Strategic Implementation - Nokia Corporation

Introduction

In today’s competitive corporate scenario, effective strategic management is essential for organizations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and long-term business growth and prosperity. Strategic management is an integral procedure that enables organizations to effectively formulate, implement and evaluate the cross-functional processes and decisions that are integral in achieving the goals and objectives of the company. Strategic implementation is the core aspect of strategic management since this procedure determines the effectiveness of the organizational strategy in achieving the business vision (Kabeyi, 2019). This managerial procedure requires the employees and the managers to take a series of complex decisions that can enable the organization to effectively implement it’s strategic plans. 

However, many organizations fail to undergo this process efficiently due to lack of focus on fluctuating macro and micro-environmental conditions leading to poor strategic fit, political interferences and constrained resources and capabilities. Furthermore, inadequate corporate leadership, faulty organizational culture and rigid strategic competitiveness within the organization may also trigger an ineffective implementation of the strategic plan. This predicament may lead to devastating consequences for the organization since this would lead to reduced employee morale and job satisfaction, increased employee cynicism, reduced work productivity and lower profitability. Hence, it is integral to efficiently implement the strategic plan in order to achieve the long-term goals and objectives of the organization (Stanley & Muriuki, 2015).

 This report essentially discusses the significance of strategic implementation in Nokia Corporation. The text also highlights the limitations and benefits of implementing the managerial strategy and offers recommendations to enhance the organization’s strategic implementation framework

Strategic Implementation – Nokia Corporation

Strategic implementation is a core element of strategic management which enables the company to achieve competitiveness and prosperity in the long-run. In order to effectively implement the strategic plan, the organization should regulate it’s planning and communication frameworks in accordance with the industry and business environment, thereby making the plan strategically fit to the organization’s goals and objectives. Furthermore, the company should also determine and focus on it’s critical success factors in order to effectively implement it’s strategic plan. Those organizations who fail to follow these procedures tend to face multiple hurdles which would mitigate the productivity and the profitability of the company (Mišanková & Kočišová, 2014). Nokia Corporation is an example of an organization that faced potential strategic implementation issues in the past few years, which led to the company losing profitability and potential market share. 

Issues in strategic Implementation 

Nokia Corporation, a successful Finnish Multinational Company lost it’s international competitiveness and dominant market share in the smart phone industry due to the poor strategic management framework of the organization. The company failed to formulate and implement a strategic plan that could secure the company from strong competitors like Apple and Google. On the other hand, Nokia’s competitors entered the market with a dynamic and sustainable competitive strategy which supported innovation and differentiation, which thereby enabled them to dominate the corporate landscape and cover majority of Nokia’s smartphone share. The organization’s poor performance can be attributed to it’s failure to align it’s organizational strategy with the external business environment, thereby leading to the formulation and implementation of an unsustainable competitive strategy. This step devastated the company’s fate and enabled the organization to bear enormous losses (Lamberg, Lubinaitė, Ojala & Tikkanen, 2019). 

The strategic implementation of Nokia’s decisions was majorly jeopardized due to the company’s incongruent organizational design and structure. The company’s agile managerial philosophy materialized the structural changes within the organization and allowed incompatible development projects and technological spaces to compete for resources (Lamberg, Lubinaitė, Ojala & Tikkanen, 2019). The organization had to meet rapidly growing demands of product development programs without technical software architecture and project managerial skills. This lead to constrained resources and capabilities within the organization and deprived the company of the market leadership. This also dented employee morale, thereby increasing employee turnover and toughening the strategic implementation procedure. Moreover, the Nokia Corporation adapted a low-cost strategy which deteriorated the firm’s differentiation efforts, thereby lowering sales and reducing the organization’s profitability. The company failed to formulate a successful corporate strategy due to the inadequate managerial systems and structure.