Rescuing Nokia

The Register writes about Rescuing Nokia. The story originates from a book (promo site in Finnish) written by an old Nokia insider, Juhani Risku.

According to Juhani, Nokia has become fat, heavy with middle management bureaucracy which hinders creativity. The seed of the problem stems, according to Juhani, from incompetence of the leaders.

Amongst some of the most interesting things, the article mentions that Nokia had already been working with touch screens ten years ago, but abandoned development. Many other innovations were ready to be developed to products many years ago, but Nokia more or less ignored them, watching competition implement the features many years later. Often, it was a case of complete lack of ability to move innovations to production due to the massive and crippling effect of incompetent middle management and division leaders who had no real experience in the matters.

Juhani also states that American style business management built around short sighted arrogance and greed has hindered innovation. According to him, appointing a CEO from the USA would be a big mistake and another delay for a company that is Finnish down to the core. American style management just does not work.