Nokia in dire straits - new CEO

On February 9, 2011, the most brutally honest memo in corporate history leaked. Addressed to Nokia's staff by Stephen Elop -- the former Microsoft executive who had become Nokia's first non-Finnish CEO the previous September -- it began with a story about a man on a burning oil platform in the North Sea who had to choose between the flames and the freezing water below. Then came the line that would define an era:

"We too, are standing on a 'burning platform,' and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour."

Elop's diagnosis was unsparing. Apple, he wrote, had "disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone" -- and while competitors poured gasoline on Nokia's platform with their own innovations, "we poured gasoline on our own burning platform" with an aging Symbian system that was "proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop." His starkest sentence: "The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience."

The numbers told the same story. In 2008, Apple's market capitalization had crossed Nokia's; by 2010, the gap had widened further. The company that had once owned the mobile phone was being dismantled by two ecosystems -- Apple's closed one and Google's Android -- that Nokia had no answer for.

The memo was not an obituary; it was a call to action, and Elop confirmed its authenticity. Two days later, on February 11, Nokia announced the decision the memo had been preparing the company for: a strategic partnership with Microsoft to build smartphones on Windows Phone, abandoning Symbian as the flagship platform.

History's verdict on the Microsoft bet is its own long story. But the burning platform memo endures as something rarer -- a CEO telling his own company, in writing, exactly how much trouble it was in, and daring it to jump.