During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly.
Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful.
They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival.
The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition.
It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated.
Conclusion:
1. The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.
2. To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change, is like being discarded.
3. Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.
In 1998 Chris (Christian) Kazamias visited Nokia at Espo Finland trying to work with them to enable laptops(there were no powerful Notebooks then) to work better with Nokia phones integrating calls, SMS, Fax and email. He was told and he quote" we are Nokia we have all the engineering know-how in-house we don't need developers". 4 years later as Nokia market share declined and apps took off on Palm and other platforms after he released first Smartphone OS he was invited to Nokias Singapore Developer conference and the tune was : " We are here for you". He raised my hand and asked for how long as you knew it all 4 years back. The head of partners at Nokia thanked me for rattling the arrogant management approach of past. The moral consistent with this article is never assume you will stay on top and embrace creativity, passionate disruptors and embrace and ride the changes or you may suffer. So for him Nokia reacted way way too late, they had the technology and the know how just not the right top down approach.