Book Review: Ringtone: Story of Nokia

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Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones

By Yves L. Doz and Keeley Wilson

Nokia, which easily can be termed as the most innovative company, helped bring the mobile revolution which currently we are in, adapting the need of being connected 24×7, and at its peak having more than 40% market share and a true leader. Though unnoticed many of us don’t know Nokia still exists and is the world’s largest 5G infra company and still innovating. But what touched us is the Nokia Mobile Company, and this book is about its rise and fall. Breaking general misconception and reasons behind its fall.

Against the general perception of failure due to not looking ahead or lack of innovation, the reason behind the fall of Nokia Mobile company is due to a change in business model to a matrix organisation 

That’s the summary of why Nokia mobile failed so miserably, it’s just because of poor execution of matrix organisation. And that’s what interests me, as a leader myself, justifying the use of matrix organisation for better productivity, it’s even important to understand the consequences of its poor execution. This book covers all those aspects with Nokia as a centrepiece. Whereat all the phases of it, we were touched as a consumer or as heartbroken engineers to see the fall of such a beautiful product company.

Small trivia

Before I begin the review of this book, let me share how mammoth the Nokia is. We always see it’s mobile and thinks Nokia started as a mobile company and ended as one. However, it’s surprising to know Nokia started as a Cable company in Finland in the 1800s, moved to Telecom infra in the 1900s, followed by infra for the first car telephone and diversified with the mobile decision in the late 1990s

What this book Is about

It tries to answer following questions, which generally we also want to know.

  • Could Nokia’s decline have been unavoidable—just an extreme case of Schumpeterian creative destruction?
  • Was it an instance of organizational evolution and adaptation gone astray down a dead end in the face of disruption and business model change?
  • Was this a failure of management volition—the wrong strategic decisions, poor choices of organization, inadequate management processes, weak leadership, and bad timing?

Some insights

Nokia always had the edge with its strong innovation. For example, although Sharp launched the first camera phone in 2001, it was Nokia’s camera phone released the following year which really changed the landscape, providing not only superior picture resolution but also picture-sharing applications that paved the way for multi-media communication. This product innovation came from fifteen labs around the world and a number of technical cooperation projects and partnerships.

Beyond product innovation, Nokia’s success was supported by an innovative and highly efficient supply chain system that had been built in the 1990s. Through this, Nokia was able to achieve much lower prices from suppliers than its competitors and ramp up new production lines to full capacity in a matter of days. In the 1990s it had also mastered lean production and Japanese quality processes and organized its integrated manufacturing around a few key regional hubs in Europe (Finland, Germany, Hungary), Asia (China), and North America (Mexico).

Just as success often results from many small positive steps, the roots of failure can usually be found in multiple small mistakes, which seem manageable when viewed in isolation. However following this book we can see small cracks, however, they are evident now, and could not be avoided in the actual scenario. For example communication gap between R&D and Sales and Marketing lead to ultimate failure with the Symbian operating system. Though a leader in OS development themselves, delay in adapting Android and working with Microsoft’s half-cooked mobile platform led to the last nail.

CORE principle

Author has evaluated the various ups and downs in Nokia with CORE dimensions .

  • C Cognition: this is what leader saw during that phase at Nokia, and strategise
  • O Organisation : it’s outing strategy to action
  • R Relationship : it’s about relationship with people.
  • E Emotions : Emotions are at play during various phases, this is what impacts the relatioy

My MindMap

Key Takeaway

  • Shifting from Symbian to Microsoft OS, Nokia overestimated brand loyalty and weren’t innovative enough
  • Decision made in 2001-05 made its impact in decline in 2013-15. Management need to be mindful of its long term impact.
  • Strategic foresight and intellectual leadership would have no value if not acted upon.
  • Poor management choices contributed to strategic stasis.
  • Successful past commitments leave a legacy
  • Outside parties, customers, major shareholders, strategic partners, industry pun- dits, and regulators can excessively and unduly influence one’s sense-making, particularly in adhering to a “being close to customers” logic.
  • Failure of cognition may not result from ignorance or lack of information, or even poor foresight, but from inadequate sense-making—i.e. not making effective sense of available information.
  • Management systems and processes have to acknowledge the irrepressible influ- ence of emotions, and thus leave some room for them to be legitimately expressed.

Where to buy. Available on Amazon as Kindle and Hard copy.

Book Review: Good Economics for Hard Times

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Recall watching many dish tv antenna on top of very weak Jhuggi or in slum areas? Thinking, people who can’t afford food and clean drinking water, how can they afford a TV? It’s not rational right?

Wrong, my fellow reader, People knows what they want…

Television is more important than food

The book tells the story of a man in Morocco. After he made a compelling case that he and his family really did not have enough to eat, he showed us his largish television with a satellite connection. We might have suspected the television was just an impulse purchase he had subsequently regretted. But that was not at all what he said. “Television is more important than food,” he told us. His insistence made us ask how this could make sense, and once we went down that road it was not that hard to see what was behind this preference. There was not much to do in the village, and given he was not planning to emigrate, it was not clear that better nutrition would buy him much more than a fuller stomach; he was already strong enough to do the little work that was available. What the television delivered was relief from the endemic problem of boredom, in these remote villages where there was often not even a tea stall to relieve the monotony of daily life.

The book I’m about to review, gives such examples , which are so co-relatable. Let’s start the review

The Book: Good Economics for Hard Times

By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Both are Nobel holders and married to each other

The book tries to answers questions like:

  • Is immigration a biggest problem, to swing our attention, political environment and really a concern?
  • Does welfare, free cash make people lazy?
  • Do we need to fear Automation? Will it take away all jobs, leading to more jobless people on ground?
  • Does inequality going to stay?
  • Is climate change really impacting productivity and poor people?

What this book do wonderfully?

The book’s greatest contribution is its methodical deconstruction of fake facts: migration, we learn, is not on the rise – indeed, at 3% of global population, it is at the level it was in 1960. Natural experiments (involving Finns expelled from the USSR in 1945, Cubans flocking to Miami in 1980 and Jews settling in Israel in the 90s) prove that migrants do not steal natives’ jobs; they just help expose the holes in public services and social housing left by austerity. As for trade liberalisation, which economists treat as super-important, Banerjee and Duflo suggest it brings relatively small benefits while doing a lot of damage to the poor in countries such as the US and India. The resulting discontent turbo-charges racism: the moment white blue-collar men lose hope and apply for disability welfare benefits, it is no longer enough for them to denigrate black people and Latinos as “welfare queens”. They must now be depicted as gang members or rapists.

My MindMap

Key topics and some insights

Impact on me

Current times, when you have more news coming on mobile than you go out and watch yourself or ask someone to validate it, and as people around loosing patience in a blink of an eye, and even knowing that the content received, has high probability of being a misinformation, we get biased and make out perceptions on surrounding and creating an irreversible situation around us. This book helps clear this muddy water, helps get clear reflection of self in clear water to know self better.

Reading this book helped me to understand my biases and basic assumption on human behaviour when it comes to subject like migrants, tax cuts or taxing riches, automation taking job away, climate change impacting once life, racist behaviour towards community either cast based or economy based.

The book clearly mentions, “We should not stop telling the truth, but it is more useful to express it in a nonjudgmental way”. And it did wonderfully well in this regards it shares data points which we can see, validate and hence accept.

Key concept like to remember

Statistical Discrimination: This concept helps why police stops and checks black driver more often, why we see more Muslims “accidentally” killed by authorities and why There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. Why we see so less women at leadership position. And how self discrimination impacts one’s performance in a place, where there are no bias. (Self discrimination triggers once under performance thinking s/he is getting discriminated)

Where to buy? It’s Available on Amazon as Kindle or hard copy. Great for collection.

Book Review : Change by Design

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Iconic Oral B Brush designed by IDEO, of which Tim Brown (author) is CEO. Till this point, we learned about ‘design thinking process’, with empathetic thinking, Defining the problem statement, Ideate the concepts, build prototype, test and launch the product.

The designer who designed it, once went to near by sea shore, and found few of colorful brushes washed over beach! the design came to its end of the life cycle, most of the part of the brush was intact.

Designer can’t prevent people from doing what they want to do with its product they own, but that doesn’t excuse them from ignoring the larger system. Often in our enthusiasm for solving problem in front of us, we fail to see the problem that we create.

Change by Design

The book is all about all round thinking while designing a product/solution for a problem. IDEO is the company, which has brought the ‘design thinking’ concept to masses. and Auther himself is known as one of the founding members of this key concept.

Key Concept/ Take away

Ideas for #Leader

  1. What is design thinking
  2. Finding interdisciplinary team members
  3. Putting people first
  4. Inspiring the birth of great ideas

Ideas for #Process

  1. Look : Look at inspiration, ideation, and implementation together to become great at design thinking.
  2. Prototype : Build the prototype of your idea and begin testing as early as possible to help you encompass all areas of innovation at once.
  3. Storytelling : If you want to make your great new idea stick, use storytelling.

About Author

Tim Brown : CEO of IDEO

  • Tim is leading IDEO, and key person to bring ‘Design Thinking’
  • He has published many books/articles for this topic including for innovation.

Tim Brown (Author of Change by Design) | Goodreads

Personal Impact

Process on ‘how to innovate’ is explained simply, with three step approach.  Innovation is an ongoing activity, its not an on/off like activity. One has to be mindful of his surrounding, get inspiration and how quickly we can bring idea to life thru rapid prototyping. Few example like complex product like google glasses the prototype was done in 30 min!

I Understand role of Empathy in design thinking, but the insight I got from this book is, empathy without action is of no use, what we need to do is act quicky and convert idea into reality by rapid prototyping.

My Mindmap

What is heatexchanger?

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Yup, just a brief on this subject.

Heat exchangers are devices used to transfer heat energy from one fluid to another, gas to gas or gas to liquid. 

Typical heat exchangers are seen around in most unexpected location. From household appliances as air conditioners, refrigerator etc.  Boilers and condensers in thermal power plants are examples of large industrial heat exchangers. There are heat exchangers in our automobiles in the form of radiators and oil coolers.  Heat exchangers are also abundant in chemical and process industries.

Heatexchanger sizes varies from couple of square mm (heat sink in computer cpu) to length exceeding hundreads of square meters!

From simple study flow to complex flows.

Heat exchanges as they say “comes in all sizes and nearly for all duties”

We will, in my next post discuss about fundamental of heat exchangers.