It’s at times like this, with the future of Nortel’s coveted wireless technology up for grabs and billions of dollars at stake, that I like to recall the wise counsel of old John C. Lobb. He was a jowly fellow who became the president of Northern Electric, Nortel’s predecessor, in 1971. He picked that dusty old company up by the scruff of its neck and shook it wide awake. Profits tripled in his first year and doubled again in his second. He used to ask employees what the company made. They’d tell him it made telephone switching equipment. He’d bellow, “We don’t make switching, God damn it! We make money.”

I love those great Canadian success stories. John Lobb, incidentally, was a lawyer from Minneapolis who ran Crucible Steel of Pittsburgh before he moved north, and who died in Pennsylvania.

All of which teaches us two lessons that may be appropriate to the current fuss over ownership of Nortel assets. Continue…