Successes · Failures
Patricia Russo – Mrs. Russo was appointed as CEO to Lucent in 2002 when the company was slated to merge with the French company Alcatel. Lucent’s profits were down, there were allegations of accounting fraud, the bottom of the telecom market was falling out, and there had been multiple failed attempts at merging with other larger telecoms in the past. She was given the responsibility to make the company profitable and to oversee a smooth merger with Alcatel. Over the next few years Russo began to streamline the company by cutting jobs and focusing on specific market segments. She cut 10’s of thousands of jobs during the period between 2003 and 2006 and has just announced another 20,000 in the last month (NY Times, 2007). She is concentrating the remaining divisions on providing equipment to network providers only and is making an effort to change her employee’s attitudes to reflect the company’s new image as a provider of services more than just as a manufacturer. In 2005 she succeeded in pulling the company out of losses as Lucent reported its first profits since 2000. She also oversaw a successful merger between Lucent and Alcatel in 2006 and continues to lead the combined company from France. Patricia Russo has successfully brought Lucent technologies from the brink of disaster, but has done only that. The newly combined Lucent · Alcatel is considered to be more the result of a take-over than a merger by BusinessWeek as it reports that Alcatel is roughly eight times the size of Lucent. The company is now solely based out of Alcatel’s Paris complex, and employees 90% of Alcatel’s previous employees and 40% of Lucent’s (Business Week, 2007). Much of what Patricia Russo has done is a result of Alcatel’s numbers diluting Lu ...