Management Skills

When you have a Smartphone…call me.

In order to revamp Nokia Corporation, and prevent the company from losing more ground in the lucrative market for Smartphones, there are some management functions that will be critical to Mr. Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, as he moves forward after announcing a major shake-up in the company. These functions are organizing and staffing.
Organizing is importantbecause it structures resources and activities to accomplish objectives in an efficient and effective manner (BACW p. 207). As a top manager, one month after taking the helm, Mr. Elop identified multiple strategic challenges to the mobile phone company (02/09). He decided it was time to change Nokia’s strategy drastically and work on a new management structure to bring up the company levels, andbe able to compete with Apple and Google. As part of establishing a new management structure, Mr. Elop reorganized the company into two divisions: mobile phones and smart devices, placing major attention on the latter one. He also elevated several executives to the company's new leadership team (02/12). The company needed to recover from its lost of market share in smartphones, thus organizing thework into teams to handle core processes such as new product development instead of organizing around traditional departments such as marketing and production (BACW p. 207) became Mr. Elop’s main priority. In fact, “he began a strategic assessment of the company’s options choosing between continued development of Nokia’s own software, or a partnership with Microsoft or Google” (02/18).Organizing allowed Nokia’s CEO to review and evaluate the company’s options; therefore the key decision tied to the restructuring of the company was the replacement of its own Symbian software by Microsoft’s operating system. Mr. Elop believed that this change in new technology would be beneficial for Nokia since the smartphone game is dictated by the software and services that come with it (02/10).Deciding to join and embrace a competitive system was for Mr. Elop the best outcome managed after good organization to identify the problem, and working on its implementation. However once all the restructuring work was done and organized, Mr. Elop faced another challenge. After he announced a major shake-up, finding the people with the appropriate skills to do the work became an issue, thus anothermanagement function enters the game.
Staffing, known as the hiring of people to carry out the work of the organization (BACW p.207), becomes critical once the company starts with a downsizing trend, the elimination of a significant number of employees (BACW p. 207). As some of Nokia’s top 10 executives, as well as senior officials and workers were expected to leave (02/07), Mr. Elop responsibilityto truly revive Nokia’s market clout is to determine what skills are needed for specific jobs and hire smart, creative executives “who understand what it means to disrupt” the norm (02/10). Staffing is essential because besides having bright sources of intellectual innovation, the company will also be equipped with the right staff members to work on teams that will bring into the market newtechnological development at a faster rate preventing the company from losing market share, losing mind share and losing time. Nokia’s CEO knew about the issues that would emerge from downsizing and the embracement of a new operating system for its new smartphone; therefore to help him staff the company with the best workers, Nokia has retained executive recruiters to find a new head of operatingsystems, as well as a new head of research and development with strong software talent, providing the company with highly competitive staff members (02/09). Also he hired the company’s first ever chief marketing officer (02/07). As we can observe, Mr. Elop made a series of significant changes to his executive team.
Downsizing has helped numerous firms reduce costs quickly and become more profitable...