Stephen Elop
Born	(1963-12-31) 31 December 1963 (age 48) Ancaster, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	President & CEO, Nokia Corporation

Stephen Elop (born 31 December 1963) is the chief executive officer of Nokia Corporation. Both a Canadian and American citizen, Elop is the first non-Finn to be named CEO of Nokia. He replaced Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in this position on September 21, 2010.^[1][2]

Personal life [link]

Elop was born in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.^[3] In his spare time, he is an avid recreational pilot. He is married to Nancy Elop, with whom he has five children, four girls and a boy, including triplets.^[4]

Education [link]

From 1981, Elop studied computer engineering and management at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, graduating second in his class with a bachelor's degree in 1986. Stephen found time to help lay 22 kilometers of Ethernet cable around campus to create one of the first Internet networks in Canada.^[5][6]

Career [link]

Elop was a director of consulting for Lotus Development Corporation before becoming CIO for Boston Chicken in 1992,^[7][8] which filled for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998.^[9] In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department^[8] and worked at the company for seven years^[10], where he held several senior positions, including CEO from January 2005^[11] for three months before their acquisition by Adobe Systems was announced in April 2005.^[12][4]

He was then president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, tendering his resignation in June 2006 and leaving in December^[13], after which he was the COO of Juniper Networks for exactly one year from January 2007-2008.^[8][14]

Before starting at Nokia, Elop worked for Microsoft from January 2008 to September 2010 as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team. During his time at Microsoft, the Business Division released Office 2010.^[15]

Nokia announced on March 11, 2011 that it had paid Elop a $6 million signing bonus, “compensation for lost income from his prior employer," on top of his $1.4 million annual salary.^[16]

"Burning Platform" and Windows Phone 7 [link]

Shortly after joining Nokia, Elop issued a company internal memo titled “Burning Platform”,^[17] that was immediately leaked to the press. The memo likened the 2010 situation of Nokia in the smartphone market to a person standing on a burning oil platform (in software, "platform" is used to refer to frameworks such as Symbian, Apple iOS and Google Android.)

Technology insiders and journalists have since remarked that the memo was a wake-up call for Nokia (“It is one of the most combustible and gripping documents ever to emerge from a major corporation.” (BBC)^[18] and “With its elegant writing style and brutal honesty, the 1,200-word missive is far removed from the average management pep talk.” (Financial Times)^[19]). The memo has also been referenced as a guide for other business and political leaders such as Cisco’s John Chambers.^[20]

In February 2011, Elop announced a new strategy for Nokia, which included shifting its smartphone operating system from Symbian to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. During the transition, Nokia released two new versions of its Symbian operating system, the Linux MeeGo-based Nokia N9 and five dual SIM feature phones. The first Nokia Windows Phone 7 smartphones shipped in November 2011.

Some technology writers have criticised Elop for the decision to move away from Symbian and MeeGo platforms to Windows Phone 7^[21] and a bad timing of communicating this decision (a.k.a. Osborne effect).^[22]

References [link]

External links [link]

• Stephen Elop on Twitter