“There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames or he could plunge 30 metres into the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform”, and he needed to make a choice. He decided to jump.
“The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future.”
• Stephen Elop, president and chief executive of Nokia Corporation in a memo to employees in 2010
The man who wrote that historic memo on assuming the top job at Nokia has just overseen the deal that will see the company’s iconic mobile phone subsidiary sold off to his former employer, Microsoft Corp. for around US$7 billion. He is also returning to Microsoft and is said to be a frontrunner to take over the top job there when CEO Steve Ballmer demits office sometime in the next year.
When I visited Finland in 2000 (yes, I know that this sounds like I am some globetrotting reporter, but I assure you it was a one-off, unfortunately) I was taken to the Nokia HQ just on the outskirts of Helsinki. People were riding their bicycles to work as it was the height of summer, which meant they had about three hours of light every day, or something like that. Just kidding. More like six.
Inside the cavernous lobby, the Nokians walked and talked with the confident air of those who ruled their world. And they did.
In the briefing room, I learned how Nokia, which had started out over a hundred and fifty years before as, I believe, a tyre maker, and over time had expanded into all sorts of industries, had ruthlessly – and controversially – reinvented itself in the not-too distant past into a telecommunications systems company and had developed a line of mobile phones that became the rage of the entire world.
They just put everything into that business and took over the industry, competing mainly with Ericsson of Sweden.
Nokia, it seemed, was invincible. The BBC’s tech reporter David Lee tells in a recent post how it all came crashing down:
“Nokia were by no means the first company to release a commercially available mobile phone, but it was the first to do it really well, and with true mass appeal.
“Back in the 1990s there weren’t these other big brands,” says Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight. Nokia were so dominant . . . . Then all of a sudden, in January 2007, Steve Jobs walked on to a stage and pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and changed the world forever.”
“The fall was swift. According to figures from analyst firm Gartner, Nokia’s smartphone market share in 2007 was a dominant 49.4 per cent. In subsequent years, it was 43.7 per cent, then 41.1 percent, then 34.2 percent. In the first half of this year, it had plummeted to just 3 per cent.”
When Jobs introduced the iPhone, he said Apple hoped to sell ten million in the first year. He was wrong. It sold many more than that and is today still the leader in the market, but whether that will continue, with Samsung having caught the popular imagination and other companies using the Android operating system, is now unfolding.
Nokia now uses the Microsoft Windows operating system, and despite making a great phone, still only has that three percent market share, but some commentators consider that company to be more or less irrelevant in the mobile phone industry.
But perhaps they will find a bigger reward in a market that is expanding so fast it seems unthinkable.
You know me, I could go on forever about all this, but Nokia’s story brings to mind our present situation as a country.
The world that came to an end in 2008 was one in which rich Brits dominated the high-end villa rental market and also purchased expensive homes here, whose prices rivalled those of Manhattan penthouses. The model gave us GDP growth every year, but the downside was felt by people whose dreams of homeownership began to be stymied by ever-rising land and house prices. The bubble had to burst and it did.
Is Barbados on a similar “burning platform” with no option but to jump off into the unknown, hoping to survive first and prosper later?
In many respects, I think the metaphor works to describe our situation.
I also believe we have no shortage of ideas on how to take this leap of faith, but we have been too slow in implementing them. Efforts to fast-track the work of Government agencies or to pull the multiple “interfaces” between these rich potential investors or their lawyers and the public servants who must deal with them into a “one-stop shopping” experience are moving forward way too slowly.
However, we have not yet jumped off the “burning platform” as regards tourism, because on the big question of how to attract major foreign investors we are not yet decided. These include the need for new policies on high-rise buildings, casino gambling, private beaches, easing franchise restrictions, and so on.
Instead of doing all of these things, and at the same time reducing the level of the direct and indirect tax burdens being placed on the people since 2009, Government has doubled down on their policy – increasing taxes on both sides at the same time. It is a recipe for disaster.
So in all of these things I fear we are still standing on that burning platform. Sooner or later we will have to jump off.