Is it just me or is Nortel and CEO Mike Zafirovski getting more than their fair share of media coverage recently? Along with Forbes, the Wall St. Journal and Barron’s, Canadian Business has done a feature story (“Inside the new Nortel”) on how Zafirovski is orchestrating Nortel’s turnaround. From a media perspective, Nortel continues to be a fascinating story because it’s big (30,000 employees, $10-billion of sales), it has a dynamic and high-profile CEO who’s made enough restructuring progress to be comfort talking about it, and its recent history is teeming with an accounting scandal and intrigue. Add all these ingredients together with a more-active effort within Nortel to court the media, and, in theory, you get some nice media coverage.
For the record, I wrote the CB cover story on Nortel in November, before WSJ et al. got on board, and we published it ahead of the Nov. 15 analyst conference. (As to why the Google News trolls only discovered it online recently, well, I dare not try to comprehend the mysteries of my publication’s website.) It is worth noting that I reported it as a management story, not as an investing story, to give readers a glimpse inside a company that many people know for its accounting misdeeds, but have little insight as to just how dysfunctional Nortel has become. Mike Z. and his crew have a lot to clean up, not just in its finances and strategy, but its corporate culture, too. And even that might not be enough. Damn right Nortel is an interesting story.
http://nortel.wordpress.com/ Mark Evans
Andrew,
My apologies for not noting the fact your story appeared a couple months ago before the media bandwagon got rolling.
Zafirovski’s 15 Minutes of Fame
Is it just me or is Nortel and CEO Mike Zafirovski getting more than their fair share of media coverage recently? Along with Forbes, the Wall St. Journal and Barron’s, Canadian Business has done a feature story (“Inside the new Nortel”) on how Zafirovski is orchestrating Nortel’s turnaround. From a media perspective, Nortel continues to be a fascinating story because it’s big (30,000 employees, $10-billion of sales), it has a dynamic and high-profile CEO who’s made enough restructuring progress to be comfort talking about it, and its recent history is teeming with an accounting scandal and intrigue. Add all these ingredients together with a more-active effort within Nortel to court the media, and, in theory, you get some nice media coverage.
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