Red Green

Nortel Is a Billion Dollar Company

It's also easy to forget that Nortel used to be a $6 billion dollar company and even bigger than that for a period of time. With that large size and profitability came an arrogance that the management were all geniuses and deserved their bonuses and praise heaped on them. They just happened to be at the right place at the right time and made some good moves to capitalize on their good fortune. Then they started to make stupid decisions and started to buy all their own corporate psychobabble doubletalk--"thinking outside the box", "paradigm shift", etc. etc. They went on retreats and spent money doing goofy things like role playing exercises in the Pacific Northwest walking ropes and nonsense like that. Many Nortel employees could see the problems coming--why couldn't management? We saw the tremendous overcapacity in fiber optics yet Nortel management kept expanding the operations and making blunder after blunder. Mr. Z is replacing all the people he brought in while the company continues to flounder. Why should any Nortel employee, stockholder or former employee take comfort in the fact that it is still a billion dollar company. Just wait--in a year they won't be a billion dollar company. Then what do you write? I would love to see Nortel come back and be the company it once was. It is possible but it will take someone other than who they have now--and a new board of directors who have two things the present board doesn't have--spines and brains.