James Bagnall of the Ottawa Citizen has been covering Nortel for a long time, much longer than my time with the company. It was with great interest that I heard from a co-worker that James was doing an 8-part series called “Who Killed Nortel?”.
Would it tell me things I didn’t know? Would it point the finger at people I respected? Would it conclude the collapse was due to bad luck, incompetence, or something more sinister?
Even knowing the series was on the Ottawa Citizen, I found it horribly hard to find the articles and then to navigate them (its improved a bit now that the series is complete). To save you the same frustration, I collected them here:
- Investigating the death of a global titan
- Part 1 - Last things first: Bankruptcy protection
- Part 2 - A group of retired executives sign up for one last battle to save their former firm
- Part 3 - The beginning of the end
- Part 4 - Looking for a turnaround
- Part 5 - On the road to ruin
- Part 6 - The silence in the boardroom
- Part 7 - ‘The world turned upside down’
- Part 8 – The Man Who Wasn’t There
- After Nortel: Tech’s last chance
I found the series very enlightening. It points to leadership apathy, a board that lacked knowledge of the telecom industry, bad luck, incompetence, and -of course- the well known financial scandals as contributing causes.
Now that you have seen the ‘balanced view’, you may want to check out the ‘unbalanced’ view for a laugh: Nortel’s Downfall – The Mini-Series
Filed under: Business, Finance, Leadership, Nortel, Ottawa, Public Companies, Strategy, Telecommunications
[...] The Mini-Series Posted on November 16, 2009 by Adrian Bashford My previous post “Who Killed Nortel?“, featured columnist James Bagnall presenting a very balanced view of the contributing [...]