Mark Blevis

For the last ten years, Nortel employees have lived under stress and uncertainty as the company’s decline gained fresh momentum with each newly appointed executive team.  None was more vocal about renewal and communication than that of current president, Mike Zafirofsky, or Mike Z as he’s been branded.  He was the self-proclaimed saviour.  Yes.  The same Mike Z that captained the listing ship into bankruptcy protection.

Mike Z has invited a significant amount of scrutiny.  His allegiances have been well documented in a series of critical blog posts, news reports and, most recently, a series of scathing yet humourous videos on YouTube.

As with most of the scrutiny, the videos poked fun at Mike Z’s routine use of the Nortel corporate jet for personal travel, loading his executive team with GE buddies (all very well paid), his famed internal ‘ZMail’ and the canceling of all active and future severance packages while trying to hang on to executive salaries and bonuses (Mike Z himself refused to reduce his salary from $9M to $1, something that is customary among executives of financially troubled companies).  One of the seven videos has accumulated nearly 36,000 views in just one month, more than twice the number of views boasted by an official Nortel video posted on YouTube one year ago.

As the company continues to restructure, laying off thousands of people at a time without a penny of severance or compensation, Mike Z has been pushing for $46M in retention bonuses for the same executive team that brought Nortel to its knees.  Meanwhile, employees, fearing for their future, are anxiously looking for new employment opportunities as far from Nortel as possible.  The same innovative and hard working people that Mike Z is counting on to repair the hull and run the bilge pumps long enough to make Nortel business-worthy, again, are the one’s jumping the rails and swimming to less turbulent waters.

Which means that either the retention money is going to the wrong people, or the mass exodus is part of Mike Z’s grand plan to keep the money for him and his GE buddies.

As the husband of a Nortel employee, watching Nortel pitch downward used to be painful and stressful as each round of layoffs went from being a periodic possibility to a daily reality.  Now it’s unavoidably comical.  The once mighty darling child of Canadian high tech and innovation, bursting with talented people and patented visionaries, is now the Titanic.

Fortunately, today is cause for celebration!  After twelve years of faithful and committed service to Nortel, Andrea took a new job and submitted her resignation.  It’s an exciting time and the celebrations will be going on for a few weeks, yet.

And now we can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the captain can go down with the ship and our family was fortunate enough to have made it safely to shore.