Hackney Gets Major Promotion

Yoiks!

Let’s see;

Problem Statement: we need to regain market credibility and compete with very tough world class companies that are eating our lunch.

Solution: Put a manufacturing guy with a temper and self control issues who has no experiance in telecom in charge of our flagship effort.

Brilliant!

Joel has what it takes to succeed at Nortel. He loovvess Mikey Z. He talks a good game. He is an operations guy. He takes no prisoners, particularly when driving his expensive Audi. And he loves Mikey Z.

Oops. A typo. The executive reduction is to 15 from 23.

Jayemmay

I heard Hackney wanted the North America President position vacated by Miami-based Dionne Joannou but agreed to Mike’s wish of moving into Enterprise and exceed Slattery’s contributions therein.

Maybe sunny South Florida is not that far away in Hackney’s future. When it does arrive, at least his road rage antics will blend right in with the rest of the driving public.

Anyone in a Senior position that have been in the organisation more than 10 years is vulnerable

It will all end in tears !!!!

Wow. I’m already on record as stating that I strongly believe Hackney should have been let go after his road rage incident. He’s a bad commercial for Nortel and has clearly demonstrated a lack of fundamental judgement. If a disgruntled employee claims ‘hostile work environment’ it will get serious attention because there is relevant precedent.

But Hackney isn’t fired, he’s promoted into a vital business leadership role – a business he has NO experience with. I don’t get it. There is no easily discernable logic for this appointment so I’m guessing it boils down to MZ being a huge fan of Hackney.

I just can’t see any way this is going to be good for Nortel and I can think of numerous reasons why it’s a bad move. As always, time will tell.

Let’s be clear about a few basic facts here:

There are completely different organizations for Sales & Marketing and Products & Technologies. Hackney is now the President of the Enterprise Products & Technologies team NOT the Sales & Marketing team.

The primary mandate is to bring products to market that customer wants and have the right cost basis to generate earnings. This is a business function, not a sales function. Hackney has done this before while at GE. It is the Sales & Marketing team that talks to customers about the business and technology value of the products and solutions created by Hackney’s team.

Paul Stevens – I’m pretty sure Hackney has the green light to do whatever he wants internally to get results. He’s Mikey Z’s boy. I’ve heard from insiders that there have been many incidents of verbal abuse by Hackney and other GE management during meetings. Its simply the GE way.

I kind of think this was the plan all along but it was only postponed because of Joel’s legal issues. Now that a little time has gone by it was time to finish the plan. Slattery was of the old regime and I was surprised he lasted this long.

Even though I work there at the moment, don’t take this as Nortel can’t do wrong comment. But I think this is exactly what Nortel needs, someone from the outside who is not going to play by the past rules and someone who is going to shake it up. We all know he will do that.

The potential problem is that he might run everyone out and be left trying to backfill so much that it will affect future product releases. Z man better keep an eye on his whipping boy or the Enterprise Business will be over for Nortel if this doesn’t work.

??Why all the nonsense?? – Respectfully, I believe your post is naive. Most strategic sales will require customer engagement. The customer likes to look the business owner in the eye and hear where the investment is going to take them. The same kind of dialog is expected with Industry and Financial analysts. What relevant personal insight will Hackney bring to these discussions? Very little, other than his focus on production efficiency to maximize Nortel margins.

Customers and analysts are going to assess Hackney – and Nortel – in the context of his knowledgable peers at Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, etc, not against his previous roles or Mike Z’s rosy opinion. Buzzwords like ‘hyperconnectivity’ without any back-up substance won’t take him very far.

The common term for this kind of leader is ‘empty suit’. I’ve been harping about too many empty suits at Nortel being responsible for the lack of a visible and credible futures plan for some time. This latest move makes the problem worse, not better, in my opinion.

I still believe its going to be out with the old and in with the new no matter what the cost. I am not sure Slattery was the man to get rid of, but maybe he had his own opinions and that wasnt good enough for Z. Nortel had the good-ol-boy syndrome before, remember the wireline mentality? This is going to be the same system with different good-ol-boys.
Hackney is inexperienced, but under Capt Z’s plan, anyone can move into a President or VP role, just follow the 6 sigma yellow brick road to Oz. Apparantly my diversity training was not the same as Hackneys, cause i am not President if anything. I should go grab the face of one of the illegal immigrants in the cafeteria and see where that gets me!

Does Nortel even abide by any State or Federal labor laws?

How do they get away with the abuse, discrimination, retaliation and plain ol’ slavery they deliver upon their employees?

Paul Stevens

I’m sure you can agree that for years following the bubble burst Nortel and its various divisions were acting independent of each other,this reulted in them as a whole losing their way in the market place.

Transforming a company like Nortel to become a go getter and be successful requires unification on all facets,whether they be Sales &Marketing,product strategy and as team to achieve a better channel partner system.

This is what we have seen with new management,Mike Z was the one who spearheaded the channel and to reinvigorate them,get them closer and better trained and updated with product developement(they are Niortel’s tentacles in the market place) and play a critical role should Nortel be successful.

And as I can recall,the easy as 123 marketing plan was responsible for reinvigorating Nortel’s channel partners,and it is safe to assume this was born out of many Sales &Marketing meetings of which are also rooted in processess- an area that Joel most likely played a key role in.

I don’t think Steve Slattery was knocked off his tower,however there is an unfortunate tendancy in human nature to resist adopting to change especially after you have been there for 20 years and as such have seen alot of changes either fail or fade away without them ever achieving what they were originally meant to do.

Nortel was and is in dire need of a cultural change and sometimes the actual people that are supposed to lead it are the ones who may find themselves most resistant to them.

Hence all the high level executive departures of late.

Does this mean that the necessary changes that Nortel needs are finally taking place,after all prior to all these departures it’s not like Nortel was a standout aggressive go to market innovator keeping up with the trends hat were necessary to stay ahead of the marketplace.

Paul – Core values are lip service at all corporations. A lot of yelling and screaming goes on behind the scenes at every corporation. There is backstabbing, politics and verbally abusive behavior at successful companies like Cisco and Microsoft. It is human nature and survival instinct to fight. Its nice to think we live in a world where people are treated equally w/ dignity and respect at the workplace but it just isn’t the case. Its just nature of the beast. I would be willing bet there are more Joel Hackneys in the corporate world than any of us would care to admit. No company becomes successful by being nice all the time to everyone and that includes their employees.

To Yessah and Disgruntled,
I don’t doubt you saw and experienced unfairness in your Nortel workplace but some departments in Miami are just crusing along with 40 to 48 hrs per week and that includes face time!

Maybe that’s because the old guard like Joannou and Bejar tolerated it while they were there. I guess it’s up to Barrios now on how to balance operational efficiency and employee morale.

Off topic but Yessah Massah what are you talking about? I have been at Nortel for quite some time and been all over the diffrent locations, dealt in people in diffrent departments. I have never heard of anything of what your talking about. Unless there is some dungen under one of the building where you work/ed and you were the only one to escape. Matter a fact I would have to say the oppisite, there isn’t enough managers out there making sure the job is done correctly. Please enlighten me if I am just being clueless.

I would assume that Yessah got laid off and he’s probably also a minority hence why Nortel has to be discriminating! Of course 60K other folks got laid off as well but that doesn’t matter to Yessah… I’ve heard that crap from other folks before and quite frankly I’ve always found it quite revolting.

Nortel is by far the most diverse company I’ve ever worked for in terms of different cultures and having a very large number of minorities. The Dept of Labor would have a hell of a time finding anything wrong with Nortel’s hiring policy.

The “..there isn’t enough managers out there making sure the job is done correctly..” comment by Almost out the door, strikes a chord with me.

Back in the day……BNR designers were autonomous enough to make sure the design was done correctly themselves without much management oversight. What managers did was help resolve roadblocks that were administrative, limited by resource or ambiguous. Design usually was included in talks directly with customer marketing, finance and technical resources as well as standards tracks. Sales did not have to “sell” so much and things worked the first time with very little adjustment. Sure there were problems, but they were solved quickly and cleanly. The BNR organization was a learning organization and had a very clear feedback loop and process for problem post-mortem. Customers had direct visibility of problem reporting and the problem communication cut through background noise directly to designers who were familiar with the code and it’s behaviour. BNR made clear policy decisions to encourage appropriate risk taking and to reward good employees, not “catch” bad ones.

Now I know everyone will tell you its a “brave new world” and “every thing has changed” and all of that nonsense, but I fail to see why the above model would still not make for a better product and organization. (No, this is not six-sigma, but I expect someone will say it is if it looks like it works).

To me, the problem occurred when nortel took over BNR. The game changed. A technical “track” parallel to the “management track” disappeared. Layers of siloed bureaucracy grew up overnight and every acquisition brought a slew of new vice-presidents all with conflicting agendas. Content decreased, delivery time increased, and consistency (both behavioral and branding) became a thing of the past. Design management became a series of ivory tower siloed “know it alls” and the grunt designers, testing and support got stuck working a insecure sweat shop trying to produce and protect revenue to support the bloated SG&A bureaucracy.

Nortel needs to realize that the good staff designers, testers and support are very smart and for the most part have *chosen* to do what they like rather than climbing the ladder of corporate crap. They need to reward this and foster it. There are no such distinctions as “legacy” designers or heritage technologies in a good product. A good designer is thinking well ahead of the market in a specific area and will adjust if things move in a different direction. Asking design managers to know details of every design and technology is removing them their important role as buffers, enablers and the glue (or conduit) for cross organizational/functional communication that strategically flattens the organization.

It is absolutely unbelievable to me that nortel has not realized this and that each successive leadership accomplishes nothing more than to change the stripes on the empty suits in exchange for their bloated salaries.

Econ 101 will teach you that any established business such as nortel is naturally profitable at some level and that cutting will eventually turn a profit. The hard part is growing top line revenue, A task which this leadership team continues to fail miserably at.

The latest boorish blunder being getting rid of the one or two leadership people that were actually turning a profit and replacing them with the likes of JJ.

You need to understand what the cost of outsourcing is to the bottom line. So many designers in other countries and they cant put all the pieces together to make a complete product.
MTX16 deliverables for CDMA are behind because Design dropped the ball, and that is piss poor management. Nothing will happen to her anyway, so you can expect a lot more Design issues down the road. If you dont meet your dates you just change it on the calendar apparantly! You will see more of this as time will tell, more and more missed dates to customers and Nortel will again pay for Design mistakes and Sales dates.
There was an article commending the VSE platform. What a POS that is, and its amazing all the hype around it when it doesnt work worth a crap. It looks good on paper and will eventually work awesomely, but for now its crap.

Camiant Names Telecommunications Industry Veteran Steve Slattery As President and CEO
Former Nortel Networks Executive to Lead Company Aggressively Into Global Broadband Markets

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Camiant, the leading provider of policy control and application assurance technology for service providers worldwide, today announced the appointment of veteran telecommunications executive Steve Slattery to the post of president and chief executive officer of the company. Slattery, who most recently led Nortel Networks’ (NYSE: NT) Enterprise Solutions organization, will utilize his operational and business development expertise to continue Camiant’s momentum in the policy server market for service providers worldwide.

Slattery’s appointment signals an intensifying focus at Camiant to support next-generation broadband Internet protocol (IP) networks, and emerging wireless platforms which demand unparalleled performance in the delivery of multimedia content and applications. The company’s policy management solutions portfolio enables broadband network providers to assure exacting allocations of network resources that support the flawless delivery of a wide array of applications.

“Steve’s appointment underscores Camiant’s commitment to serving top-tier customers around the world, and accelerating the growth of the company as multimedia applications and mobile convergence plays a critical role across market segments,” said Ed Anderson, managing partner of North Bridge Venture Partners, and a member of the Camiant board of directors. “His prominence in the field of mobility, and his demonstrated ability to translate technology innovation into large-scale business, dovetails perfectly with Camiant’s rising profile in the broadband sector. We are thrilled to have an executive of Steve’s caliber lead Camiant into its next growth phase.”

“I am excited to join a company that has been selected by so many tier-one mobile, cable and wireline service providers, and is uniquely positioned to leverage these successes in this strategic technology space,” said Slattery. “A new era of broadband multimedia possibility is dawning, and Camiant is at its center.”

Slattery is a well-known telecommunications executive with a reputation for advancing large, growing businesses that depend on innovative technologies. Most recently, he was president of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business unit, where he established strategic partnerships with Microsoft and changed the trajectory of the division to its current 20% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth. Previously, Slattery served as president of Nortel’s Carrier Packet Networks organization, which encompassed the company’s Ethernet, optical, and wireline voice and data portfolios. He is also widely recognized as the driver of Nortel’s successes in the mobile market, and for establishing Nortel as a key vendor at Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other mobile operators for rollouts of their respective 3G infrastructures.

Slattery holds a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and a MBA from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

Note To Editors: A high-resolution headshot of Mr. Slattery is available upon request by contacting Keith R. Pillow at (805) 389-1815, or by e-mail at keith@abelsongroup.com.

About Camiant

Camiant’s proven policy control platform is the market leader with service providers worldwide deploying its solution to differentiate services such as SIP-based telephony, video communications, streaming media, games and commercial services, with quality of service and enhanced charging. Camiant’s policy solution, available today, enables service providers to deploy non-IMS to fully-compliant IMS applications. Through real-time policy control, Camiant enables service providers to maximize the utilization of bandwidth, enhance their customers’ experience, and increase revenue.