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Posts: 285 | Thanked: 1,900 times | Joined on Feb 2010
#77
Originally Posted by Hacker View Post
This is a case study on why top organizations need top talent in leadership. But the question is HOW? How does a company as important as Nokia was to Finland, with so much talent there, end up with poor leadership? A good leader can manage egos and get unproductive internal conflict handled.

Does anyone have any insights or links on the leadership quality problem?
As far as I know, leadership problems were some kind of "public secret" for a long time. It was known that Nokia had bloated middle management who only cared about their own a**, which made the company work incredibly inefficient. My contacts in Nokia said the same thing - project would start and when things were progressing at full speed someone could simply pull the plug and scrap everything to get some "savings" to make papers look good. And then all that would start again from the beginning... When rumors of OPK's ousting begun spreading, my recipe for Nokia would have been to kick out most of the bloated management and flatten the organization as much as possible. If it was done early enough, it might have saved Meego, but Elop came onboard too late for that. However, it's still questionable if Windows Phone move was the correct one.

Organization got bloated during times Nokia dominated the business. It's possible that leaders didn't realize this until it was too late or they considered chopping the organization to be bad pr. Afterall, Nokia's rise begun during extremely hard times when there was huge unemployment rates and lives of many people were permanently ruined. It would have been hard to lay off loads of people, especially when company was making reasonable profit. I guess that's the reason Elop came along in the first place instead of Vanjoki.
 

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