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Alcatel-Lucent backs CEO Russo
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Even though Alcatel-Lucent has issued many profit warnings since the companies merged last year, the board of directors still supports the job CEO Patricia Russo is doing. They're not mad, they're just disappointed. The company recently announced plans to quicken the integration of the two companies, which many analysts took to mean an ouster of Russo was imminent.
The Alcatel-Lucent board said that it is "clearly disappointed in the most recent changes in the company's outlook," but it supports executives' leadership "to adapt the company's plans in light of this year's developments."
For more on the statement:
- read this article from the WSJ (sub. req.)
Comments
Posted by Anonymous | October 4, 2007 - 7:35am
Mz Russo left Lucent in 2001 - during Lucent's torrent of layoffs - apparently either unable to deal with the layoffs that had been occurring since 2000 or a layoff casualty herself. She took the CEO job at Kodak - also in turmoil and reorganizing. When Lucent couldn't find a replacement CEO to fill the job after it had to let go Rich McGinn, who took the blame for questionable bookkeeping which resulted from the telecomm industry downturn and subsequent meltdown between 1999-2002, they came back to Mz Russo who apparently couldn't handle the Kodak turmoil either. Now, Mz Russo was tasked with completing the downsizing allready underway under Henry Schacht acting as interum CEO - MZ. Russo's idea of turning Lucent around was to continue the downsizing to keep up with the ever shrinking Telecom market place and Lucent's continued inability to deliver products that the Next Generation Networks were demanding. So to fix the the problem, after taking it's employee base to 35,000, Mz. Russo lead Lucent into the merger with Alcatel and was left in place to "turnaround" the combined Lucent-Alcatel company. Of course the recent news indicates she hasn't been able to perform the turnaround expected. Pretty obvious that Mz Russo hasn't been able to deal with the changing global Telecommunications marketplace since 1999 or so when huge market changes started. Time for Mz Russo to find another line of work.
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