Question

f Nokia decided to embrace the change and move from the old slate (Nokia phones in 2005) to the future slate (smartphones similar to apple and Samsung smartphones in 2020), bearing in mind the lesson learned stated in the last page in the case, propose suitable levers throughout Lewin’s three phases of managing change which in your opinion could have saved Nokia from failure. The levers should cover the four organisational subsystems. (at least 2 levers in each subsystem).

Answer 1

Nokia Corporation or Nokia is a well-known Finish multi industrial company, founded in 1865 from a single paper mill operation (Bennett and Pohjanpalo, 2017). Since the telephony began, Nokia started to step into the telecommunication world. And when Europe deregulated the industry, Nokia decided to made the mobile and telecommunications as their core business with a great number of achievements in human history such as the first fully-digital local telephone exchange, first car phone, first GSM (Global system for mobile communications) call … (Schrempf, 2011). By 1998, Nokia was the world leading brand in mobile phone devices for decades. The ambition of this innovation leader had been shown more clearly by evolving and expanding their business. joining with some giant companies like Siemens, Microsoft … With the vision of transforming the way people and things communicate and connect, running by thousands of people across over 100 countries, Nokia Corporation was an iconic model of a successful organisation in their shining era.

Nokia wants to create a new world; to transform a big planet to a small village. Their vision is to create, build, and encourage people from all countries to communicate with each other in order to create a world where everybody is connected.

Humans learn from people around them, but men also seem to forget that beliefs and thoughts differ from person to person. The way of thinking, experiences, believes are simultaneously related in a logic approach. Similarly, Nokia wants to create a world of creativity and experience, shared experiences. mill in Tammerkoski in southern Finland. Frederick Idestam then built another mill by the Nokiavirta River where he gave the name Nokia to the mill in 1871. Originally, the Nokianvirta River was named after a dark furry animal, locally known as the Nokia – a type of marten.

Following a major industrial force, the company merges with a cable company (founded by Eduard Polon) and a rubber firm (founded by Arvid Wickstrom) which sets Nokia on the new path of electronics. Nokia’s first electronic device was a pulse analyzer designed for use in nuclear power plants in 1962. Their interest in telecommunication systems began in 1963 when they started developing radio telephones for the army and the emergency services, prior to the manufacturing of televisions, radio phones, data transfer equipment, radio link, analyzers and digital telephone exchange. Nokia will change its production and focus on the telecommunication expertise until itbecomes the core of its future work.

Nokia has gone through several organisational changes since their establishment. And one of the current major change in this organisation was their devices and services partnership with Microsoft, the American technology ‘giant’. The change process at that time was critical for Nokia when their profit and market share continually declined. Before going with the deal, Nokia appointed Stephen Elop as their CEO to drive the company through the hard time.

To analyse this change process, the Kurt Lewin’s change model will be used in this part. This model includes three stages: Unfreezing, Changing and Refreezing (Medley & Akan, 2008). The reason of using this module is because this is a planned change when Nokia got a change agent, Elop as a CEO determined and prepared the process for the organisation.

Unfreezing: Unfreezing is the first step of the process. This is the time for the organisation to prepare for the change by starting to recognise the forces for the change and also against it. Driven forces make the group members become dissatisfied with the status quo of the organisation and get ready for the change time. However, there are some obstacles forces to change when it restrains the change process. In the Nokia case, applying the Lewin’s force field model is the suitable overview to understand the current state of the organisation.

Changing: The mid-step in Lewin model is changing or moving. It is the time for applying and implementing the plans, the actions for change. The change tools in this stage covers many aspects of the organisation. Business strategic Days later after the memo, Elop announced the new strategy for Nokia when shifting its current OS to Microsoft’s Windows and they became the partnership in mobile and services. Partnership is one of the tools in organisational change. It will match up well in all areas of those organisations and allow them being mutually beneficial. This partnership was a big surprise for everyone internal and external of Nokia as well as Microsoft. Confusing and worrying about the big change did happen to everyone involved in the change. However, as a decision maker, Elop believed the joint was the opportunity for them to work together, bring more innovations and creating a differentiation in the market. The two combined their strengths in mobile and services. As the new goals, a new ecosystem of mobile devices was expected to be a revolution and success for two in a near future. After the partnership agreement, Elop started restructure Nokia. He chose to delayered management structure, bringing a flatter one to the organisation. The new management layer will be called as the Leadership team instead of Executive Board. Delayering is about removing levels of management of the organisation in a high competitive environment. In this case, it is important to have delayering as the change tool as Nokia original structure was complicated and slow in making decision.

Refreezing: The last stage of Lewin change model is refreezing which is about change slowing down and new strategies becoming standard practice. Rewarding will be in place when the organisation reached the desired situation . After the major change process in the organisation, Nokia’s market share started to recover and soon their Window Mobile replaced Blackberry as the third ecosystem in the market. However, the team kept taking more actions to focus its product offering, product competitiveness and improving the profit seriously.

Nokia was the most famous mobile device company in the work. But over a period of time, Nokia stick to its old traditional way when the world and competitors kept changing and creating new trends. As the consequences, they lost their market share and profit fell rapidly. They started change. However, the fundamentals of the change process had not been effectively drawn out by the organisation. Nokia attempts for reviving its current state and get back to the mobile market failed because of lacking strong plan and stakeholder engagement. This is a lesson for Nokia and also other organisations when going for change which always have to be prepared and incorporate by everyone in the organisation to move forwards.