When Everyone Was Right, and the Company Still Lost: All-Time Strategy Trap Fail #4
In 2007, Nokia controlled more than 40 percent of the global mobile phone market.
Their devices were everywhere.
They were profitable, admired, and dominant.
But just six years later, Nokia sold its entire phone business to Microsoft for a fraction of its former value.
What makes Nokia’s collapse so painful is this: they saw the future coming.
The Vision Was There
Years before the iPhone, Nokia engineers had built touchscreen prototypes.
They were experimenting with advanced mobile operating systems.
Inside the company, many people understood that Symbian—the operating system powering most Nokia phones—was not built for the next era of smartphones.
Leadership knew this too.
By the mid-2000s, Nokia wasn’t short on ideas or awareness. They had multiple strategic paths on the table.
That wasn’t the problem.
The Trap: Strategy Without Co-Creation
Nokia didn’t lack strategy.
They had too many strategies, and no shared commitment to one of them.
Symbian teams focused on extending the existing platform. Operating systems teams pushed for a clean break and a modern smartphone OS. Hardware teams optimized for scale and backward compatibility. Regional leaders prioritized short-term volume and market share.
Each choice made sense in isolation. Together, they pulled the company in different directions.
There was no forcing moment where leaders across hardware, software, product, and regions came together to make the hard tradeoffs, choose one future, and commit to it collectively.
Instead, decisions were layered. Compromises accumulated. Parallel paths were allowed to persist. Execution followed org structure.
The Cost of Avoiding Commitment
Because the strategy was never co-created and owned together, coordination never followed.
Teams weren’t aligned on a single roadmap.
Dependencies multiplied.
Progress slowed.
Warnings about Symbian’s limitations existed early, but they competed with other priorities rather than triggering decisive action.
By the time the CEO issued the “burning platform” memo in 2011—an explicit acknowledgment that Nokia was falling behind—the window to respond had already closed.
How the Six Cs Would Have Helped
In my book, The Strategy Trap, I introduce a system called the Six Cs—the execution conditions teams need to turn insight into results.
Nokia’s decline wasn’t inevitable.
But two Cs in particular could have helped a lot.
Co-creation
Co-creation is about building strategy with the leaders and teams who must carry it out.
True Co-creation would have forced leaders to confront the tradeoffs openly:
Which platform wins, and which ones are shut down?
What near-term pain are we willing to accept for long-term relevance?
What will we stop doing so this can succeed?
Without that work, alignment remained optional.
Coordination
Coordination turns shared commitment into shared action.
Teams optimized locally instead of moving forward together.
Strong Coordination mechanisms—shared roadmaps, enforced priorities, and common checkpoints—could have turned Nokia’s technical strength into speed.
Instead, fragmentation slowed everything down.
The Lesson
Strategy fails when leaders avoid the hard work of choosing together.
If you don’t co-create the strategy, you can’t coordinate the execution.
Ask yourself:
Have we truly committed to one path, or are we letting parallel strategies quietly cancel each other out?
Master the Six Cs
These stories are the warning signs.
The solution is the system.
You can learn how to apply Co-creation, Capacity, Clarity, Communication, Coordination, and Coaching in my upcoming book, The Strategy Trap.
Pre-order from your preferred bookstore at TheStrategyTrap.com.
Next up: Failure #3 — six people. That’s how many enrolled on day one of this massive launch.
