Nortel Business Ethics

Nortel’s Historical Ethical Dilemma “Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies” (Wadhwa, n.d.). Nortel once noted as a key player in the Canadian market with a vast knowledge in wireless and broadband communications failed to heed this advice. Nortel may have been extremely successful during the communication boom of the early ninety’s but that all changed in the early twenty-first century where the company saw a steep decline due to an overvaluation of its worth which would ultimately lead to their fall. Nortel’s fall did not happen overnight thus it is important

Several factors that brought down Nortel include analyst growing lazy, financial irregularities, executive compensation and lack of proper earnings management. These items failed Nortel because of two missing traits within of some of Nortel’s key players. These two traits include having ethics and applying principles of moral imperatives to their day to day business actions. Within a company as large as Nortel decisions are part of everyday operations thus it is important to ensure ethics are considered in the decision making process due to the amount of people who may be affected if a poor decision is to be made. Just as important as ethics, confirming implementation of moral imperatives principles ensures the companies best interests are kept in mind. These moral imperatives should include not lying and doing unto others as one would want done to them (Collins, 2011, p. 24). One such example of this failure can be found with the analysts who grew lazy in their assessments of Nortel during their rise. These analysts failed to justify high-priced acquisitions made by Roth such as that of Qtera who made no sales and cost the company a mere three billion dollars, instead they wanted to believe Nortel was a shining star but ultimately acted unethically causing many to suffer because of their actions (Fogarty, 2011, p. 536). When examining Nortel and the issues they faced, such as the previous example, are there things that Nortel should have incorporated to better align managers with the interest of their