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[Who can save Nokia from a tumbling market valuation, declining margins and product failures? Guest author Thucydides Sigs deconstructs Nokia's culture and explains why an acquisition would be the best next step for Nokia] When CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo took control of Nokia in 2006, the stock was at $25 per share. In late July 2010, the stock was around $8, the same level as in the late nineties. Ouch. In just four years, two thirds of shareholder equity is gone. If we go a step further, and compare market cap and sales by number of units, we observe an even more disturbing picture: Nokia’s valuation was at $33B on sales of 125M handsets last quarter; the same figures for Motorola were $17B on 12M handsets and for RIM $31B on 10.6M handsets. The math is pretty simple: Nokia is valued almost as much as RIM, but ships 10 times fewer MORE handsets. The trend is not looking good for Nokia. No wonder that we have seen news reports of the board finally looking for a new CEO . Is a CEO change what it takes to fix Nokia? Will it make a difference if a foreigner takes over the proud Finnish company? Is Nokia beyond fixing – a dinosaur who can’t survive the climate change – or is there something that can be done to transform the company? I don’t think Nokia is unfixable. Nokia has a huge potential: amazing global consumer brand, a very strong IP war chest and deep understanding of where the market is heading. Yes, Nokia does know where the market is going and it always has known. From launching the Nokia Communicator in 1996… and attempting to expand into services (Ovi is the latest strategic attempt), Nokia has known where it wanted and needed to go. But the problem has been and still is the execution. The Finnish giant just fails to move and adapt fast enough to the chaotic, rapidly evolving software and internet market. What is holding the execution back? More than anything, it’s the company’s culture. And before I dive into it the details, I have to preemptively apologize; like any discussion of a large corporation or a regional culture, one has to use generalizations. Yes, there are always exceptions, but if we want to analyze the culture we need to resort to generalizations. Some readers might find this offensive. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Nokia takes great pride in being “Smart, Cold Blooded Vikings.” Thoughtful and tough, strategic and careful, they don’t take chances. They calculate, analyze and think before they react. And “if it takes time, that’s fine”. This is an admirable approach. But as Google’s Shona Brown pointed out in “ Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos “, if you try to analyze and manage chaos (or any environment which is rapidly changing in multiple dimensions), that might take a while. Plus, if your analysis takes longer than the rate of change, you are actually moving backward. In the age of fast moving internet and web, the best strategies are coming from the bottom up, and are best developed through experimentation rather than long analytical cycles. This is the antithesis to what the Nokia culture is all about.

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