A Nice Company, Concluded

2020 Reflection.  I am discovering more and more details about myself, and my thoughts, throughout most of my life, and the two big experiences that produced trauma that I did not know existed until the advent of the Anderson case. I know that my physical problems, the chest aches and high blood pressure, and nervous thoughts, were not normal, were not due to my diet or physical fitness - - - it was all anxiety brought on by policies of the University of Michigan Board of Regents, and then later, by some senior executives at Nortel. But I stress - - - these few people with power are not what gives life to damaging corporate practices: it takes a compliant and willing base of rank-and-file people: employees; neighbors; politicians; professionals; the news media . . . human resources departments . . . When you have been wronged, or you see that others have been wronged, and it counts as unethical in every sense - it becomes nearly impossible to find someone, including your closest friends, that will take your side, support you, encourage you, and back you up. They disappear. 

Even now, today, three of the five women that I have mentioned (primarily in the podcast interview produced by Chris Ward) seem to have left me. They've been critics. They have ghosted me. They gave an initial burst of vitriolic rhetoric in support of me and against the U of M. But now, in the lowest point, when I am in hand-to-hand trench combat with myself, these friends are not available. Trauma to people occurs because of us. I am at fault. And you are at fault. And we need to stop scapegoating these people that we make bigger than they are. Institutions and mobs of people are the real culprits. 

My point is that Nortel was like any other organization comprised of people. We all waI had been thrilled to be an employee of Nortel Networks. It was a pioneer in digital networking, and in the 1980s enjoyed explosive growth, globally. The parent company was Northern Telecom, LTD, a major scientific and commercial enterprise based in Ottawa, Canada. Nortel's largest operation was that in the US. We had manufacturing plants in several US cities. At Nortel, you worked for an American company called Nortel Networks, Inc. But globally, the Canadian parent could be emphasized. The company had a pristine image everywhere. It was innovative, driven, visionary . . . and nice. But many of my friends, and I had observed, from early on, some tendencies in the company that pointed to collapse, like so many other companies that folded when the dot-com bubble burst. 

Ethics . . . creativity . . . teamwork . . . leadership . . . these were wonderful, lofty principles of the 1990s. But Nortel's leadership was like all leaders: only human. The problems that we observed may have been minuscule. But, they were common, and aggregated across the American landscape, emerged a top-heavy dynamic that by 2020, could no longer stand. 

We have got to listen to each other. 

  • My office mate and informal supervisor in Richardson, Texas, made my life miserable when I was but a new, starry-eyed young visionary joining corporate America. She was a highly valuable employee that had a thick coat of Teflon. But her treatment of me was unacceptable to later sensitivities. She threatened me with vicious and vulgar hyperbole. I attempted to go to Human Resources with my concerns, but they poo-pooed my complaint. And they probably tagged my file as "potential troublemaker."
  • In Sales Operations in the Atlanta Transmission Division, I was required to submit phony year-end numbers, so that we could make our sales budget. Our sales total was based on a "Purchase Order" written out in longhand, on a bar napkin. Everybody in our building knew it was sketchy. They did it anyway. 
  • I was ordered to hire an unqualified, non-strategic employee into my elite MBA hiring program, due to her family relationship to one of our major customers (that was, at the time, considering Nortel for a major purchase of equipment). I was tasked with developing a diverse corps of middle managers. I was told that the company would not defend managers if they got into any civil rights situations, and I had just turned down a highly qualified minority candidate. I developed a solution to the predicament, but reported the whole thing to our Ethics VP, who agreed I was put into an inappropriate gray area. 
These are the three scenarios that loom the most in my Nortel experience. 

I do not wish to cast aspersions on a great company and its wonderful people.

My point is that Nortel was like any other organization comprised of people. We all want to do well, and we want to do right. But our culture had become one where people were afraid to speak on things that concern them. My experience was minor and relatively tame. 

But as I have pointed out . . . aggregated throughout the culture for several generations, we ended up with an expanding bubble of ethical and moral shortcuts. Bad things happen. Wrong decisions are made. And that is all okay . . . as long as we respect each other and make corrections along the way. As the tenet, from many Customer Service Training Programs, might say: "Customers will forgive you for making mistakes. But they will not forgive you if you don't fix the problem that caused the mistake."

The ethical and moral bubble burst in May of 2020. And we should have been listening to each other, for a very, very long time. 

Next: Interlude - Some Time in the Shack

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