Nokia’s Smartphone Problem: The End of an Icon

This book by Majeed Ahmad, a former EE Times editor, dates the start of the decline and fall of Nokia from the elevation of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to CEO in 2006 – the year before the iPhone launched

Kallasvuo, a lawyer, was CFO of Nokia before becoming CEO.

Under his tenure as CEO, Nokia “hired a large number of executives who knew little about mobile technology, media and design,” says the book.

In Kallasvuo’s time, the recommendations of Nokia’s engineers were ignored, the challenge of the iPhone was not met, touch-screens which had been trialled at Nokia years before, were not adopted and the rot set in.

Stephen Elop completed the collapse of the iconic Finnish company appartently predicting that he would be seen as a double-agent for Microsoft from where he came to head up Nokia and where he returned after selling the company to Microsoft.

This is a fascinating account of an epic disaster which makes you realise how staggeringly stupid top management can be when it isolates itself from the detail of the business it’s in.