Disclosure: In early March, members of my team and I will most likely be casualties of the economic downturn and inferred strategic changes by our employer, Nortel. This post reflects my perspectives only and not necessarily those of my employer and colleagues.

As background, the past few weeks have been quite tumultuous at Nortel. After many years of work in trying to turnaround and restructure the company, Nortel filed for creditor protection on January 14, 2009 (under the Chapter 11 code for the U.S. region). For those folks that will continue with the company, turnaround work is not yet done. Although I've worked in a number of environments, prior to this experience I have never lived *within* a company that has filed under the Chapter 11 code. I write this post simply to share some thoughts on both social media situations and management styles I've seen in this environment. In no particular order:

1. Companies need to be aware of blog posts by directly involved parties. Here is a blog posting that chronicles communication of the ex-Nortel employees with the CEO, Board, officers, and the Monitor. The content of the posting is written professionally, and it seems to both chronicle a sequence of events and communications that indicate a number of "disconnects" in the communication process between employees and CEO (primary target it seems). Given the electronic environment that is a regular part of our lives, managers and workers need to know that histories can be traced more than ever before. I, for one, never saw this thing kind of thing ten years ago.
2. Third party blog sites should also be monitored. For example, blogs such as All About Nortel cover the happenings in the industry with specific focus on Nortel. Whether one loves the AAN site or not, I have found that employees to look to these sites both for information and as an outlet. People discover things that they did not know (of course many things need to be verified). For example, in one of the comments sections of a recent All About Nortel post, I saw a disturbing comment by a potential distributor and customer of Nortel. I forwarded that information to a regional manager I knew - soon the blog post had circulated to a VP level for escalation and verification.
3. Managers should treat their employees like adults where possible. Sounds like a basic one, but as an example, my manager gave me (and my team) straight talk and opinions during the process (outcomes which are still unfolding). Even when things weren't set in stone and when potential results were ugly, he managed to be up-front. On the other hand, in another situation at Nortel I did have a manager in the chain who (from my vantage point) chose to gather information to make himself look good while "rolling people under the bus" without having an adult conversation with the affected parties first. Little did this manager know that people were willing to be rolled under the bus for the cause but instead felt betrayed when the adult conversation never occurred and they were simply rolled over.

Although I didn't really address anything about the issues related to creditors, suppliers, and partners, from the above, my largest takeaways would be that fairness, transparency, and communications are critical things to balance in a company under duress. 

Update 2/11/09: As sample exhibits, I also wanted to point out some user-generated video on the Internet. Here is a YouTube video (apparently posted post-Chapter 11 filing) covering a pep rally as part of the "I Believe" grassroots campaign within Nortel. To contrast this is a more cynical YouTube parody as related to the blogpost/letter I cited above in point #1.

Update 2/15/09: CEO provides a YouTube update to the "public".