Brutally honesty can be a good quality in a CEO. Too often top executives don’t do much more than cheerlead their company and products. It’s hard to get a straight answer. You’ve got to hand it to Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop–at the very least, the guy seems to be a straight-shooter. The company’s first non-Finnish CEO sent out a memo to employees that really didn’t cloud his sentiment about the state of the company.
The letter opens cold with a parable about a guy standing on a burning oil platform. Forced to choose between being consumed by flames and plunging into the icy waters of the Atlantic, the man chooses the latter. Naturally, the guy lived to tell the tale. (No, so far as I can tell, that man wasn’t Stephen Elop–though that would be a pretty good punchline, right?)
“We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.”
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