It was a moment of sadness for the top management of Nokia as it got acquired by Microsoft after losing out of the highly competitive SmartPhone market.


During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop ended his speech saying,

Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly.

Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful.

They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival.

The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition.

Microsoft announced the purchase of Nokia’s phone assets in September 2013 — just weeks after Steve Ballmer said he would step down — and finalized the deal in April 2014.

The total purchase price ended up as approximately $7.9 billion, according to an April 2015 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated.

Conclusion:
The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.

To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change, is like being discarded.

Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.

Written by Ziyad Jawabra