Lessons from the pioneer

BE stagnant, refuse to innovate and you’ll see yourself in the dungeon of irrelevance and insignificance.

Remember your first mobile phone? It’s Nokia. Now, where is this phone brand? In recent years, its global market share decreased significantly to nearly zero percent, far from its position a decade ago as it owned more than 50 percent of the global market share of mobile phones in 2007.

It is a shocking data which should be a source of lessons by leaders, not just in business but in all industries in order not to commit the same mistakes the Finnish phone brand did.

“We, Nokia at that time, never really failed, we just kind of just exited, we didn’t innovate, we stop marketing and we kind of just slip away,” HMD Philippines country manager Shannon Mead said in a recent interview with Davao reporters.

This does not only hold true to mobile players, this is for everyone to ponder.

Disruption and change is a scary thing but nothing is more scary than to be stagnant, undeveloped.

Innovation is key to this rapidly changing world.

This year, another lesson is being shown by the same brand – never give up. Committed to up their game in the mobile phone market, Nokia targets to be the top 3 mobile phone player globally in three to five years’ time. This time, Nokia’s direction is to regain the market share it once had in the mobile phone market by introducing an Android-focused strategy for developing smartphones.

According to IDC in its September 2017 report published in its website, the worldwide smartphone market will reach 1.5 billion units shipped this year, up 1.7 percent from the 1.47 billion units shipped in 2016.

“No one really had a negative experience with the brand which is a lot easier to reconnect. But of course we need to prove ourselves that our new portfolio (Android-focused smartphones) is worthy for customers,” Mead said.

Just like in starting a business, running an organization or leading a country, success is always not an easy way. There will be downfall, but it’s never too late to rise above the challenges and keep up in the game.

To innovate and fail fast, these are the lessons that can be learned from the brand that started the mobile era.