Another GE-Welch Alum Goes Down: "Rusty" Mike Zafirovsky

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal reported that the former "Iron" Mike Zafirovsky has put his company, Nortel, in to Chapter 11. Thus becoming, I guess, "Rusty" Mike, and the latest of Jack Welch's spawn to fail in running a company.

Of course, Welch's replacement, Jeff Immelt, has been a complete disaster. Jim McNerney had little to negative effect at 3M, before moving to Boeing and assisting in the Dreamliner snafu.

Bob Nardelli managed to help ruin Home Depot, then jumped out of the frying pan, tens of millions of dollars wealthier for his 'work,' and landed in the fires of Chrysler. No sign yet that Bob has turned that one around, either. I suppose asking for a Federal bailout would qualify as failure, don't you think?

Now we have Mike Zafirovsky. As CEO of Nortel since 2005, he certainly owns the company's current situation. As the nearby price chart for Nortel and the S&P500 Index for the past five years shows, Nortel has been in decline for the bulk of Iron Mike's tenure.

It's now lost nearly all of the value it had when Zafirovsky took over the company.

Like Lucent, it seems the business of developing, manufacturing and selling telephone-based digital processing switching systems just seems to have been the wrong business to be in since the digital revolution.

At least Lucent managed to fall into the arms of Alcatel. No such luck for Nortel, the once-vibrant competitor of Lucent's businesses when they were under the AT&T umbrella so many years ago.

It doesn't seem like any of these companies managed to survive the onslaught of wireless and the digitization of information streams. They might claim to have gone digital with their communications systems, but, somehow, that didn't seem to matter.

As a GE-trained success story, I'd have expected Iron Mike to have either merged or reshaped Nortel before this end befell the company.

Then again, looking at the records of Nardelli and McNerney post-GE, and GE post-Welch, under Immelt, it really doesn't look like any of these guys learned much in their alma mater's famed training program, does it?