Then he stayed long enough to enjoy the party and exited when the going was good. Brilliant.

nobody ever in the life of Nortel could integrate acquisitions well. they should have hired some cisco people to retain the talent for which they paid the big bucks. there were acquisitions that just did not make sense like Clarfiy. extended Nortel too much too quickly.

the boom resulted in a lot of useless people getting promoted who knew squat about the industry, the technology or the competition. Roth could not control all this. I think he had good vision but bad execution killed the company.

Another example is he did away with gating processes and banding for employees. This should have made the company more agile allowing people to move around the company faster. Instead the way it was done, it had the exact opposite making the company slow and locking up talent (their way of retention) because management did things the same way, useless HR never got it and all the cronyism just killed off enthusiasm from passionate people.

May 21, 2009
The co-chief executives of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd said on Thursday they would donate about C$290 million ($253 million) of RIM shares owned by them to two charitable foundations.

Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis will donate about C$190 million over 22 months to his charitable foundation.

There exist a handful of former NT employees who could use as little as $1-2k to make it into the new year. Wheres the love?

I'd agree that the market got pretty brutal during Roth's tenure, although it looked more like a veritable fairyland toward the bottom of its food pyramid for a while.
You opine Roth was more or less kicked out, but a wholly different rumor persists saying Roth was very adamant about retiring and on his own terms, so a needy, greedy NT brass wooed him with hefty cash incentive. Roth said, okay, show me the money, took it and left nonetheless.

http://www.kelowna.com/2009/11/08/nortel-networ…

Roth had been determined to retire when he did. He had done every job asked of him during a 30-year career and he'd had enough.
“My retirement date is 2001,” Roth had said. When an astonished Wilson pointed out that would make his term one year shorter than typical, Roth emphasized, “That's the way it is.”
Whatever the reason, Roth's eagerness to escape the firm should have been a warning sign
When Roth learned that Chandran was too ill to take over as CEO, he was furious. The board pressed Roth to stay on as CEO until they could find a successor to Chandran. He did so, but grudgingly.
When the board convinced Dunn to take the top job, it also persuaded Roth to serve as vice- chairman until Dec. 2002. Roth was rarely seen in the office

A truly better occassion to flip the ultimate bird at a pack of self-serving jerks and walk away rich doesn't come along that often, but look at the fallout.

NT brass got just smart enough to not beg Mike Z to stay, so he has to sue NT for $12mio. Still, NTs money is being placed in the most deserving hands according to NT

John Roth had to leave because he was at the helm when the telecom market – and Nortel's top line – cratered. Had he been able to stay on, I have no doubt that Nortel would have turned around quickly.

I'm sure I'll draw a lot of flak for this post but I'm only interested in hearing opinions from others who had direct dealings with Roth. The rest of you are just winers and gossipers.

What did he do and how was it perceived?

While Cisco and Lucent pluck away at purchasing smaller voice and data vendors for less than a half billion dollars, Nortel made the big, bold move by acquiring Bay for $9 billion. That's the way John Roth does things.

Piddly Cisco.

12.13.00 SILICON VALLEY – John Roth doesn't look like an Internet entrepreneur. At 57, he's as buttoned-down as a lifetime employee of a telecommunications company–which is what he is.
Over the past couple of years, however, Roth has behaved very much like a new age mogul, turning Northern Telecom–a Clark Kent of a company–into Nortel Networks (nyse: NT – news – people), a Superman of the Internet

Twas, “John Roth, upwardly mogul” so they named Roth a bold visionary; Forbes one of the best CEOs of 2000.

Of course, a few months later John Roth blamed what he called a “disastrous” U.S. market for the company's woes. Quick, what else? A collapse in orders: “In my 30 years, I’ve never seen anything like it”.

As early as 2001 there were widespread fears in Canadian business circles that Nortels declining stock valuation would render it easy prey for a foreign takeover.
So John retired as promised with his pals showering him with money on the way out, cementing the negative trend for his/their successors and the BoD to exploit.