The timely release of Dempsey’s (2014) work, No Fear: Tales of a Change Agent or Why I Couldn’t Fix Nortel Networks!, comes even as the one-time Fortune 50 sized telecom giant Nortel Network’s global bankruptcy litigation settlement is playing out in courts in Canada, the USA and the UK.
Working for Nortel’s subsidiary, Bell Northern Research (BNR), and then scaling the ranks of Nortel’s corporate ladder in a dynamic 17-year tenure with the company, Dempsey (2014) provides insider understanding and depth of knowledge into Nortel’s inner workings as it rose during the dotcom boom, attaining sales in excess of $30 billion and employing more than 100,000 people worldwide, to its ultimate bust – declaration of bankruptcy in 2009 and eventual liquidation.
Dempsey (2014), seeking to serve up insight on how to drive culture change in large companies and frame Nortel’s dramatic demise within the context of a flawed culture, centers his work on the themes of power, leadership, learning, customer and trust.
Nortel's prevailing dominance leadership model was characterized by the pooling of power in the upper executive ranks in a hierarchical top-down leadership decision-making system. Dempsey (2014) views this dynamic as an obstacle, contrasting this model with meaning-making and adaptive leadership models, where employee input, influence and impetus for change are generated, valued and acted on at all levels of the corporate hierarchy. Leadership is a capability, not a place in the hierarchy. Influenced by Marvin Weisbord’s (1987) work, Dempsey (2014) emphasizes the importance of involving people who are going to be affected by a change process instead of just dictating change down to them. Dempsey (2014) dishes, “I learned that people really don’t mind change, but they do mind being changed” (p. 120).
A multitude of insidious leadership issues infecting Nortel are explored. Communication issues, poor decision making, bad acquisitions, malicious compliance, resistance to change, blame, board of director issues, lack of diversity, groupthink, corporate greed, excessive spending on perks, the Peter Principle, frequent executive turnover, executive golden parachutes and lavish executive severance packages are all targeted as culprits tainting Nortel's culture and contributing to the once mighty company's downfall.
Learning is a central theme of the book. Dempsey (2014) describes his personal growth, developing his HR and leadership capabilities while guiding the growth and learning of Nortel colleagues as an organization development (OD) practitioner. An emphasis on organizational learning is also portrayed, with a focus on the customer value process.
One of the core beliefs espoused by Dempsey (2014) is listening to and valuing the customer, and in so doing, trusting employees to make the best decisions with customers’ interests at heart. One initiative in this direction, Customer First, was a success, raising one of Nortel's large business units, Broadband Networks, customer satisfaction (CSAT) from 65 to 89 percent. A loss of trust among Nortel's customers, however, due to issues such as front line employees complaining to customers about issues within the company, is pointed to as a key reason leading toward Nortel's collapse. Dempsey (2014) adds values to the mix of issues which ultimately plagued Nortel, “[…] we valued heroes over teams, firefighting over prevention, and financial results over value creation. We valued shareholder over customer, never quite believing that the best way to build shareholder wealth would be to truly put the customer first” (p. 144).
Dempsey (2014) led Nortel to liaise formally with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Greensboro, North Carolina as a corporate sponsor and brought in their best thinking and talent. Dempsey's OD leadership and management practices reflect a strong influence by Robert Burnside and others at CCL, including David Nadler's work on discontinuous change (Nadler et al., 1995) and Stan Gryskiewicz's (1999) work on positive turbulence. Additional influences include National Training Labs (NTL) courses and trainings, Frederick Taylor's (1914) theory of scientific management and Weisbord's (1987) transformative views of management.
Dempsey (2014), whose perspective often reflects the human resource frame, with its emphasis on relationships and the alignment of organizational and human needs (Bolman and Deal, 2013), provides insight on his growth and development while navigating Nortel's organizational processes, “I developed a working model for successful HR work: Start out by doing whatever it takes to get invited to the business table. Leverage networks, do favors, use bosses, but get invited to the meetings where business decisions were made […]” (p. 62). Dempsey’s (2014) views on leadership and employee empowerment emanate through an HR lens:
My theory was to shift leadership from a dominance principle to a “making meaning” leadership style. I wanted to include, somehow, representatives from every group that touched this process. I thought if they worked on the decisions together, they would more naturally help implement it (p. 82).
For Dempsey (2014), the concept of adaptive leadership is paramount. Adaptive leadership is about learning and continuously changing. The best change leaders are learners who welcome feedback and value their own and others' learning. Great leaders adapt by deftly navigating change. Dempsey contrasts Nortel's collapse during the dotcom meltdown of the early 2000s with Cisco, which survived due to its adaptive leadership's effective ability to change during this period. Dempsey (2014) maintains that Nortel leadership's failure to adapt and effectively transition from an industrial to knowledge company was a contributing factor to its demise:
Value in knowledge work, as exemplified by the short-short environment of the software industry, is created through innovative approaches to solutions. Products are almost beside the point-the goals of many offerings from business-to-business industries are to enable your customers to gain competitive advantage in their markets […]. If there was ever a time for Nortel to fully shift from a technology/product driven company to a market/customer driven company, this was it […]. The problem was, again, we did not know how to change our culture, to change the basic assumptions that our behaviors were driven by, to align with this vision (p. 170).
Important aspects of organizational change include systems thinking, change dynamics, planning change, leading change and implementing change (Mayhew, 2006). Dempsey (2014) emphasizes the importance of leadership and communication for organizational change leaders.
Resistance to change, however, can come from many sources and manifest itself in a variety of ways. Resistance, active and passive, is the most important factor in change, and it's often the main reason why change initiatives fail (Maurer, 2006). Dempsey (2014) points to several factors blocking change at Nortel. Self-esteem issues sometimes served to block the flow of communication. Some people fear negative consequences of speaking out about change initiatives, so they don’t share information or what they know. Lack of diversity and groupthink played a part (Dempsey, 2014), “There was no diversity in decision-making, in meeting management, in promotion and other HR processes […]. Innovation demands diversity of opinion, demands some give and take. Groupthink can maintain the status quo, but it can’t change direction or develop new strategy” (pp. 202-203). At the top executive level, Dempsey (2014) asserts, “[…] malicious compliance, the most effective passive-aggressive organizational behavior, crippled the system like an insidious cancer” (p. 182).
Leadership failure, failure to lead change, is high on the list of top culprits contributing to Nortel's ultimate failure. For Dempsey (2014), if there's resistance to change, it's a leadership issue. Someone has done a poor job communicating change or the reason for the change, which contributes to a lack of information, communication and trust. The case for change, the reason for it, has to be communicated down to where the work happens. If you don’t communicate the reasons for the change down, you’re going to get resistance from people due to their fears. Dempsey (2014) asserts, “[…] I want to state, here and now, why I couldn’t fix the company: I was unable to effectively change the leadership system” (p. 190).
In No Fear: Tales of a Change Agent or Why I Couldn’t Fix Nortel Networks!, Dempsey (2014) gives the reader a view of Nortel Networks under a microscope, where he focuses his work on how to drive culture change in large corporations while zooming in on Nortel’s rapid fall from global telecom front runner to bankruptcy in light of a flawed culture. Dempsey shares many lessons learned during this sometimes turbulent period. No Fear: Tales of a Change Agent or Why I Couldn’t Fix Nortel Networks! is well crafted and a must read, not just for anyone who wants to learn more about the rise and fall of Nortel, but also for those interested in the work of OD practitioners and change agents.
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About the reviewer
Brett Dixon is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult and Higher Education at the North Carolina State University. Brett Dixon has a Master of Education in Educational Leadership, a Graduate Certificate, Middle/Secondary Education, Social Studies and ESOL Endorsements, from the University of Oregon, CELTA, Cambridge/RSA, and a BA in History from the University at Albany. Brett Dixon has 19 years work experience in Taiwan, the USA (Oregon and North Carolina) and South Korea, with children and adults, in a range of educational settings (public/private, elementary, middle and high schools, language schools/academies, companies, teacher training institutes, community college, universities) and positions (English/ESL Teacher/Instructor, Editor, Teacher Supervisor, Project Writer, Teacher Trainer, Teacher Training Program Director, English Language Fellow, Program Coordinator, TOEFL ibt Speaking rater). Brett Dixon’s interests include international education, study abroad, education abroad, international service learning, leadership training in China, Taiwan, Asia.
