As the Empire Crumbles, Nortel Carries On

By Mark Evans | Published: October 24, 2009

In many respects, it must be very strange for Nortel employees to keep doing their jobs while the company’s different assets are being sold. I mean, how motivated or excited can you be when your employer is crumbling and the CEO has gone running off into the hills?

This take on the world struck me when hearing about Nortel’s presence at SUPERCOMM last week in Chicago in which Nortel aggressively waved the flag about some new products. It has to be an odd feeling to be manning the Nortel booth at a time when everyone knows Nortel is not going to exist for much longer. I suspect that if Nortel was handing out swag, it had to be considered as collector’s items.

In any event, the reality is that after Nortel disappears, its carrier and VOIP businesses will carry on with new owners, and that its employees will continue to do what they’re doing but, hopefully, with a more stable employer.

For more on Nortel’s activities at SUPERCOMM, here’s an article from Xchange magazine.

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  • NortelTragedy

    Business as usual. What is a person supposed to do? Sure motivation lessened, but there's still work to do. Believe it not, customers are expanding and upgrading their networks – product and professional services are being sold and profit realized. It's not 1999, but it's not 2012 either.

    Z, Hackney, Lowe, Dunn were FIGUREHEADS, nothing more. There are good people left at Nortel, still chugging along doing what needs to be done for the business, the best they can with what is left. The advantage to those left is that there's no more LSS, “Own It”, hyped GIS and other propaganda (i.e. “hyperconnectivity”), ethics tutorials and exams, and other worthless programs to deal with.

    Congratulations to E/// for their acquisition of Richard “Dick” Lowe and the band of worthless Directors and VPs he's bringing in tow. And let us not forget Avaya for their snapping up Joel “The Carolina Choker” Hackney — P.S. sell short!!!!

  • GoProto

    With Joely on board, its an opportune time for Avaya to send out Fruitcakes for the upcoming XMAS season…

  • NortelTragedy

    They don't know what they got in Joel … those pretty pearly whites when he smiles. And his psycho-like big blue eyes. Should he do time for his crime, he'd make someone a great prison bitch.

  • GoProto

    Yeah, I'd buy tickets to the bitch-slapping show in them purty orange jumpsuits.. =)

  • Zhacknightmare

    I was going through my folder of personal stuff I took from Nortel, I just found the EMEA pipeline for Enterprise Sales.

    Hmm how do I have this, because an Italian Ferrari driving VP of Sales used to blanket bomb the whole EMEA sales team with this every week in an effort to correct CRM errors, yes this dumbass used to send a list of every opportunity that was being worked by Nortel out by email to the whole European Sales Team. This was still being done as Nortel slashed the sales teams.

    Charlie of Avaya do you hear this ??

    Now where did I put the email address of the Sales Director for Alcatel and Siemens or in case I forgot Cisco….

  • Nortel watcher

    William Nelson was sending these emails?

  • Nortel watcher

    Umm, I wonder who will make the stalking horse bid for CVAS so that we can get an auction date announcement?

  • Zhacknightmare

    Bill is not Italian & he is an excellent public speaker, unlike this uk based italian that cant string two words together….btw this is a recent list, summer '09. Bill left over two years ago…

  • gone2moro

    “I mean, how motivated or excited can you be when your employer is crumbling and the CEO has gone running off into the hills?”

    I bet it's hard for anyone in sales or marketing to go out and put on a happy face. I think back to the propaganda nitwit for Sadam Hussien who was denying the presence of US troops in Baghdad while M1 takes were cruising up behind him…. must have been tough for him too….

    But I think that there are customer/companies who respect that. I don't work for Nortel anymore, but I'm still in the same major carrier market segment. I have to say its great working for a company that you don't have to apologize for everyday, but at the same time, as a competitor of Nortel, I don't hear many bad things about the plight of NT from the customer.

    To Mark's point last point… Your individual reputations in how you handled yourselves and conducted your business in the face of this is likley being watched by customers and future employers. As you engage competitors for employment or the new owners becareful in how desparaging you are about Nortel. Many employers don't like hear negative candid comments…. makes them wonder what you wll say about them..when things are tough.

    Keep a chin up.

  • MyHeadHurts
  • NortelTragedy

    Good points, gone2moro. In my interviews with sales directors and VPs at competitors, they understand and appreciate what employees have been through and desire the talent that remains at Nortel.

  • zeroman

    probably the only one. reason for sending email is they cannot use other tools to work with.

  • less

    One could say that having worked at Nortel they learned how not to do things….

  • zeroman

    Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

    Emperor Z fiddled while Nortel burned.

    At least Rome was re-built.

  • happy2bG

    You go to work, spend the day looking at job opportunities, applying to jobs, sending out CVs, take time off for interviews and when job related work comes across your desk you say, “I'm too busy doing real work” and pass the work on to a “I believe” worker (A.K.A the ones hoping for life with a new owner, or the ones with no talent and no hope of finding other work.)

    The day in the life of a typical Nortel worker

  • Lookahead

    But what you described is directly controdictive to what Mark's comments: as Nortel continuously demonstrates the R&D superior over its competitors. The ones with no talent remaining in Nortel can do a better job than Nortel competitors? then other Nortel competitors/employers do not want those Nortel “no talent” to join them because they can make better products against them?

    Wow, that would be a fantastic joke I even heard from a capitalized telecommunication market.

  • less

    Woohoo! “Orange” means he be getting “multimode” not just “single mode” fiber.

  • XPM_guy

    The CVAS division is what remains of the NT/BNR core that brought us DMS, the cash cow that funded the purchase of all those other divisions and helped set the bar for Carrier Grade. There are still a lot of incredibly talented people hanging on there, hoping for better times under new management (and more than a little frustrated with the leaders who keep saying we're almost there, over and over)…

    Remember that the workers who remain have survived a full decade of laying off the lowest ranking performers while distributing the work among the dwindling few who remain. The folks who don't do their job (e.g. allow their ongoing job search to impact the quality of their work) are shortlisted for the next round of layoffs (at least one round each month)…

    Given the musical chairs nature of the process, and the relative dearth of comparable jobs open in the areas where Nortel labs have been cutting the most (i.e. U.S. & Canada), survival of the fittest has been a big factor in determining the the composition of the workers (as opposed to managers) who are still doing the work, day in and day out, with their heads down. I am not aware of any remaining dead wood in the U.S. or Canada at the rank & file level (mgmt is an entirely different story), so it should not be surprising that the work still being done is superior.

    Honestly, if the job market were any better, there probably would be a real shortage of talent remaining within Nortel's U.S. and Canadian operations. But that's not the case…

  • GoProto

    Oh, well than scratch that.. no perks allowed. lets go with basic black n white..

  • Still_waiting

    This is well stated .To rebutt some of the other opinions, I must say that I have seen great talent walked out of the door besides the so called under performers. Speaking for a few people I know, we do our jobs because that is what we are getting paid to do. When the time comes and there is no paychecks or a opportunity to move on presents itself, then we will move on, never looking back. There are a few opportunities out there and personally, I have been on a few interviews and offered a position but it was not the right fit for me.

    Please do not stereotype me as one of the beleivers as that has never been the case and as far as lack of talent, I will let the hiring manager of the next company I work for make that call.

  • XPM_guy

    “Please do not stereotype me as one of the beleivers as that has never been the case and as far as lack of talent, I will let the hiring manager of the next company I work for make that call.”

    Very well put! I too have seen a lot of highly talented people given the bum's rush (less than 2 hours to vacate the premises after 20-30 years of dedicated service) in recent years, as the pool of under-performers dried up but the executive appetite for more blood did not…

    If you've still got under-performers in your rank & file workforce after 10 solid years of non-stop culling the bottom of your ranking ladder, then either you had no good workers to start with (and we know that was not the case with Nortel) or your ability to rank the productivity of your workers is seriously messed up. And since that ranking for Nortel is done based primarily on the input of the first (D) level managers who are still close enough to the work to recognize talent when they watch it perform it, the remnant talent pool remains strong (in fact proportionally stronger) at every site that started out with strong, experienced talent…

    Now if we could only get CVAS' leadership to step up and announce a sale – even an auction without a stalking horse. They have not had to undergo the same talent-based culling process they put their workers through, instead relying on their connections with now thoroughly disgraced higher ups to remain employed (as almost all of them still are, even after driving the company into the ground), so it is easy to understand their deer-in-headlights reaction to the auction process: they didn't know how to run the company, and now they don't know how to sell it. Drag it out a little longer and that'll trigger another bonus or two, since that's all they know how to do…

    We can only hope that when the courts finally force the issue (Chapter 7?), someone is still willing to scoop up all the talent that is being so mishandled by CVAS' current leadership… We'll see!

  • XPM_guy

    “Please do not stereotype me as one of the beleivers as that has never been the case and as far as lack of talent, I will let the hiring manager of the next company I work for make that call.”

    Very well put! I too have seen a lot of highly talented people given the bum's rush (less than 2 hours to vacate the premises after 20-30 years of dedicated service) in recent years, as the pool of under-performers dried up but the executive appetite for more blood did not…

    If you've still got under-performers in your rank & file workforce after 10 solid years of non-stop culling the bottom of your ranking ladder, then either you had no good workers to start with (and we know that was not the case with Nortel) or your ability to rank the productivity of your workers is seriously messed up. And since that ranking for Nortel is done based primarily on the input of the first (D) level managers who are still close enough to the work to recognize talent when they watch it perform it, the remnant talent pool remains strong (in fact proportionally stronger) at every site that started out with strong, experienced talent…

    Now if we could only get CVAS' leadership to step up and announce a sale – even an auction without a stalking horse. They have not had to undergo the same talent-based culling process they put their workers through, instead relying on their connections with now thoroughly disgraced higher ups to remain employed (as almost all of them still are, even after driving the company into the ground), so it is easy to understand their deer-in-headlights reaction to the auction process: they didn't know how to run the company, and now they don't know how to sell it. Drag it out a little longer and that'll trigger another bonus or two, since that's all they know how to do…

    We can only hope that when the courts finally force the issue (Chapter 7?), someone is still willing to scoop up all the talent that is being so mishandled by CVAS' current leadership… We'll see!

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