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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 15 2012 @ 09:36 PM EDT |
It occurred to me that maybe symbolset is suspicious because Elop's name was
announced so quickly. It makes perfect sense to me, though.
Keep in mind that the entire Board of Directors votes on who to hire as the new
CEO. The board wants the decision to be unanimous. Normally the Chairman has a
lot of influence, but if a couple of the directors had strong feelings, they
might have been able to lead a revolt, particularly since no one was
particularly happy with the Chairman because the stock hadn't been doing well.
At least a couple of the directors probably represented the interests of some
large American institutional investors. It is not unusual for large investors to
arrange it. Even if not, it's all very clubby.
So the Chairman probably formed a confidential search committee to pick the next
CEO. That's just the way to do it. He apparently used his influence to make sure
that the person who came out ranked best was Anssi Vanjoki, his favorite. So he
tells the board that the search committee picked Anssi Vanjoki and tried to
schedule a board meeting for them to approve it. The directors representing the
American institutional investors probably told the investors about what the
Chairman was doing and the investors probably got together and decided that was
a very bad idea and they shouldn't let it happen. Then they probably started
calling around to other large investors to see how happy they were with the
Chairman, then finally they (or their directors) called the Chairman and told
him that they weren't going to go along with picking Anssi Vanjoki and that if
he tried to push it, they probably had enough votes to fire the chairman,
instead. (Or maybe they had enough votes to make it close, which would have been
bad enough.) They probably also told the chairman that their concern was that
Nokia already had enough people who understood the market in Europe, but not
enough people who understood the market elsewhere, so only someone from outside
Europe would be acceptable. The Chairman probably made some calls and talked to
some people to verify what they told him and didn't like what he heard.
The Chairman now knew that if he wanted to keep his job, he had to select
someone from overseas as CEO. That would have been easy enough. All he had to do
was take the list of people interviewed and evaluated by the CEO search
committee, cross out anyone from Europe, and pick whoever was left on top.
Apparently that turned out to be Stephen Elop. Once that was done, hiring Elop
wouldn't have taken much time at all.
This may not be exactly what happened (it's almost certainly oversimplified),
but it's probably close. It's what one would expect given the way these things
are done and what the article said.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 15 2012 @ 10:57 PM EDT |
Stuff I've picked up so far...
Most businessmen suspect that adopting Android will lead to
very low profits. (This seems to be true...great for the
customer.)
Most businessmen really don't care about keeping a company
in business at zero profit. (paying employees is not a
bonus)
A significant fraction of
Nokia's investors felt that a 'European' mentality was an
issue. This might even have been accurate.
Nokia had a gigantic install base and excellent sales.
Meego was an open source OS. Similar, and possibly superior
to Android - but significantly behind in terms of ecosystem.
Elop's announcements completely tanked Nokia sales.
...so...
(a-1) Choosing Elop was...possibly reasonable.
(a) Choosing WP7 was...probably reasonable even though it
significantly increased the risk of total collapse. (If it
had panned out...the company _profits_ might have been
boosted significantly.) Meego, while probably a nice OS,
sounds a lot like going with Android, but adding development
costs. It still might have been a better choice, but I
won't second-guess Elop too much here.
(b) That burning platforms memo will live on in business
school infamy. Sometimes you can't just fire
someone...sometimes they need to go out back behind the
woodshed. No excuse for this. Really.
(c) Is the fix in? Well, Elop is either a tone-deaf idiot
with the backing of the board... (See M$, this isn't that
rare) Or, PJ may be correct and this is just an elaborate
scheme to loot Nokia's patent portfolio. OTOH, I can't
imagine that M$ would end up getting Nokia's patents for
anything resembling cheap.
--Erwin-[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Fresh blood - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 15 2012 @ 11:35 PM EDT
- Fresh blood - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 15 2012 @ 11:58 PM EDT
- Fresh blood - Authored by: PJ on Monday, July 16 2012 @ 06:24 AM EDT
- Fresh blood - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 16 2012 @ 01:40 PM EDT
- Fresh blood - Authored by: jonathon on Monday, July 16 2012 @ 05:03 PM EDT
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