Nokia Life Quotes

We lived in a safe, family-friendly area, but parts of London were rough, as you’d expect from any large city. Mark had a knack for attracting muggers. One time, we were in a train station and a little kid--no more than about eight years old--came up to him: “Oi, mate, give me your phone.” We always carried the cool Nokia phones with the Snake game on them, and they were the hot item. It was like inviting trouble carrying one around, but we didn’t care. Mark thought the mini-mugger was crazy: “Are you kidding me? No way.” Then he looked over his shoulder and realized the kid wasn’t alone; he had a whole gang with him. So Mark handed over his phone and the kid ran off. I never let him live down the fact that an eight-year-old had mugged him. I had my own incident as well, but I handled it a little differently. I got off the train at Herne Hill station and noticed that two guys were following me. I could hear their footsteps getting closer and closer. “Give us your backpack,” they threatened me. “Why? All I have is my homework in here,” I tried to reason with them. They had seen me on the train with my minidisc player and they knew I was holding out on them. “Give it,” they threatened. My bag was covered with key chains and buttons, and as I took it off my shoulder, pretending to give it to them, I swung it hard in their faces. All that hardware knocked one of them to the ground and stunned the other. With my bag in my hand, I ran the mile home without ever looking back. Not bad for a skinny kid in a school uniform.

The truth is that our material possessions, rather than helping us understand our limits and our place in the world, regularly distort out perspective. Put a Coach purse or the key to a BMW M series or the latest Nokia gadget in our hands and it's not uncommon for humility, respect for other people, and appreciation of our environment to drain from out brains.

For an illustration of business drift, rational and opportunistic business drift, take the following. Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a stationery store. The last two examples are close, perhaps, but consider next: Raytheon, which made the first missile guidance system, was a refrigerator maker (one of the founders was no other than Vannevar Bush, who conceived the teleological linear model of science we saw earlier; go figure). Now, worse: Nokia, who used to be the top mobile phone maker, began as a paper mill (at some stage they were into rubber shoes). DuPont, now famous for Teflon nonstick cooking pans, Corian countertops, and the durable fabric Kevlar, actually started out as an explosives company. Avon, the cosmetics company, started out in door-to-door book sales. And, the strangest of all, Oneida Silversmiths was a community religious cult but for regulatory reasons they needed to use as cover a joint stock company.

MANY YEARS AGO, I had joined the local news desk of a prominent newspaper in Bengaluru, the sleepy south Indian town that became the country’s Silicon Valley. After trying my hand at crime reporting and general business journalism, I developed an interest in tracking technology. Among other things in the mid noughties, I had half a page in the paper to feature new gadgets every week. Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung and a few other companies were regulars on the page. While I was enjoying my work, my salary needed a boost. (The media industry’s decline was just about beginning, and salaries were as poor then as they are today.) Getting out of the rather difficult circumstances that I found myself in, I moved on to the Economic Times to report on technology. The business daily was India’s largest pink paper by circulation, and I worked with some of the best journalists of the time. My job was mainly to write about technology services companies. Soon I got bored with tracking quarterly results and rehearsed statements. This was around 2012, and India’s start-up ecosystem was in its infancy. I quit the paper to join a start-up blog. I didn’t ask for a raise. I was just happy to be able to write about start-ups and their founders. It was something new, and their excitement was infectious. In those days, ‘start-up’ was not a mainstream beat in India. Only niche blogs wrote about them. On the personal front, there were months when I was flat broke. One evening I sold my old Nokia 5800 for ₹300 at a second-hand electronics shop to buy a packet of biryani. That is still the best biryani I’ve ever had. The two years at the start-up blog were also my best two years ever. As start-ups became the buzzword, I went back to the pink paper to write about them. I was able to upgrade my life a little. I moved into a middle-class apartment with my family. I got some furniture and so on. After selling the Nokia phone, I used a feature phone for a few days. But now I had to upgrade my phone. After much research, I zeroed in on a Micromax handset. Micromax, a Gurgaon-based company that began making handsets in 2008, had some smartphones that were affordable on a young journalist’s salary. It was also a leading brand and had some interesting features such as dual SIM and a great touchscreen display. Going from a phone that ran on Symbian (Nokia’s proprietary operating system that failed) to an Android-based phone was like suddenly being

Outsourcing requires a tight integration of suppliers, making sure that all pieces arrive just in time. Therefore, when some suppliers were unable to deliver certain basic components like capacitors and flash memory, Compaq's network was paralyzed. The company was looking at 600,000 to 700,000 unfilled orders in handheld devices. The $499 Pocket PCs were selling for $700 to $800 at auctions on eBay and Amazon.com. Cisco experienced a different but equally damaging problem: When orders dried up, Cisco neglected to turn off its supply chain, resulting in a 300 percent ballooning of its raw materials inventory. The final numbers are frightening: The aggregate market value loss between March 2000 and March 2001 of the twelve major companies that adopted outsourcing-Cisco, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Apple, IBM, Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, and Nortel-exceeded $1.2 trillion. The painful experience of these companies and their investors is a vivid demonstration of the consequences of ignoring network effects. A me attitude, where the company's immediate financial balance is the only factor, limits network thinking. Not understanding how the actions of one node affect other nodes easily cripples whole segments of the network. Experts agree that such rippling losses are not an inevitable downside of the network economy. Rather, these companies failed because they outsourced their manufacturing without fully understanding the changes required in their business models. Hierarchical thinking does not fit a network economy. In traditional organizations, rapid shifts can be made within the organization, with any resulting losses being offset by gains in other parts of the hierarchy. In a network economy each node must be profitable. Failing to understand this, the big players of the network game exposed themselves to the risks of connectedness without benefiting from its advantages. When problems arose, they failed to make the right, tough decisions, such as shutting down the supply line in Cisco's case, and got into even bigger trouble. At both the macro- and the microeconomic level, the network economy is here to stay. Despite some high-profile losses, outsourcing will be increasingly common. Financial interdependencies, ignoring national and continental boundaries, will only be strengthened with globalization. A revolution in management is in the making. It will take a new, network-oriented view of the economy and an understanding of the consequences of interconnectedness to smooth the way.

I started to organize the procurement process from Denmark, which was good and not good. Good because I had experienced procurement people and engineers close by, and not good because I discovered quickly that we were required to put contracts out to tender under strict EU rules that would thwart our ability to launch on time. That, in turn, would mean that we could risk high penalties and/ or lose the license. After issuing the Request for Proposal and one round of intense negotiations with a couple of network suppliers, we decided to move the procurement team to Hungary. There were two suppliers left, a newcomer called Nokia and the old Ericsson, Finns and Swedes. The final negotiations could start.

Nokia and our team worked day and night; sites were selected, even churches, masts were built, and equipment was installed. We were heading for launch. Dead tired but things moved forward. Richard’s wife was screaming and shouting on the phone, where the f… he was, she would divorce him. It was early evening after our Christmas party, the offices deserted. Very cold outside, big snowflakes falling. Richard and I were looking out of the big 6th floor windows of our new office in Pest. Silently we stood together. We had grown close that year. He said sadly, ‘You see those people there Ineke? They have a life and we will improve it when they get cheap mobile phones. And we?’ I said nothing, I just watched people pass by and felt like him; lone wolves we had become.

Cleaning out my closets and came across a dusty old book, buried and forgotten in there. I sat down and opened it up. It’s about a little girl in Finland with blonde ringlets who got mad at her grandmother and decided to walk to America. Buck naked except for the bright yellow Nokia rain boots. That’s how the journey started. Forward 53 years and I’m still that girl with a lifetime of adventure and walkabouts in between. I did end up in America, a country I embrace as my own, but the path here came with many detours and dead ends,but I’m here. Finally.

It was 2006, and I was working with the Nokia Nseries marketing team. We were holding focus groups with prototype touchscreen phones, the like of which nobody had ever seen before. This was way before the iPhone. It was fair to say that not everyone saw the future that day. People almost without exception hated the new phones. They worried that the screens would smash even though we assured them that they would not. They hated the fact that the battery life was less than two days. They worried about strange things such as fingerprints making the screen greasy. Above all else, people couldn’t really see the point. For the outrageous trade-offs that had to be made – the large screen necessary to view photos that people were yet to share and to access apps that didn’t yet exist – the main takeaway was that it did more than they needed to. I remember more than anything else the proclamation that, ‘I like the internet, but I’ve already got it at home’. Even those companies who see the future more than most can find it very hard to change.