Nokia: Sisu and Susi

Back in the late 90s, I had the opportunity to work with a company that had Canadian, American, and Finnish operations. The highlight of this job was a visit Finland in 1998. The ritual of sauna, drinks, dinner, and dancing is still a blur in my memory...

The Helsinki stock market was booming during my visit. Like NorTel in Canada, the market was driven by a single company: Nokia. I got my first mobile phone that year; a Nokia 5100 series. It had a intuitive menu system and was a joy to use. Of course, phones didn't need to do much other than make calls and text back then.

Part of the business trip took me to the city of Oulu, north of the Arctic Circle, Oulu has a major Nokia R&D centre and the flight from Helsinki was a veritable Tower of Babel with technologists from around the world on the shuttle.

Our first night in the hotel coincided with the end of the fall semester. It seemed like the whole university had parked their bikes outside the hotel bar for a night of drinking. Earlier in the evening, I had crossed a bridge over the frozen Oulu river and nearly died from the biting wind. These kids were riding their bikes through the same wind - drunk! This was my introduction to that most Finnish of characteristics:"sisu". It's hard to describe, but Wikipedia makes a good attempt. Of course I got it backwards and pronounced the term "susi". This means quite the opposite! More along the terms of "snafu".

Back when Nokia had trouble in the mid 2000's, their CEO said "sisu" would see them through. . Several CEOs later, Nokia is still trying to figure it out. So how did Nokia go from "sisu" to "susi"?

Fortunately, we have an insightful piece that sheds some light. Unlike the usual finger-pointing associated with insiders describing a company's fall, this article is based on over 25 interviews reflecting a wide variety of viewpoints. It has an almost mournful tone. There are many product management lessons to be learned. The clearest example is found in this paragraph:

"In the 1990s Nokia's product development was still very much concentrated on one product - or at the most two products - at any given time. Every product had a clearly-defined team working on it, where the people focused on that one item and no others."

That changed in the 2000's with a component based approach. Now there are rumours of Nokia using Windows Phone 7 as their software platform. Oh how the mighty have fallen.