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miércoles, 15 de octubre de 2014

La caída de Nokia en el mercado de los celulares por decidiones equivocadas de su CEO y su consejo directivo

Ejemplo del poder de la tecnocestructura que señala Galbraith

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nokia-lessons-for-apple-and-google-by-pekka-nyk-nen-and-merina-salminen-2014-10



 4

Who Killed the Nokia Phone?


HELSINKI – It seems to be a law in the technology industry that leading companies eventually lose their positions – often quickly and brutally. Mobile-phone champion Nokia, one of Europe’s biggest technology success stories, was no exception, losing its market share in the space of just a few years. Can the industry’s new champions, Apple and Google – not to mention titans in other tech sectors – avoid Nokia’s fate?
In 2007, Nokia accounted for more than 40% of mobile-phone sales worldwide. But consumers’ preferences were already shifting toward touch-screen smartphones. With the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in the middle of that year, Nokia’s market share shrunk rapidly and revenue plummeted. By the end of 2013, Nokia had sold its phone business to Microsoft.
What sealed Nokia’s fate was a series of decisions made by Stephen Elop in his position as CEO, which he assumed in October 2010. Each day that Elop spent at Nokia’s helm, the company’s market value declined by €18 million ($23 million) – making him, by the numbers, one of the worst CEOs in history.
Elop’s biggest mistake was choosing Microsoft’s Windows Phone as the only platform for Nokia’s smartphones. In his “burning platform” memo, Elop compared Nokia to a man on a burning offshore oilrig, facing a fiery death or an uncertain leap into the frigid sea. He was right that business as usual meant certain death for Nokia; he was wrong to choose Microsoft as the company’s life raft.
But Elop was not the only person at fault. Nokia’s board resisted change, making it impossible for the company to adapt to rapid shifts in the industry. Most notably, Jorma Ollila, who had led Nokia’s transition from an industrial conglomerate to a technology giant, was too enamored with the company’s previous success to recognize the change that was needed to sustain its competitiveness.
The company also embarked on a desperate cost-cutting program, which included the elimination of thousands of jobs. This contributed to the deterioration of the company’s once-spirited culture, which had motivated employees to take risks and make miracles. Good leaders left the company, taking Nokia’s sense of vision and direction with them. Not surprising, much of Nokia’s most valuable design and programming talent left as well.
But the largest impediment to Nokia’s ability to create the kind of intuitive, user-friendly smartphone experiences that iPhones and Android devices offered was its refusal to move beyond the solutions that had driven its past success. For example, Nokia initially claimed that it could not use the Android operating system without including Google applications on its phones. But, just before its takeover by Microsoft, Nokia actually built a line of Android-based phones called Nokia X, which did not include Google apps, but instead used Nokia maps and Microsoft search.
Why didn’t Nokia choose Android earlier? The short answer is money. Microsoft promised to pay billions of dollars for Nokia to use Windows Phone exclusively. Given that Google gives away its Android software, it could not match this offer. But Microsoft’s money could not save Nokia; it is not possible to build an industrial ecosystem with money alone.
Elop’s previous experience at Microsoft was undoubtedly also a factor. After all, in difficult situations, people often turn to what is familiar. In Elop’s case, the familiar just happened to be another sinking company. After hearing that Nokia had chosen Windows, Google director Vic Gundotra tweeted: “Two turkeys do not make an eagle.”
Apple and Google should not rest easy. Like Nokia in the mobile-phone industry – not to mention Microsoft and IBM in the computing industry – one day they will lose their leading position. But there are steps they can take to prolong their success.
First, companies must continue to innovate, in order to improve the chances that disruptive technologies emerge from within. If market leaders implement a system for discovering and nurturing new ideas – and create a culture in which employees are not afraid to make mistakes – they can remain on their industry’s cutting edge.
Second, major firms should keep track of emerging innovators. Instead of forming partnerships with smaller companies that suit their current business model, major firms should work with inventive startups with disruptive potential.
Finally, though successful companies must constantly innovate, they should not be afraid to imitate. If Nokia had immediately begun to develop products modeled after the iPhone, while addressing related patent issues effectively, the mobile-device business would look very different today.
Nokia’s experience also carries an important lesson for regulators, particularly in the European Union. Attempting to quell disruptive technologies and protect existing companies through, for example, antitrust crusades, is not an option. Indeed, that approach would ultimately hurt the consumer, both by impeding technological progress and eliminating price competition – like that from Samsung’s Android devices, which forced Apple to lower iPhone prices.
Herein lies the most important lesson in Nokia’s fall. Technology companies cannot achieve success simply by pleasing their board of directors or even striking multi-million-dollar deals with partners. Whichever company makes the consumer happy – whether a well-established multinational or a dynamic startup – will win. Companies that lose sight of that are doomed.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nokia-lessons-for-apple-and-google-by-pekka-nyk-nen-and-merina-salminen-2014-10#1lpLOsff44q0HiOB.99




 4

¿Quién mató al Nokia Phone?


HELSINKI - Parece ser una ley en la industria de la tecnología que las empresas líderes con el tiempo pierden sus posiciones - a menudo de forma rápida y brutalmente. Mobile-phone campeón de Nokia, una de las mayores historias de éxito la tecnología de Europa, no fue la excepción, perdiendo su cuota de mercado en el espacio de unos pocos años. ¿Pueden los nuevos campeones de la industria, Apple y Google - por no hablar de titanes en otros sectores de alta tecnología - evitar el destino de Nokia?
En 2007, Nokia representó más del 40% de las ventas de teléfonos móviles en todo el mundo. Pero las preferencias de los consumidores ya estaban cambiando hacia los teléfonos inteligentes con pantalla táctil. Con la introducción del iPhone de Apple a mediados de ese año, la cuota de mercado de Nokia se contrajo rápidamente y los ingresos se desplomaron. A finales de 2013, Nokia vendió su negocio de telefonía de Microsoft.
Lo que selló el destino de Nokia fue una serie de decisiones tomadas por Stephen Elop en su cargo de consejero delegado, que asumió en octubre de 2010 Cada día que Elop pasó en el timón de Nokia, el valor de mercado de la compañía se redujo en 18 millones de € ($ 23 millones) - haciendo él, por los números, uno de los peores CEOs de la historia.
El mayor error de Elop fue elegir de Microsoft Windows Phone como el único plataforma para smartphones de Nokia. En su nota "plataforma en llamas" , Elop compara Nokia a un hombre en una plataforma petrolífera en alta mar en llamas, frente a una muerte ardiente o un salto incierto en el mar helado. Estaba en lo cierto que el negocio como de costumbre significaba una muerte segura para Nokia; se equivocó al elegir a Microsoft como la empresa balsa salvavidas.
Pero Elop no era la única persona culpable. La junta directiva de Nokia resistió el cambio, por lo que es imposible para la empresa para adaptarse a los rápidos cambios en la industria. Más notablemente, Jorma Ollila, quien había liderado la transición de Nokia desde un conglomerado industrial a un gigante de la tecnología, era demasiado enamorado de éxito anterior de la empresa a reconocer el cambio que se necesitaba para mantener su competitividad.
La compañía también se embarcó en un programa de reducción de costos desesperada, que incluía la eliminación de miles de puestos de trabajo. Esto contribuyó al deterioro de la cultura una vez de espíritu de la compañía, que tenía empleados motivados a tomar riesgos y hacer milagros. Los buenos líderes dejaron la compañía, tomando el sentido de Nokia de la visión y la dirección con ellos. No es de extrañar, gran parte de diseño y programación más valioso talento de Nokia izquierda también.
Pero el mayor impedimento a la capacidad de Nokia para crear el tipo de experiencias de teléfonos inteligentes intuitivas fáciles de usar que los iPhones y dispositivos Android ofreció fue su negativa a ir más allá de las soluciones que habían impulsado su éxito en el pasado. Por ejemplo, Nokia inicialmente alegó que no podía utilizar el sistema operativo Android, sin incluir las aplicaciones de Google en sus teléfonos. Pero, justo antes de su adquisición por parte de Microsoft, Nokia realmente construyó una línea de teléfonos basados ​​en Android llamado Nokia X, que no incluyen aplicaciones de Google, pero en su lugar se utilizan mapas de Nokia y Microsoft en esta categoría.
¿Por qué no elegir Nokia Android antes? La respuesta corta es dinero. Microsoft se comprometió a pagar miles de millones de dólares por Nokia para utilizar Windows Phone en exclusiva. Teniendo en cuenta que Google regala su software Android, que no pudo igualar esta oferta. Pero el dinero de Microsoft no pudo salvar a Nokia; no es posible construir un ecosistema industrial con dinero por sí solo.
La experiencia previa de Elop en Microsoft fue, sin duda, también es un factor. Después de todo, en situaciones difíciles, las personas a menudo recurren a lo que es familiar. En el caso de Elop, el familiar ocurrió que otra empresa que se hunde. Después de escuchar que Nokia había elegido de Windows, director Google Vic Gundotra tuiteó: "Dos pavos no hacen un águila."
Apple y Google no deberían estar tranquilo. Al igual que Nokia en la industria de telefonía móvil - por no hablar de Microsoft e IBM en la industria de la computación - un día van a perder su posición de liderazgo. Pero hay medidas que pueden tomar para prolongar su éxito.
En primer lugar, las empresas deben seguir innovando, con el fin de mejorar las posibilidades de que las tecnologías disruptivas surgen desde dentro. Si los líderes del mercado de implementar un sistema para descubrir y cultivar nuevas ideas - y crear una cultura en la que los empleados no tienen miedo de cometer errores - que pueden permanecer en vanguardia de su industria.
En segundo lugar, las principales empresas deben llevar un registro de los innovadores emergentes. En vez de formar alianzas con las empresas más pequeñas que se adapten a su modelo de negocio actual, las principales empresas deben trabajar con startups invención con potencial disruptivo.
Por último, aunque las empresas de éxito deben innovar constantemente, no deben tener miedo de imitar . Si Nokia había comenzado de inmediato a desarrollar productos modelados después de que el iPhone, al abordar las cuestiones de patentes relacionadas con eficacia, el negocio de dispositivos móviles sería muy diferente hoy en día.
La experiencia de Nokia también tiene una lección importante para los reguladores, sobre todo en la Unión Europea. El intento de sofocar las tecnologías de punta y de proteger a las empresas existentes a través, por ejemplo, las cruzadas antimonopolio, no es una opción. De hecho, este enfoque sería en última instancia, perjudicar al consumidor, tanto impidiendo el progreso tecnológico y la eliminación de la competencia de precios - como el de los dispositivos Android de Samsung, lo que obligó a Apple a bajar los precios del iPhone.
En esto radica la lección más importante en la caída de Nokia. Las empresas de tecnología no pueden lograr el éxito simplemente por complacer a su consejo de administración o incluso golpear ofertas de varios millones de dólares con los socios. Cualquiera que sea la empresa hace que el consumidor feliz - ya sea una multinacional de reconocido prestigio o un arranque dinámico - va a ganar. Las empresas que pierden de vista que están condenados.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nokia-lessons-for-apple-and-google-by-pekka-nyk-nen-and-merina-salminen-2014-10#1lpLOsff44q0HiOB.99
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Jean Tirole, la conducta estratégica de los agentes económicos y el Premio Nobel de Economía 2014

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/10/strategy-lessons-from-jean-tirole/


20141014

Strategy Lessons From Jean Tirole

by Justin Fox  |   11:00 AM October 15, 2014
Why did Jean Tirole win this year’s economics Nobel?
Here’s one key reason: “Jean has a bit of magical quality of being able to take very complex situations where there are a lot of different moving parts and a lot of institutional details and structuring the essence of it in a relatively simple model,” says Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, who has co-authored several recent papers with Tirole. “Obviously models have to simplify reality, but one of the real skills is essentially being able — it’s an art, not a science — to say, ‘What are the key levers here? What are the aspects that distill the situation down to its very essence?’”
In other words, Tirole does what modern academic economists do, only better than almost anyone else. He is the eighth most-influential economist on the planet among his peers, according to the weighted RePEc citations ranking, and three of those above him on the list already have Nobels. Unlike Paul Krugman, another MIT PhD of Tirole’s generation with similar renown as a model builder who has gone on to a second career as a highly visible and controversial public intellectual, Tirole has mainly just kept on building those models — and at a seemingly youthful 61 will presumably just keep building them unless the prize curse gets to him.
The models Tirole builds are mathematical in nature, and start with individuals or firms that are assumed to be rational creatures out to maximize their utility, their profits, or something else along those lines. He then usually brings in the tools of game theory, in which his protagonists have to contend with other rational actors and the moves they might make.
In the “Scientific Background” essay on Tirole’s work provided by the Nobel committee, the focus is on Tirole’s work on industry structure, which has had a big impact on antitrust and other regulation, especially in Europe. The basic story is that early antitrust and regulatory ideas that didn’t have much basis in economic theory were brushed aside in the 1970s and 1980s by the University of Chicago-based “law and economics” movement, which basically taught that competition conquers all, even in pretty concentrated industries. Then a new generation of economists, with Tirole at the lead, showed that a rigorous, orthodox economic approach, if you threw in a little game theory andinformation asymmetry, actually delivered much more complicated results. Sometimes business regulation improved social welfare, sometimes it didn’t, usually the key was exactly how the regulation was structured.
The implications of this for, say, broadband Internet regulation have been discussed at lengthelsewhere, so I’ll leave it there. But Tirole’s 1980s work on industrial organization also found its way into thinking about business strategy. The academic study of strategy took a big leap forward in the 1970s when Michael Porter of HBS looked at earlier economic research on industry structure and noticed that market power — which economists wanted to minimize — was the same thing as sustained profitability, which corporate executives wanted to maximize. Porter then used the tools of microeconomics to craft advice for executives on how to get and hold on to that power.
In the early 1980s, the game theory approach to studying industries promised to be the next big wave in strategy. A series of papers (sample title: “The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look”) by Tirole and game theorist Drew Fudenberg, who is now at Harvard, seemed to promise firm answers to timeless business questions like, “Should we enter this industry?” “Should we lower our prices?” “Should we increase production?”
“When I was just starting at HBS [as a professor] in 1983, Fudenberg and Tirole were kind of the reigning duo of young theorists,” says Pankaj Ghemawat, who now teaches at NYU’s Stern School and the IESE Business School in Barcelona. “Every single working paper of theirs was eagerly awaited.” For Ghemawat, what followed was a bit of disappointment. Game-theoretic models of industry did indeed often offer wonderfully explicit advice. But it turned out that slight changes in the initial conditions in a model might deliver wildly different advice. And so since the 1980s, he says, “the interest has shifted more to empirical work out of concerns that you can rationalize just about any kind of behavior with a game theoretic model.”
Still, that work has continued to be informed by Tirole. His 1988 book The Theory of Industrial Organization became the standard graduate textbook on the topic. “Many of us who have wound up teaching strategy and doing research in strategy grew up learning game theory from Tirole’s textbook,” says Jan Rivkin, the chair of the strategy unit at HBS. “Game theoretic thinking certainly influenced the strategy field, and Tirole was as influential as anyone in that shift.”
As an example, Rivkin cites the notion of commitment, which Ghemawat wrote a book on. “Game theory models, including some of Tirole’s models, show that a firm can sometimes advance its interests in odd ways,” Rivkin says. “For example, a firm can change its own payoffs and make it attractive to respond aggressively to a rival’s move. If the rival understands those payoffs, the rival might forego the move. Many of us teach such ideas — that one firm’s commitments can change another firm’s actions — in our classes today.”
More recently, Tirole put himself back on the strategy professors’ radar with a 2002 paper, co-authored with Jean-Charles Rochet, now of the University of Zürich, that examined the dynamics of competition in “two-sided markets” that “are characterized by the presence of two distinct sides whose ultimate benefit stems from interacting through a common platform.” This describes lots of modern digital enterprises — think Google and Airbnb — as well as most traditional media companies, and has been discussed a lot already in this week’s coverage. But the significance of the paper seems less in that offers any definitive answers to how to think about the phenomenon than that it kicked off what is a now a rich (if still not exactly conclusive) literature on what are now also called multi-sided platforms. “I don’t know how profound you can say the influence will be,” says Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, “but it was at a time where he was a pioneer racing to the fore in terms of thinking about strategy in those sorts of markets.”
Gans thinks Tirole’s most remarkable accomplishment might be his graduate-level textbooks. The Theory of Industrial Organization was just the first. Together with Fudenberg, Tirole wrote Game Theory in 1991. In 1993 it was A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation with Jean-Jacques Laffont, the late founder of the Industrial Economy Institute at the University of Toulouse, where Tirole has taught for almost two decades. Then, in 2006, came The Theory of Corporate Finance — not a field Tirole had really been known for. “That appeared out of nowhere,” says Gans. “Corporate finance? Since when? Sheesh, when did he do it?”
Gans wrote right after the Nobel announcement that he has “a whole shelf … and not a decorative shelf” of such books by Tirole and has relied on them throughout his career. “There’s very few people who can really absorb more than one of these. They think Jean Tirole is the IO guy or the corporate finance guy or the game theory guy.”
The aim here clearly hasn’t been making money — for that you need to write introductory textbooks for undergraduates. It’s to teach and to influence Tirole’s fellow economists, both in the academy and in government, mainly in the direction of carefully formalizing their analyses and arguments in mathematical terms. This is of course the direction economics has been headed in for more than half a century — Tirole certainly didn’t start it, and he’s been more careful and less ideological about it than many of his peers. But there is ideological content to the very methods that economists use, which Tirole acknowledges with dry humor near the beginning of his corporate finance textbook.
“Many politicians, managers, consultants, and academics object to the economists’ narrow view of corporate governance as being preoccupied solely with investor returns,” he writes. Then, after promising to revisit that debate a few pages later, he adds, “we should indicate right away that the content of this book reflects the agenda of the narrow and orthodox view.”
In recent years Tirole has taken some steps beyond the narrow and the orthodox, although always with his mathematical-economic toolbox in hand. A 2003 paper with Princeton economist Roland Bénabou starts out by agreeing with psychologists’ and sociologists’ long-standing critique that the use of economic incentives (paying your kid to do homework, for example) often backfires. But Bénabou and Tirole then go on to try to explain that backfiring in purely economic terms. Those are the tools Tirole knows how to wield so brilliantly, after all.

More on: Economy, Government, Strategy
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Justin Fox is Executive Editor, New York, of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of The Myth of the Rational Market. Follow him on Twitter @foxjust.
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