Reinvention and Nokia

When you hear the name Nokia you might think of phones that were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s (the key word being were). Maybe the famous Nokia ringtone comes to mind.

What you probably don’t think of is a paper mill. But that’s exactly how Nokia got its start, as a paper mill. From the Nokia corporate website about us page:

“From its humble beginning in 1865 as a single paper mill operation, Nokia has found and nurtured success over the years in a range of industrial sectors including cable, paper products, rubber boots, tires, televisions, and mobile phones.”

If you only know Nokia for their phones you might assume they’ve gone out of business. But Nokia has been adapting and reinventing itself for nearly 160 years. In the context of 160 years, the period of Nokia’s rise and fall in cellphone dominance is a blip on the radar.

Today Nokia still makes consumer products, but also offers networking solutions and plays a major role in making 5G networks possible. Additionally, Nokia derives significant revenue from licensing its vast patent portfolio to various industries including smartphone and automobile manufacturers. In 2022 Nokia had sales of approximately 25 billion Euros. A few select highlights about Nokia:

• Developed the video encoding technology that set the stage for internet video streaming

• Currently working with NASA to put LTE on the moon

• Vast patent portfolio deemed essential to 5G networks

• Internet of Things

• Continues to spend billions on R&D every year.

If you ever feel that you cannot reinvent yourself, think of Nokia. Nokia is the nearly 160-year-old company that went from a paper mill to a telecommunications/technology company whose inventions are the foundation for much of the 21st-century digital age.

Broad competency

In business, the potential problem with focusing on too narrow a niche is that technology and the world we live in today move so fast that your niche can become irrelevant so quickly. While it is important to focus on one's core tasks and goals, we also need to be aware of the opportunities and trends in the surrounding environment, in order to make the best decisions and adapt to changes. It’s our metaphorical peripheral vision that can help us identify new market trends, changes in customer needs, or even new technologies that can help our business grow and succeed.

While chasing every new idea can be counterproductive, it seems that training our peripherals is now more important than ever.

The human eye and the meaning of focus

You’ve likely heard of the importance of ‘finding a business niche’. Broadly speaking, finding and focusing on a business niche can have its benefits. But how do you decide what constitutes a niche? Further, how do you define focus itself?

There’s an interesting parallel between these questions and how human vision works.

The area our eyes are able to see in sharp, full definition at any given moment is actually quite small compared to our total field of vision, including our peripheral vision.

The human eye has a small area on the retina called the fovea centralis that is responsible for our sharp, detailed vision. Interestingly, the fovea centralis is responsible for only about 1-2% of our total visual field, meaning that a mere 1-2% of our vision is in full definition. The rest (98-99%) of what we see at any given moment is made up of our peripheral vision. The 1-2% of high-definition vision is roughly the size of 3-6 words in a book or the size of your thumbnail with your arm fully extended.

To test this, try looking at the first word in a sentence without allowing your eyes to move across the page. How many words can you recognize without letting your eyes move at all?

So, if only 1-2% of our visual field is in high definition, why don't we perceive the world around us as blurry and out of focus? It's because our eyes are rapidly and continuously scanning our environment, stitching together a high-resolution picture of the world.

This creates an interesting implication for what it means to focus on something. If we were to truly focus our eyes in one place while reading a book, we’d miss everything.

In reality, focus requires a great deal of rapid and constant changes. It's limiting those rapid and continuous changes to a specific area of value that's the real trick. It's about successfully defining the edges of the page, the start and finish of the book, or the size of the domain in which you will direct your points of focus.