Nokia opts for "safe" hands, but that's not what they need

Dinosaur opts for new leader they are comfortable with rather than face the radical reform they need to survive - it's a corporate story we have all heard over and over again, and this time it's possibly Nokia -SAI

The standard criticism we hear about Nokia is that it's a company overrun with managers, where decisions are always made based on business sense and never made based on product vision.
And it seems like Nokia's board just hired another CEO who is a seasoned manager, but not a consumer product visionary. So unless Stephen Elop, Nokia's new boss, has hidden talents, he may represent more of the same for Nokia -- which would be a disaster.
Nokia needs someone who can leapfrog Apple's iPhone and Google's Android the way they leapfrogged Nokia. Is Elop that guy?
Let's trace through his career: Nothing exciting the last couple years as the Office boss at Microsoft, nothing that consumers would ever care about as COO of Juniper Networks, and then sales functions at Adobe and Macromedia.

Timing, as they say, is everything. Nokia is largely irrelevant in the emerging fast growing, high margin smartphone world. Criticisms range from unintuitive software to design-by-committee to just not being cool in the new mobile world.

They face the classic incumbent problem - how to maintain their hold on the existing legacy phone market while catching up in the new market which is culturally totally alien. By my calculation Mr Elop has about 2 years ( 3 if he is quick, now ). So, what to do, what to do?

Firstly, I have been working in and around corporate innovation and reinvention for 20 odd years, and in all that time the one thing I have seen that really works in this space is the out-of-the line skunkworks. If Nokia is to push it's way into the new smartphone market it will need to set up an independent operation far from it's madding crowd of existing stovepipes, probably somewhere steeped in the new mobile culture. Small acquisitions get stifled unless they are kept away from the Barons (think Dopplr) and big acquisitions don't work as the temptation to meddle is just too great. So - step one is a skunkworks, plus careful small acquisitions then later pull through into the channels.

Secondly, it is highly unlikely there is anyone in Nokia who can run this new operation credibly, they need to bring in some cool, and fast, to give them some believability that they can do something good later. That buys a bit of time before something has to hit the ground. In fact they probably need to bring in a lot of new people to effect a culture change in the skunk works

Thirdly, they have to release something as good as the current market leaders (by the lights of the early adopters, not their own fan base) in the next year to capture the still large Nokia customer base before they defect. Their advantages over the medium term time are scale, reach, industry clout and a massive user base - that is theirs to lose. But despite a lot of advice at the time they blew mobile music, then blew smartphone 1.0 and are in the process of blowing mobile tablets.

So, best of luck to Mr Elop. Let us hope he turns into an unsafe pair of hands.