Will Nokia be the first "Internet Corporate Revolution"

This is quite interesting - a small group of shareholders are putting their agenda - to vote the current Nokia board away - onto the 'Net:

We are a group of nine young Nokia shareholders. All of us have worked with Nokia in different capacities in the past. We plan to challenge the company’s strategy and partnership with Microsoft in the next Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011.

If you elect us to a majority in the Nokia Board of Directors we will pursue the following agenda:

- Return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience.

- Maintain ownership and control of the software layer of the Nokia products. Software is where innovation, differentiation and shareholder value can most easily be created.
- Revamp hiring strategy to target the top young software talent from around the world. Only if Nokia is able to attract and keep the best talent in the industry it will be able to generate the level of innovation that is needed to achieve sustained growth and consistently high profit margins.
- Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing.
- Avoid at all cost becoming a poorly differentiated OEM with only low margin, commodity products that is unable to attract top software talent and cannot create shareholder value though innovation.

It's not so much the agenda that interests me, its more the extension of online unrest from the overturning of political elites to overturning elites in the corporate sphere.

It is very true to say that traditional fund manager shareholders (and boards for that matter) have been "asleep at the wheel" in corporate life too often recently (the latest news that only one option was put to the Nokia board is disgraceful in my opinion too - but I don't know what is worse - that the management did it, or the board accepted it - how can that be diligent to shareholders by either party for something so key ?) so its no surprise that some of the more switched on shareholders are cross.

But what is more interesting is how this will pan out now - the story is in Techmeme, lots of people are reading it and blogging it - imagine if it could generate the sort of protests from other Nokia shareholders that we've seen in recent political protests? The big lesson of the last 10 years is that the regulators, major shareholders and boards are not watching out for ordinary people's interests, and one thing the new media is proven to do is help monitor and organise protest.

I don't think this one will do it as is (the plan in my opinion is still too ropey - they want MeeGo to the main platform), but given a bit work could be a lot better - maybe crowdsource from other disgruntled shareholders

Definitely one to watch.........

Update - the answer is no, this time the institutional shareholders are not going onto the barricades - combination of timing and a poor Plan B:

Posting an update today Nokia Plan B said that “after reviewing the feedback we’ve received from investors on our Plan B, we have decided not to carry on with it,” despite contact from hundreds of individual Nokia shareholders (which they note owned anywhere between 10 and 400,000 Nokia shares).

It was Nokia’s institutional investors and developers that put the nail in the coffin, the responses they received from them “were not encouraging”. Due to the fact that they aren’t allowed to support activities such as Nokia Plan B, they can vote with their feet by withdrawing stock from the company instead of protesting changes.

They also realised that by May 3, many of Nokia’s Symbian developers may have already left the company – campaigning for the future of Symbian would be fruitless.

Well there we go - didn't think it would, but we saw the first swallow......

Update 2 - it was a hoax apparently, one bored engineer - and this droll piece of Nokianalysis. Interesting that the zeitgeist of this post got so far, I stick with the view above the some form of shareholder activism is coming via new media.