In less than three decades, Nokia emerged from Finland to lead the mobile phone revolution. It grew to have one of the most recognizable and valuable brands in the world and then fell into decline, leading to the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft. This book explores and analyzes that journey and distills observations and lessons for anyone keen to understand what drove Nokia’s amazing success and sudden downfall. It is tempting to lay the blame for Nokia’s demise at the doors of Apple, Google, and Samsung, but this would be to ignore one very important fact: Nokia had begun to collapse from within well before any of these companies entered the mobile communications market, and this makes Nokia’s story all the more interesting. Observing from the position of privileged outsiders (with access to Nokia’s senior managers over the last twenty years and a more recent, concerted research agenda), this book describes and analyzes the various stages in Nokia’s journey. This is an inside story: one of leaders making strategic and organizational decisions, of their behavior and interactions, and of how they succeeded and failed to inspire and engage their employees. Perhaps most intriguingly, it is a story that opens the proverbial “black box” of why and how things actually happen at the top of organizations. Why did things fall apart? To what extent were avoidable mistakes made? Did the world around Nokia change too fast for it to adapt? Did Nokia’s success contain the seeds of its failure?
