Telecom Trends

As I read James Bagnall's story in the Ottawa Citizen about Nortel last Wednesday and colour commentary by Mark Evans, I thought that there will be case study material for Canada's business schools for decades to come as armchair CEOs replay and analyze missteps made by management and the board.

Management is rarely blessed with the benefit of hindsight. On the other hand, good managers can surround themselves with more diverse viewpoints in order to improve the breadth of information that contributes to more effective decision-making.

There was a quote in the story that reminded me of a personal experience 25 years ago.

Nortel achieved this distinction by spending more than $2 billion (all figures U.S.) annually on R&D, and hiring up to 30 per cent of Canada’s masters grads in electrical engineering.

I didn't have a graduate degree in engineering - my Masters is in Mathematical Statistics.

AT&T Bell Laboratories was recruiting people with diverse graduate degrees - some of them engineers, but many of them from completely non-technical disciplines. I saw geography and music majors when I worked there. All of them were very bright; all of them had a technical aptitude.

The recruiting guidelines suggested that we ask candidates what kind of hobbies the potential employee had. Did you like to play with Lego or Tinkertoys as a kid? Did you ever take apart the family car radio? Depending how they answered those questions, we figured we could teach them how the phone business worked.

Perhaps initially driven by Affirmative Action programs that demanded that AT&T spread its recruiting beyond white males, it was a systemic difference between Bell Labs and BNR.

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