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The Nokia Revolution
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The Nokia Revolution

The Story of an Extraordinary Company That Transformed an Industry

Dan Steinbock
AMACOM, 2001
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Dan Steinbock gives you a riveting look at one of the most important companies of our time in an elegant, storytelling style. His text is rich in detail and seems to capture every conceivable perspective on every possible event in Nokia’s 140-year-old history. Writing almost at the level of a fictional narrative, Steinbock adroitly takes you through the company’s highs, lows and pivotal moments from its origins in the timber industry in the 1860s and the merger in the 1960s that first gave it an electronics division, to the suicide of its influential CEO in the 1980s. It’s all here, along with Nokia’s strategies and values. getabstract.com recommends this book to anyone who relishes well-written corporate adventures or who harbors a certain curiosity about events inside influential companies (or about corporate thought in Finland, for that matter).

Summary

Nokia’s Considerable History

While Nokia is known as one of those bright, shiny and new firms that rose during the dot-com boom, the company’s origins can be traced back more than 140 years. The company was founded during Finland’s earliest era of commerce. Nokia advanced along with Finland, a small, now independent country that has been ruled over the centuries by both Russia and Sweden. During that 140-year period, Nokia was recreated, merged and reorganized many times. This Finnish company endured and survived Russian oppression, a Bolshevik revolution, a struggle for independence, a civil war, a worldwide depression, two world wars, reparations, cyclical recessions and the premature deaths of two key executives.

The two driving forces behind Nokia are bold dreams and innovation. In the course of many decades, the company has exhibited self-reliance, the creation of a context for strategic and tactical decisions, and extraordinary teamwork and cohesion in the face of adversity and challenges. Even back in the 1890s, this firm distinguished itself by paying attention both to differentiation and to mastering its products’ full value chain. For example, branding has...

About the Author

Dan Steinbock  is an affiliate researcher at the Columbia Business School Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) and a visiting virtual professor at the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration. He is the author of The Birth of Internet Marketing Communications and Triumph and Erosion in the American Media and Entertainment Industries. He lives in New York City and Helsinki.

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