John Roth Wants Nortel’s Help!

Mr. John Roth wants NORTEL's help??????????

I want NORTEL's HELP too! BY GIVING ME MY "RETIREMENT ALLOWANCE"!!

BUT THE FREAKIN" BANKRUPTCY COURT WONT ALLOW IT!!! nor the

MONITOR!!

Has he actually been taken to court for anything? Or is he just worrying, reacting to all the negative publicity and messages from pensioners and the like, that he is no doubt receiving?

It's called Karma, John.... :-)

Roth was the biggest crook of them all. He stole ten times more money from Nortel than anyone that followed him. Don't forget his trusted CFO was none other than F Dunn, the Canadian poster boy for accounting fraud. Where and when is it you think the Nortel accounting fraud was invented? Guilt by association? You betcha.

Roth is a either a crook, stupid or both. He wasted huge amounts of time, capital and good will on stupid optical follies, not realizing (or maybe he did) that optical innovations and bandwidth multipliers doomed his strategy. If he has bothered to talk to customers and their finance people instead of playing with his classic car collection he would have seen it coming soon enough to refocus away from Optical and onto products that customers wanted. When he did realize it he beat a hasty retreat with dubious excuses, marooning thousands of employees and taking 100million + of much needed capital.

Chandran was another crook, who knew one year prior that the NA optical market was drying up and the customers were on very thin ice, but said nothing. Roth’s firing of Chandrin was probably the sole good deed of his tenure. This good deed was immediately nullified by putting Dunn in charge.

I hope John Roth is financially wiped out and he and his family have to live in a dumpster.

I knew some guys had a problem.Their power bill was killing them.They told their people to cut back. They removed light bulbs throughout their building. They turned the thermostat up 5 degrees. Then they checked their network -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3WGxVvVc8I&feature=related

Roth left at the right time. Ok so he acquired a whole slew of companies, some which made no sense. but what were the 3 CEOs since 2000 doing? if Roth were sued then they should go after every exeuctive since 2000 since they were the ones who goofed it all up wasting millions in crap products that never made it to market. need i bring up opc, interceptor, neptune, metro next?

I think what the lawsuit will be for are damages related to him indicating that Nortel was a good buy when the stock was tanking. A lot of people lost money.

What's next? 1 billion to defend Jean Monty, Paul Stern. This is ridiculous if creditors want to start suing every CEO. waste of time and money.

no matter what anyone says the sole CEO responsible is Mike Z. he says Nortel was not a normal company for the past 6 years. well 3 of them were on his watch and he did nothing to get the company on the right path. in fact his big bloated egghead ego turned back the sale of Enterprise to Avaya and CDMA to Nokia, which would have brought in over 3 billion cash.

I want Roth to send me a few grand so I can go away...

John Roth's legacy, the "Right Angle Turn"

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Oh, how convenient to blame poor Clarence. The blame does not fall on just one person and trust me, Roth bears a lot of the blame. He spearheaded the acquisition of Bay Networks - a cornerstone to his "right angle turn" strategy. This was not a bad acquisition per se, except very quickly, Nortel drummed out all of the Bay Networks management team. So, essentially the acquisition was a ~$7B acquisition of people and some technology. Ironically, the remnants of Bay Networks and the Enterprise business unit have officially transferred to Avaya today.

Roth knew that something was really wrong with the business before the telecom bubble burst. He was just too full of himself to admit it. He knew that the order book did not support the guidance to the street even as he "re-affirmed" guidance. He knew that two customers - Qwest and MCI - essentially hoarded and warehoused all of the long-haul optical equipment that Nortel could manufacture. He knew that even through the entire Y2K and web frenzy, Nortel did not make a profit and burned through cash like there was no tomorrow. He knew enough to know that Nortel was not on solid ground as a business.

When it became painfully obvious that he had lost control of the market, he decided to slash. BUT HERE IS THE RUB. The slashing was all about headcount and not cost....nor about business strategy. So, guess what, Nortel cut 40% of the staff and that amounted to only 20% of the people cost (all the low paid people went first) and was still left with all of the same business units, products, etc... before the mandate to cut.

On September 12, 2001 (yes the day after 9/11), I sat in a conference room with Roth and all of his senior management (who were all stranded in Toronto due to the events of 9/11) as they finally came to grips with we have to fundamentally restructure this business. The knew that they needed to exit unprofitable, non-core businesses, but no one, no one could make the tough decisions about what should stay and what should go. As Roth was still CEO, it was his job to make the decisions regardless of his plans to retire.

He had his hand on the wheel during the good times and was lauded to no end. He had his hand on the wheel as it came apart and he wants to shrink from the responsibility that he had in the start of what we now know is the demise of Nortel.

In my opinion, he is not a criminal nor he did not commit fraud. He was a innovative visionary, but not a business person. He is guilty of being over-confident in his ability to control his business/markets and falling in love with the way the world (and the press) fell in love with him in 1998 - 2000.

I was also in Carling on 9/11, though not in a meeting with Roth. I was with a group trying to clean up after his stupendous mess. I argue that the Nortel-Bay merger was more successful than the Synoptics-Wellfleet merger. If Roth had done any due diligence at all he would have realized how fragmented Bay and their products were. Bay was never a competitor to Cisco, and the main reason Nortel "acquired” Bay was because Lucent was a huge Bar reseller and it bought Nortel access to most of the Lucent customer base. The Bay acquisition rivaled Lucent’s acquisition of Ascend for sheer stupidity.

I remember trying to get two Bay product management people (one from Boston and the other from Santa Clara) to even talk together about such elementary look and feel commonality as the Bay RS and common MIB definitions. No dice. They hated each other. The only think that held that company together long enough to be acquired was David “Captain Adrenaline” House.

Not finished yet, Roth acquired such uncomplimentary businesses with no products as Xros, and CorTek and under Roth’s misleadership made complete fools of themselves trying to market Sonoma, Clarify, Qtera, Promatory, Altion, Architel adnausium under a common Nortel brand that confused the market completely.

Roth should share a cell with Madoff.

I agree with your basic assesment about the manor in which the "force reductions" were handled, but at that point nothing surprised me.

Excellent assessment indeed. Never saw so much spending then during the Roth years. I remember asking to myself : How can we make money by spending so much like if we had unlimited revenues. In fact we weren't making money it was just a smoked screen. Roth initiated the 'right angle turn' buying a business a month with all these new employees added to the headcount but was not prepared for the cliff that followed. After the telecom collapse in 2000 it did cost a fortune to Nortel to let go all these people hired during the frenzy(95,000 at the peak).

Maybe Roth was a visionary like you say but he was more obsess by making the share go up then to manage prudently the company.

Excellent assessment.

"John Roth Wants Nortel’s Help!" should read "Nortel will Need Help from John Roth's Wrath"

Nortel back stabs their employees, shareholders, creditors, RIM,...name it as only management walks lining their pockets to this day with raises and bonuses ..as they seek the best deal for their big business creditors after misleading and reluctant to parliamentary witness.

Who would believe Roth would align himself with them when he admitted they are history.

Adding a billion in liability than legal costs, after the taxman asked for 3B, is hardly something Nortel would entertain to appease their big business creditors, and Roth was not pals with the departed CEO who promoted than promoted green pals to have put this in place earlier for him.

For Roth to ask backstabbing Nortel for help is absurd, let alone today, I wonder where the hell they got this from.

Who said Roth seeks help from Nortel? Post Roth Nortel people? Ya right, like god spoke to Gary, right? Cisco Tax, or there is no better time to buy? Same mentality of green bozos following Roth's reign where stupidity breeds hatred from road rage to slander. Roth was none of these things let alone stupid enough to ask them for help today.

The new board increased their lawsuit insurance premiums to a whopping $300M for legal fees, perhaps he should sue for similar insurance arrangements instead than warn Nortel of their potential $1B liability should he get mixed up in their soup.

I suspect he doesn't expect help from Nortel than give them a heads up he will sue them if he gets sued by an angry mob seeking their pound of flesh in this witch hunt.

Roth was tough, egotistical, greedy, nasty, but not extremely knowledgeable. He thought he knew everything about everything (egotistical people usually do), but he was a sham.

you are the "sham" misleading, read more before posting...what you propose is utterly false and parallels slander

the Roth envy green successors were this way instead, excluding "tough"... he was forced to be after Chandra squandered in acquisitions

The article at least admits:

"In 2000, John Roth had been the most recognized executive in Canadian business. In retirement,

Mr. Roth was smart, tough and extremely knowledgeable.

During his final months at the company, he would confide in colleagues about his fatigue.(this may have been due to his bout with cancer which is never mentioned anywhere!)

great companies are run by leaders with passion, energy and a relentless drive to see things through. Mr. Roth had all that during most of his career. But in 2001 he did not. Indeed, during much of 2000 and 2001 -- years of crisis in the industry -- Nortel lacked a steady hand at the wheel.

In February 2001, Mr. Roth told the board of his plans to accelerate retirement. He would resign as CEO in April 2001.

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This story almost insinuates he saw the writing on the wall. I do not believe he did. How could he.

It was during his tenure it boomed and during his absence they fell, cooked the books with endless, endless following follies to eventual demise.

No one should witch hunt and go back this far to search for blame and their pound of flesh. What is fair is fair and I can think of none more disgruntled than I for their endless ongoings, that Roth had nothing to do with. He simply was not there.

What followed his departure was a Roth envy of ongoing bonuses, to this day!

Here is an interesting read on Roth and Chandra where following his cost cutting strategy was mirrored and reiterated ever since (but to no avail with his successors as we witnessed)

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http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=12855

I haven't seen this in any of the postings, but JR had this obsession with the "Cisco Model". He was constantly playing a public game of one-up-man-ship with John Chambers. He seemed to believe that Nortel's problem was that it wasn't enough like Cisco. He tried to align things ala Cisco all the time, and always harboured a dream to scale NT to 40K employees. He got his excuse, under the guise of cost reductions, when the bottom dropped out of the stock price. The rumour was that Chandran (who by nature is a builder) wanted no part of it, and parted ways with JR at that point. JR blamed Clarence for all of the M&A catastrophes, and was just as glad to see him go.

Then John started slashing. He started by emasculating HR. Anyone in HR who didn't have the stomach or passive submissiveness for what was to come was gotten rid of right off the bat. Then it was everyone else's turn. Good and bad people, dedicated and lazy, old and young, talented and worthless. It didn't matter! 40K is the goal, and 40K it shall be. I know personally of cases in which people out on long and short term disability (at least one I know of on cancer chemo), were badgered into returning to work early so they could be laid off without medical insurance. I don't believe for a second that JR issued such a mandate, but there is no doubt that it was a product of the fear culture he created. It wouldn't surprise me if JR's bonus is based on the number of bodies on the pyre. The good news: he got it to 40K. The bad news: how he did it was the same as disemboweling a lion in an attempt to make it as agile as a cheetah.

There's no spirit left. Anyone who's left, and there are still some good ones, are in survival mode. It will be quite a while before the mood turns to growth and optimism.

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Again, to target compensation on the "pyre of bodies" was unfair than the effect of these painful cuts.

The lawsuits following its stock decline were reiterated to have had no teeth, before Dunn cooked the books that is. No wonder boards are increasing lawsuit insurance since Nortel's fraud as an angry mobs maintains wanting their pound of flesh with lawsuits following decline as a given, warranted or not.

Roth is unfairly smeared for his compensation while no one can deny his stellar effectiveness and what he had done for Nortel unlike anyone else. He earned it (even blamed Chandra for $20B wasted acquisitions) .

It was other megalomanics with Roth envy that destroyed it by transforming Nortanic from a ciulture of innovation to financial innovation and bonuses, misleading, and unethically, Roth did none of these things.

The angry mobs are barking up the wrong tree going back even further to chase loss and look for blame. Roth should not have to seek protection ffor what others did in all fairness

Again, when Roth was not there and had nothing to do with him, just because others envied him with what has been termed "Roth envy".

Target the telecom green team's culture of misleading following his wake with so many still there than Roth who was perhaps the best CEO Nortel ever had. It was Chandra who wasted $20B in acquisitions forcing him to make cuts. If Roth ran the ship, perhaps it would still be floating today by the sounds of things!

hey proto. simple question. if Chandra was making all the decisions what was Roth doing. come on don't be so naiive. you are just like one of those evil nortel backstabbers.

ya ya
listento Proto he has never been wrong seence I met him in 2004 after the accounting fraud
he is well known public person talking openly about Nortel's frauds on tv
so who are you mr zero?
zeroman?
what level of iq shows your name_id zeroman?
just stfu