Nokia's radical CEO has a mercenary, checkered past

Some interesting perspective on Nokia's radical new CEO Stephen Elop from 2008, when he left his job of one year running Juniper Networks to work at Microsoft. The article paints a damning picture of a mercenary short-timer who costs his employer huge wads of cash in expenses, cash and bonuses, without delivering, and who leaves the day after he vests:

Stephen Elop is making news by giving up his job as chief operating officer job at
Juniper Networks after one year to take over as the top executive of Microsoft's business software division.

The move will actually cut down Elop's commute to work. He lives in Canada…

That's right, Elop was commuting from Canada to Silicon Valley these past two years, and doing it on his employer's dime. First at Adobe Systems, which bought his previous employer Macromedia in late 2005. Adobe paid out $145,149 to cover Elop's commuting from Canada in 2006.

After he had been working at Adobe for about six months, Elop told the company in June 2006 he'd be leaving, setting his departure date as Dec.5, one year to the day since he had been hired. For his year of service, Elop was paid a $500,000 salary and $315,000 bonus. Oh, and got a $1.88 million severance payment, on top of that. And all of his restricted shares vested when he left, despite the original performance strings that had been attached to them.

Microsoft beware: Stephen Elop is a flight risk

(via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: Stephen Elop talking Android, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from gsi-r's photostream)