In a brutally honest memo, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop addressed his company and employees with what might be a corporation’s version of hitting the collision alarm and cramming the tiller hard to port. In sailing school, students are often reminded of the phrase, “tiller towards trouble,” because of a particular nautical fact that the boat turns in the opposite direction of the rudder—in order to safely navigate a close, dangerous obstacle, the captain had best properly judge its position. In his memo, not only does the CEO of Nokia identify the trouble they’re sailing right into—but he builds a beautiful narrative about momentum and the unknown.

For those of you who like a good story, The Register UK has both posted commentary on the memo, and the essential narrative section of the memo itself:

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform”, and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times – his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

The reason that I used the ship metaphor myself is because industries can’t actually stand still—even on burning platforms—they inexorably barrel forward, gathering momentum towards doom or safety. But from what we’ve seen, Elop’s “burning platform” metaphor can also be seen as a sort of double-entendre.

Nokia have been watching as platforms like Android and iOS have been gaining popularity while their own have been losing ground. The OS and hardware that they build their very handsets on seem to be betraying them and originally they’d been pouring money into them, hoping that the extra steam—and handset sales—would deliver them into clear waters. We’ve seen them make some powerful decisions with regards to marketing and markets last year, but over the last two months it’s become obvious that they need a change of course if not just attitude.

A lot of speculation have been flying about what Nokia might do with their current conflagration of a platform—MeeGo—and everyone has been heaping on the speculation that they might go with Microsoft and Windows Phone 7. We at SiliconANGLE certainly have not been quiet on this subject: “Nokia Might go With Windows Phone 7”, “Nokia: ‘To buy or not to buy’ makes for an interesting question”, “Nokia and Microsoft, Together They Could Dial it Up to Eleven”. Although, that would just be an industry shifting choice if it is the unknown waters they’re sailing into.

In the memo, Elop pressures his employees and company to stop worrying about technology platforms, OSes, and architectures themselves and get back to doing what they do best: dominating the field in innovation and design. “We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough,” he writes, right before he scathes appropriately about how slow-to-market MeeGo has been.

They’ve been spending way too much time building foundations while the rest of the industry has been taking risks and using technology in new and amazing ways.

To mix metaphors: Nokia seems to have been asleep at the helm; a plunge into cold water might just be the wakeup call they need to change course and get back on their game.

Customers flock to the new and remarkable and Nokia originally built their empire while standing on the bleeding-edge. The memo makes a lot of play on the concept of striking out into the unknown—rather than directly into what they know will sink them.