Conspiracy theory?
We know the following:
1. The burning platform memo... no sane CEO who's in it for the long term kneecaps their current platform.
2. The N9 launch to restricted markets... no sane CEO who's in it for the long term kills their new platform.
3. In his breathless rush to dump existing and new OSes and switch to Windows Phone, he soured operator relations by insisting on Skype being bundled too.
4. As his CV shows, Elop's one and only idea before Nokia was engineering buyouts. Thus it happened with Nokia.
So, saying he was all in a fluster to get on board the Windows Phone train whatever the cost and get bought by MS is hardly a conspiracy theory. It's all on the record.
Maybe Nokia had dysfunctional internal bureaucracy, but it's no worse that Microsoft's stack ranking or any large corp I've worked in. In spite of that bureaucracy (which they themselves recognised hindered them and were trying to change) they still got good phones out like the N8, N9, E7, and N808.
Yet when they bet everything on Windows Phone, which neither end users nor operators like, they stopped being successful. What should we blame, the bureaucracy or Elop? If you're still not sure, look at his CV after Nokia.