Restructured the company and optimized its production

restructured the company and optimized its production method leading to considerably reduced prices and
time-to-market, and conjointly redoubled the spectrum of devices made. These new methods made a
positive impact and helped boost Nokia’s sales. When these changes were required to be made by the new
CEO, the changes degraded Nokia and resulted in fatal slowness in Nokia’s moves against the threads in
the smartphone market.
One of the problem that Nokia had was that it became habitual to making organization changes. It had
gone under three major changes in its structure and some major adjustments were made practically every
year. These changes would have not been a problem if there was a good amount of coordination between
the different business units. But because of these changes there was no strong technological leadership
and different business units were driving into different directions.
Beyond 2004, top management was no longer sufficiently technologically savvy or strategically
12

Impact of Leadership on Change: Comparison of Nokia Team-A
and Apple for the Period 2000-2013
integrative to set priorities and resolve conflicts arising in the new matrix. Increased cost reduction
pressures rendered Nokia’s strategy of product differentiation through market segmentation ineffective
and resulted in a proliferation of poorer quality products. Shareholders were shocked about the strategy
shift and Nokia’s share price was steep-dropped by nearly 10% immediately after the February 11th
announcement, and as of March 2013 Nokia’s share price is still far from recovering back to the pre-
strategy-change level.
Analysis of Apple
Leadership Aspects
Apple has always been a leader in the technology market, and this was possible due to the
efforts put in by its founder Steve Jobs. He transformed a total of seven industries by his
leadership in that particular sector, namely personal computing, animated movies, music,
phone, tablet computing, retail stores and digital publishing and thus is regarded as one of the
great innovators of the century. He is known for applying imagination to technology and
business. The highlight of Jobs’ personality was his way of doing business. Steve was known
to be being rough on his employees, but he believed that that is what was getting the work
done. One of the main aspect for Jobs’ leadership was his focus, he always stressed on doing
what really mattered and leaving behind the things that dragged you down. This aspect is also
highlighted in the company itself, Apple dose not focus on a very wide range of product in
each sector but makes the best of the product in each sector. This aspect is the crucial aspect
for getting the work done and getting best results.
Market Aspects
Apple has one of the largest market-share in the technology world and that is due to its
understanding of the consumer requirement. The major advantage that Apple had was its
operating system, the iOS, consumers specifically liked this operating system as it was nearly