100 Days: The Rush to Judgment That Killed Nortel by James Bagnall
Let’s start with the definitive story. Veteran journalist James Bagnall, who covered Nortel for years, delivers a gripping, detailed account of the company's final, frantic months. This isn't just about the dot-com bust; it's a forensic look at the accounting
scandals, the executive blame game, and the boardroom panic that turned a crisis into a catastrophe. Bagnall argues that a rush to judgment by directors and investigators, which led to the firing of CEO Frank Dunn and two colleagues, was a critical error that Nortel never recovered from. For anyone who wants the unvarnished, Nortel-specific story, this is the essential read. It’s a chilling narrative of how a corporate giant was felled not just by market forces, but by a witch hunt from within.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
If Nortel’s story is about corporate downfall, Enron’s is the Shakespearean tragedy of the genre. This book is the gold standard for understanding how arrogance, greed, and complex accounting can create a house of cards. McLean and Elkind masterfully detail how Enron executives built a culture of deception, using financial engineering to hide massive debts and project an illusion of success. The parallels to Nortel’s accounting restatements and executive bonuses are impossible to miss. Reading this will give you a powerful lens through which to view the Nortel collapse, highlighting the universal ingredients of corporate scandal: hubris, pressure to meet quarterly earnings, and a shocking lack of oversight.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
While Nortel was an established giant, its story shares a crucial element with the modern startup disaster of Theranos: the seductive power of a visionary promise that outpaces reality. In "Bad Blood," John Carreyrou exposes how Elizabeth Holmes built a $9 billion company on a technology that never worked. This is a story about the cult of personality in the tech world, where a charismatic leader can convince investors, board members, and the media to ignore glaring red flags. It explores the toxic workplace culture and fear used to silence dissenters—themes that resonate with the final years at Nortel, where internal warnings were often dismissed in the relentless pursuit of growth.
How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins
If the other books are the 'what,' this one is the 'how.' Business researcher Jim Collins provides a framework for understanding corporate decline, identifying five distinct stages: Hubris Born of Success, Undisciplined Pursuit of More, Denial of Risk and Peril, Grasping for Salvation, and finally, Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death. The Nortel story maps almost perfectly onto this framework. From the arrogance of being a market darling (Stage 1) to the frantic, undisciplined acquisitions during the boom (Stage 2), and the subsequent denial as the bubble burst (Stage 3), Collins gives you the analytical tools to see Nortel not as a unique event, but as a classic example of a predictable pattern of failure.
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
To truly understand Nortel, you need to see the bigger picture of the industry it dominated. Tim Wu’s brilliant history of information technology—from the telephone to the internet—explains a recurring pattern he calls “The Cycle.” An open and innovative technology emerges, only to be consolidated and controlled by a monopoly or cartel, which is eventually disrupted by the next new thing. Nortel was a central player in this cycle, rising as a challenger and becoming an empire, only to be undone by the very forces of disruption and consolidation Wu describes. This book provides the sweeping historical context, showing how Nortel’s fate was tied to the brutal logic of information empires.
