In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be rebranding its mobile phones to remove the “Nokia” name from its Lumia smartphones. For most customers, this will be the most visible sign of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone unit.
Like many others who have worked in Nokia, I was a cog in the wheel of a very large organization. The rise and fall of businesses is a fascinating topic not just because of the famous brand names involved but for the lessons it may hold for the current title holders and especially for the rising stars waiting in the wings.
For someone in digital, I was working for Nokia at the best possible time. Market share in some of the markets were over 70%, a level of dominance that both instilled incredible pride but also complacency.
I recall here some examples from my own experience that continue to serve as cautionary tales for me and still affect the way I chose to work and conduct myself today.
Don’t Show Them
The digital team worked with all the business units that each had a different portfolio of phones. A key document we referenced were the product decks that would contain everything you needed to know about a product from the product positioning, market assessment, consumer research findings and detailed target customer profiling.
The internal “rivalry” among the business units became increasingly intense during my stint at the company. Towards the end of my stay at Nokia, I recall once when I asked for a product deck, my colleague from the business unit pulled me a chair to sit next to her, opened her laptop to share the information with me but will not send me the file. When I asked to see the current build, she unlocked the drawer, took out the latest build with a working software for me to play with for a while but reminded me as I left to “please don’t show them” – “them” being colleagues from the other business units.
When I first joined Nokia, we routinely received all the product decks and everyone were widely knowledgeable about all upcoming products across business units.
Only One Store Window
We had regular regional briefing with the countries. All the different marketing teams would share their plans with the country marketing teams. This can cover sharing info, delivering full programs to providing guidance on execution items. As each of the business units grew and became more differentiated in their product line, there was a corresponding growth in the number of people in each business unit. Duplicate roles started to appear within each business unit.
Each regional team took turns to go to the front of the conference room to present to the countries. One of the areas covered was retail. The retail marketing manager for one of the business unit got up to present guidance on what should be the merchandising strategy for the various retail outlets including the Nokia Concept Store. Later, the retail marketing manager for the next business unit shared their guidance for the retail outlets as well.
After they were done, a country marketing manager raised her hand and expressed her confusion on what she should do exactly. There was only one Nokia Concept Store in her country and both business units had given the guidance that only their products should be featured in the window. Both business units then repeated their guidance, insisting the Nokia Concept Store shop window should only feature products from their business unit.
At one point, the country marketing manager exclaimed in exasperation “But I have only one shop window!”
A little while later, I will face the same conundrum. We were promoting mobile emails (which was at its infancy then) but each business unit only wanted their own phones to be featured on the mobile email ad. We were not supposed to show phones across different business units in the same ad (I didn’t know how such rules came about). I couldn’t remember how it was resolved finally – I think we tried to flout the global guidelines and got the local guys to agree to have the phones be placed together and flew under the radar on that one.
Has Everyone Seen It?
During my time at Nokia, the landscape of stakeholder management became more and more complicated. As business units grew, more people joined the organization and reorganizations brought new roles and responsibilities – the number of people you had to socialize your projects with to gain acceptance grew substantially.
It is quite typical of stakeholder management in matrix organizations to share your ideas and projects so having to socialize ideas in itself was not the problem.
The issue was when it became an endless loop.
In my first year at Nokia, we were able to develop, manage programs and make decisions with agility. For larger projects, we sometimes formally form committees to make decisions but we were empowered to do our job. There were presentations to senior leaders but they were at strategic stages of the process.
By my last year at Nokia, I was caught up in an endless loop of internal presentations. It became the norm to consult and get feedback from all the business units. At times the “tweaks” demanded were nothing more than changing phrases on a powerpoint slide but still it had to be presented again. As more people became involved, less decisions got made and were made far more slowly than before.
Internal planning time versus external execution time became inversed – we spent the majority of the time managing internally and far too little time out in the market. It was exhausting.
That Plastic Feeling
This last cautionary tale example is about packaging but really its about company values.
BTL and packaging is a separate line of activity as part of preparing for launch. One day we received the packaging material for a new phone. I was in digital and didn’t deal much with packaging but there was enough of a rustling that I walked over to see what the fuss was about. The packaging for a new product was using plastic. The colleagues that were huddled around to examine the new packaging were dismayed and disappointed. They were discussing among themselves: Maybe its recycled plastic? There were no signs on the plastic sheet that said so.
The Nokia brand stood for something to consumers and to employees. One of the things that my colleagues valued and took pride in was Nokia’s green record and its responsibility to the environment as a very large provider of electronic devices and as an industry leader. They were proud of the policy of recycled paper packaging. Reintroducing plastic into the packaging materials after getting rid of them in the past represented to them a break from the Nokia values that were dear to them.
I always think you lose your troops before you lose your customers. I saw it as yet another consequence of developing silos and the lack of internal coherence.
I had always disliked silos. After my experience with organizational silos in Nokia, I no longer see silos as just an irritating inconvenience. I recognize it as a cancer that can attack initiative, innovation and kill off great companies.
Having shared all of the above, Nokia was still by far the best company I had worked for and I just wanted to share one more story on that.
Equity and fairness
Fairly or unfairly, the salary offer you get is heavily influenced by your last drawn pay. Mid way through the year, I had hired a new staff who had a fairly low pay in her previous company. Our recruiter had made her a very decent offer with double digit pay rise and she was of course happy with our offer and hence joined the company. She of course did not know she was drawing a much lower salary compared to other members of the team at the same job grade but I knew and I had wanted to address the internal inequity at the next salary review cycle.
When the annual salary review cycle came up, I had my usual salary increment pool, my bonus pool and a separate sum that was specifically given to me by HR to bring her pay up to the minimum end of the compa ratio for her job grade. It was an incredibly fair approach to compensation management and as a manager it was astounding to see this from a company . In neither the companies I worked prior to or since Nokia had I seen such a proactive and enlightened approach. I remember being immensely proud to work for such a company that was fair to a single employee because it was the right thing to do – far more than pride in the 70% market share.
Digital Optimist 