Culture & Change - The Challenge Facing Nokia

This has to be one of the best newspaper articles for a Year 13 business student in many a long year…

A fascinating insight from the International Herald Tribune into the (claimed) prevailing corporate culture at Nokia which seems to have contributed to their loss of competitive advantage over Apple, RIM (Blackberry), Samsung and others.

Nokia, it is said, were actively considering the development of a touch-screen smartphone five years ago - which might have killed off the iPhone in its tracks. But the prevailing culture of risk avoidance, conservatism, inertia, acted against the investment. How they must wish they had been bolder.

What a fantastic article - packed full with core strategic terms and concepts. A great starting point would be to ask students to highlight the main themes and then explain why they are significant to Nokia. A connectives approoach (as outlined by Lord Sutch at TBBLE2010 today) would work really well with this article…..

...this theme (e.g. conservative, risk-averse decision-making) is significant to Nokia BECAUSE…and THEREFORE…

I think Nokia should be right up there at the top of list of “firms to follow” for Year 13 students. The appointment of a new CEO (Stephen Elop) provides the extra leadership/change management angle to the case study which examiners might be quite attracted too!