Word: lucent
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What's the state of aggression these days? The abrupt departure of Lucent's Deborah (Hurricane Debby) Hopkins touched off the usual fulminations: that aggressiveness, which is rewarded in men, is punished in women. No question, gender unfairness still operates. But more to the point, aggressiveness as a trait, in men or women, is less in vogue. Period. If you think of it as a stock, "its value has been diluted," says Patrick Wright, chairman of the human-resource-studies department at Cornell...
Consider too what happens at downsized companies, where the resources are spread thin. At Lucent, a dizzying sequence of restructurings, layoffs and revised business strategies has reduced internal competition in favor of playing nice together. Before its fiscal year began last Oct. 1, notes Pam Kimmet of Lucent's HR department, the focus for salespeople was hitting their numbers by pushing their own products--a Lucent optical networking system, say, vs. data networking. Now the company needs to sell integrated systems that may include a little of each. So salesfolk have to join forces...
...Lucent is not leaving any of this to chance--or to benevolent human nature. The new rule is that no one wins unless the company overall hits its targets--a mandate made imperative by Lucent's precarious state. So last year no one got bonuses. Once the company makes its numbers, it creates a kind of prize fund and divvies up the dough according to how a team performed and what each member contributed. A staff member on a successful team can make zilch or more than everybody else. But nobody gets anything unless his team wins...
...expensive union labor. The service sector is America?s future - maybe the place to put this is an extravagant dinner for two, or a cheap Yankees season-ticket package. Or maybe support financial services, manufacturing and tech all at once, and blow it all on 50 shares of Lucent. (At least I won?t have to worry about capital-gains taxes for a few years, if ever...
...markets started Tuesday in quicksand and kept sinking steadily during the Fed chairman's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, and wound up with the Dow shedding 183 points and NASDAQ 29 points. But you'd sell, too, in Lucent was practically running out of employees after cutting 20,000 more jobs, selling $2.75 billion worth of assets to raise cash and embarking on yet another desperate restructuring, if Amazon.com suddenly looked even less like it would ever make money, if manufacturing outfits like Alcoa, 3M and International Paper served up another painful reminder that inventories were nowhere near gone...