The Ghost in the Graph, Pt. 1: How Individual Beliefs Become Organizational Behavior

Posted on 2025-07-30 12 min read

If you haven't read Why Facts Don't Change Minds, consider reading it first. This post builds directly on that foundation, and it's my most well-received post by far.

In 2011, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sent a memo to his employees that would become infamous. "We are standing on a burning platform," he wrote. "We have multiple points of scorching heat that are fueling a blazing fire around us."

Two years later, Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion—a fraction of its peak value of $300 billion. In just five years, the company that had dominated 40% of the global mobile phone market had become irrelevant.

Nokia had everything it needed to succeed in the smartphone era. They had the technology, the manufacturing expertise, the global distribution network, and even early smartphone prototypes. But they struggled to adapt their Symbian platform to the new touchscreen paradigm, while Apple and Google raced ahead with purpose-built smartphone operating systems.

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