame the greedy board members only looking for their bank accounts. http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-admits-giving-misleading-information-about-elops-compensation/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-a... http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/09/24/nokia-board-criticized-for-incentivizing-elop-to-tank-stock-and-then-get-rescue/ http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/09/24/nokia-board-...

rbanffy 11y ago
To destroy the company and reduce its value until someone (how odd it's his previous employer) acquires it? That's a bit hard to swallow.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Most likely because his previous employer was the company that had the better contacts. However I do believe he wasn't a mole rather another manager driven by greed alonside the board members. Once upon a time I worked for that Finn company.
- ntakasaki 11y ago
  Boards have to approve every major move by a CEO and can fire a CEO at any given time for any or no reason. This person was the chairman of the board, read through his profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila >Prior to joining Nokia in 1985, Ollila worked for eight years in corporate banking at Citibank's London and Helsinki offices, and when he joined Nokia his tasks involved international investment deals. A year later, in 1986, Ollila found himself as head of finance during Nokia's renewal under then CEO Kari Kairamo. He was appointed as chief of the mobile phones section in 1990, and CEO two years later in 1992. When Ollila first came to power, the company had suffered from internal disputes and had had a financial crisis for a number of years. >As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets. >In 1999, Ollila seriously considered taking part in the Finnish presidential election, following a request from a member of the National Coalition Party, Sauli Niinistö[citation needed] who was at that time Finnish finance minister and who later became Speaker of the Finnish Parliament. This was in spite the fact that Ollila belongs to a different party, the Finnish Centre party, which he has been involved with since his activities in student politics at the University of Helsinki[citation needed]. >He was CEO of Nokia from 1999 to 2006. He was succeeded as CEO by Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. On 15 September 2010, he announced he intended to step down from the position of Chairman in 2012[2] and did so on 3 May 2012.[3] >Ollila is the Chairman of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), the most reputed economic and social studies think tank in Finland. Since 2005, he is chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). That doesn't look like someone who would trash a company they built for whatever conspiracy theories people cook up about how Elop got hired. It's funny how Microsoft is ascribed the superpowers of a comic book super villian around these parts while they barely break 3% in the mobile market.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Nokia (as a cell phone company) died the day the iPhone came out. They were too big and bureaucratic to react with competitive products, and there's no way you can turn that around (regardless of CEO) on the timescale that consumer cell-phone purchasing decisions are made. Note that Blackberry, Motorola, and Palm also died, and LG and HTC aren't doing so hot.
  - rbanffy 11y ago
    That's not exactly true. Nokia pretty much owned the featurephone market and had all the right relationships with telcos that were the primary channel. The excuse they were too large and bureaucratic to change does not fly when you are the CEO - he had the power to make the required changes. Nokia also had good technology, on par with Android, at least. The mistake was not to realize that iOS's and Android's strength is not on their technology, but the rich ecosystem built around it.
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      CEOs have less power to steer the ship than you think. The main assets of a corporation in a knowledge industry are the particular skillsets of its employees and the web of personal relationships between them. If the knowledge required to adapt to a market shift doesn't exist within the company, then the only option that a CEO has is to bring it inside the company, and assimilate it into the existing web of relationships without having the existing power structures reject the new talent. This is challenging in the best of times, with the most forceful CEO, and virtually impossible when you've got only a couple years to live, a complacent workforce, and a board that's only interested in salvaging what they can. Assuming that you're right that iOS and Android's strength is their ecosystem rather than their technology, there's no way Nokia could've capitalized on that. They couldn't bring on hardware partners, like Android, because all of the hardware partners were their competitors and wouldn't trust anything they did. They had no expertise in engaging independent developers; Nokia has never had a product where they've had to, and their OS (Symbian) was reportedly a pain in the ass to develop for. And while they knew how to build a mass-market consumer product, they didn't know how to build a mass market consumer platform - first-hand experience of what consumers could do with an open-ended computational device wasn't in their DNA the way it is in Apple & Google's.

freehunter 11y ago

>one of the worst CEO's Leo Apotheker?

ameen 11y ago
They're both up there. Having destroyed one of the most promising products (WebOS / Maemo) in recent times among other things.
hga 11y ago
HP is much less dead than Nokia. On the other hand, Nokia was in much worse shape, right?
- pavlov 11y ago
  Nokia isn't dead though. They are a top-tier player in network equipment along with Ericsson and Huawei. The company is profitable, its market cap is around $26 billion USD, and they recently announced a major deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent. They seem to have survived the amputation of the mobile phone division quite well.
  - hga 11y ago
    That's why I said "less dead" ^_^. Buying Alcatel-Lucent suggests to me they aren't all that healthy, based in part on my working at Lucent in 2001 and paying attention to that field since then. And "amputating" what was once more than 2/3rds of the company, going back to 2002, yikes. But, still, you might be right depending on how you define this sort of business health. Scary how their revenue peaked the year the iPhone came out....