to emerging countries, mobile devices were being commoditized, handset prices

were declining, networks were combining (Nokia had just merged its own networks

infrastructure business with that of Siemens, forming Nokia Siemens Networks,

or NSN), Microsoft and Apple were making moves toward mobile devices, new

technologies were being developed, and new strategic opportunities were arising as

mobile phones were becoming the gateway to the Internet.

To win in such a fast-paced and intensely competitive environment, the company had

to move with speed and do a superb job of satisfying consumers. Decision-making

would have to occur at the lowest possible level to reflect the peculiarities of the local

markets while leveraging the power of Nokia’s diverse people, its brand, its financial

resources, and its technology and design expertise. Collaboration between locals and

headquarters and among multiple cultures and partners was paramount.

Nokia conducted extensive interviews with people inside and outside the company,

including partners and suppliers, to understand how Nokia was perceived and how it

might have to change. That research informed a number of actions and renewed the

focus on Nokia’s culture and, in particular, its values.

From Paper Mill to Conglomerate to Global Brand

Nokia, headquartered in Espoo, near Helsinki, Finland, is the world’s largest mobile

handset manufacturer. It holds some 40 percent of the global device market as of

the second quarter of 2008. It operates in 150 countries and had more than 117,000

employees, including NSN, as of late June 2008. It is the top-rated brand globally.

Annual revenues for 2007 were $74.6 billion (51.1 billion euros).

The company began in the late 1800s as a paper mill, then evolved into a diversified

industrial company and was an early entrant in the mobile era in the 1980s. In the

1990s, CEO Jorma Ollila restructured the conglomerate to focus on mobile phones

and telecommunications, and Nokia became the technology and market leader,

starting first in Europe, then expanding to the United States and dozens of other

developed and emerging economies, including China and India. In the early 2000s,

Nokia was briefly challenged by Motorola and Samsung but was able to maintain and

soon to increase the lead.

In 2006, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK, as he is known at Nokia) became CEO.

Nokia’s strategy at that time was changed to cover both the mobile device market as

well as services and software. In 2007, Nokia announced that it would become more

like an Internet company.

Transforming the Culture for the New Challenges

As Nokia’s leaders pondered what would hold people together and enhance

collaboration and speed across their large global company, they arrived at an

answer—culture, of which values had long been a foundation. Values align people’s

hearts and emotional energy and define how Nokia employees (“Nokians”) do

business with each other and the rest of the world. Because Nokia’s existing values

had been unchanged for more than a decade and research showed there was some

ambivalence about them internally, the executive board, comprised of the CEO and

about a dozen senior leaders, decided it was time to re-examine the values. OPK

selected a team of people to create a process for doing so. The challenge to the team

was to get all the people of Nokia intellectually engaged. In keeping with Nokia’s

culture, the values would have to be the result of “the many” communicating with

“the many.”

Assigning this task was not trivial. It required that senior management be committed

to live with the outcome. The values that emerged from the bottom up would have

to be taken seriously and stick—or the organization would be seriously harmed.

As the team got to work and explored the options, they determined that the best

approach would be to combine high tech and high touch. The high-tech part of the

values-creation process would be through the “Nokia Jam”—using IBM’s Jamming

technology that would allow all Nokians to engage in an online dialogue. The hightouch

part would come through the use of the World Café methodology.

The World Café methodology had sprung up in the mid 1990s to accommodate a

large group of people from diverse disciplines and far-flung locations around the

world who wanted to discuss issues of common interest.2 That group was known as

the Intellectual Capital Partners. To create an informal conversation among so many

people, participants were divided into small groups seated around tables to discuss

a given question. The groups would then repeatedly disperse and individuals would

rotate to other tables, so ideas were disseminated, cross-pollinated and combined. As

the conversations continued, facilitators compiled the ideas that emerged.

The World Café methodology had been used in some small pockets within Nokia

but had never been tried on a companywide scale. The concept was right, but it was

impractical for all 50,000-plus Nokians to directly engage in a dialogue. So the idea

emerged to have a subset of people from across Nokia get together to discuss Nokia

values with a totally clean slate, as if they were recreating Nokia on the planet Mars.

© 2009 Society for Human Resource Management. Geraldine Willigan, MBA 3

A trip to Mars became the metaphor for assembling a cross-section of Nokians to

participate in the World Café format and create the new values.

Nokia’s Trip to Mars

Nokia produced 5,000 elegant, visually exciting invitations that looked like boarding

passes and airline tickets. These were sent in bundles through snail mail to people

at various organizational levels and functional areas, including HR, in each of the

business units. The instruction to the recipients was to find a way to randomly

distribute their bundle to people in their offices and factories whom they would trust

to have a discussion about Nokia’s values and culture. The recipients could also keep

a ticket for themselves.

Each ticket was in a “wallet” that described what Nokia was doing. It stated the

current values and gave instructions for how to proceed, first by going to the Nokia

Way web site to learn more and to register for a café in their local area. Participants

also got two luggage tags, which they were supposed to discuss with their colleagues

beforehand: a green one, which represented the values or ideas Nokia should be sure

to take with it as the company moved forward, and a gray one, for things that could

be left behind.

Nokia held 16 cafés in 60 days around the world. More than 100 employees

representing a cross-section of Nokia attended each one. The day of the café, small

groups discussed a predetermined set of questions. One person served as host and

stayed at the table while everyone else rotated to other tables, eventually returning to

their original spots. People had taken the preparation very seriously and interviewed

their teams ahead of time; some brought stacks of paper with various notes and

ideas.

As the discussions took place, ideas began to emerge and converge. Facilitators

captured them graphically and in written scripts. The outputs from each café were

then uploaded to the Nokia Way web site, and everyone at Nokia had access to it and

was invited to comment. Several thousand more employees were able to participate

in the dialogue through the means of the web site, giving their opinions and making

suggestions and sometimes asking questions they hoped the next café would address.

The sessions were also videotaped and edited into short video blogs that were so

funny and engaging that they logged approximately 30,000 visits. The video blogs,

too, elicited comments from fellow Nokians.

The mix of people attending the cafés was just what Nokia’s executive team had

hoped for: an assortment of people from offices and factories and from every

functional area and organizational level. The café process allowed those diverse

viewpoints to be heard. Engineers said Nokia needed greater tolerance for risk, for

instance, while marketing people wanted more stability. In the process, it broke

down biases and misconceptions and began to build social bonds. “Latin Americans

were not the only people with emotions!” one participant commented. Another

said: “At first it felt like I couldn’t even find a common language with my Mexican

marketing colleagues in Nokia. It was exciting when we found a common language

and vision, and everybody was on board.”

As the cafés took place, four values began to emerge. These were to be presented

to the top 30 leaders at the final global café to be held in Helsinki. But instead of

writing them on a PowerPoint slide, the values were presented in a way that was

experiential. Representatives from each of the Nokia Way cafés were chosen to

attend, and on day one of the Helsinki café, they got together and brainstormed how

to make the values come alive. They recreated some of the skits, songs and visual aids

their local cafés had generated to express the thoughts and feelings that underlay the

values. The representatives from the Finnish cafés built a bird’s nest and a sauna in

the hotel meeting room to represent Nokia’s passion for innovation (the bird’s nest

was for the hatching of ideas, the sauna to represent the fire of passion).

The next day, the group made their presentation to the senior leaders, and after

some discussion, the four values that had came out of the café process were affirmed.

OPK, who, like many Finnish people, was ordinarily quite reserved, was visibly

moved by the intensity and sincerity of the feelings expressed. He felt as though he

could hear the voices of Nokians around the world, and he, too, wholeheartedly

supported the values. He asked that a representative present them to a group of 150

top leaders that was meeting three or four weeks later as part of the annual Strategy

Sharing process.

The group selected Ganeas Dorairaju, a native Malaysian who had been working in

Finland for the past decade, to represent them. He stood in front of the top leaders

and explained the values and the process by which they were created. At the end

of it, the audience gave him a standing ovation. One leader wondered if the values

could be turned into a catchy tune. Soon after, an employee teamed up with her

husband and did just that!

Nokia’s New Values3

Nokia’s new values and the explanation of them are as follows:

nn Achieving Together. Achieving together is more than collaboration and

partnership. As well as trust, it involves sharing, the right mind-set and working in

formal and informal networks.

nn Engaging You. For us, ‘engaging you’ incorporates the customer satisfaction value

and deals with engaging all our stakeholders, including employees, in what Nokia

stands for in the world.

nn Passion for Innovation. Passion for innovation is based on a desire we have to

live our dreams, to find our courage and to make the leap into the future through

innovation in technology, ways of working and through understanding the world

around us.

nn Very Human. Being very human encompasses what we offer customers, how we

do business, how we work together, and the impact of our actions and behavior on

people and the environment. It is about being very human in the world—making

things simple, respecting and caring. In short, our desire is to be a very human

company.

The world café process generated values that are different and more open-ended

than most companies’. As leaders at Nokia note, the values require discussion. People

might not know right away what “very human” means, but once people start to

discuss it within the context of Nokia, it becomes very clear. People do, in fact, have

those discussions. They use them to say, “Hold on a minute, is this engaging you?

Are we meeting that value in what we’re doing?” ‘Very Human’ is closely associated

with technology; it reflects the fact that Nokia has to develop devices that are easy

to use. And ‘Achieving Together’ is about customers and suppliers as well as fellow

Nokia employees. ‘Achieving Together’ also helps remove the fear associated with

being an industry pioneer.

The values are aspirational but also model what was already working well at Nokia.

In India, for instance, where Nokia has built a dominant market position of some

75 million subscribers in a very short time, the values were evident before they had

been articulated, which likely influenced the input of the three cafés conducted

in that country. One of the key factors that drove business success in India was

the distribution system, which Nokia and its business partner, ATL, built from

scratch when large consumer electronics retailers declined to carry mobile phones

because of their low margins. Working together to find an alternative, Nokia and

ATL hit on the idea to mimic the small (sometimes just 5 x 5 feet) kiosks that are

found in villages across India from which vendors sell fruits and vegetables. They

recruited individuals interested in running their own kiosks, trained them and

ensured they would have products in the right quantities and at the right margins

for those vendors to make a living. The Nokia team wanted to be sure that whatever

arrangement they designed would benefit Nokia, ATL and the individual mobile

phone vendors. That way, they would Achieve Together.

The Nokia team in India—a mix of native Indians and technology and other experts

from such far-flung Nokia locations as Finland, China and Indonesia—collaborated

in listening to and observing people in various parts of India to understand their

needs. Their approach was collaborative and Very Human. As a member of the

leadership team in Nokia India explains, “One thing that Nokia prides itself on is

that it is not arrogant. That comes across in every interaction. People never take for

granted that they know everything.” Because of conditions in parts of the country,

Indians needed a mobile device that was dustproof and didn’t slip out of sweaty

hands. They wanted a device that could be an alarm clock, radio and flashlight (or

“torch”) as well as a phone. Nokia’s Passion for Innovation drove the team to find

the technology solutions Indians needed.

Nokia found that the process of creating values itself had merit. It allowed the many

to connect with the many and demonstrated that heterarchy was more important

than hierarchy. It captured Nokia employees’ understanding of the challenges they

were facing personally and organizationally and their desire to create an organization

that could meet them. It also reflected the spirit of bonding across cultures,

functions and silos. As a member of the executive team says, “It is proof that a strong

global corporate culture is possible.”

The next order of business was to track the effectiveness of the values. To that end,

the company has created a number of vehicles. Nokia includes values in its annual

employee survey, “Listening to You,” and made them a key part of the change

pulse survey it undertook during a recent reorganization. The suggestion arose to

have pictures to demonstrate the new values, so the company staged an employee

competition for photos that represent the values. Photos were posted online, and

employees voted for their favorite. The top prize went to a quality manager in one of

Nokia’s Chinese factories, who got to accompany Nokia’s brand people on a photo

shoot in Paris. Given the quality of Nokia’s artistic skills, it was a choice prize. More

than 22,000 employees took part in the competition, and Nokia has a rich bank

of photographs to represent the new values. Nokians now are learning to create

90-second films that tell how values are making a difference in their work. These

films can be uploaded to a video hub where fellow employees can view them. As of

October 2008, more than 60 films had been uploaded to the internal VideoHub,

and they have had over 50,000 viewings.

Questions to Complete:

1. Why did company management choose values as a foundation for taking the

culture to the next level?

2. What is your view about the four values the café approach produced?

3. What’s your evaluation of the social process for engaging thousands of

employees across the globe in defining the values?

4. What does Nokia’s café process say about its senior leaders?