Lucent was slickly marketed as the best of all possible investments – in Endlich’s words, “a low-risk, high-tech company.” It didn’t hurt that Lucent kept the better part of Bell Labs (AT&T kept the rest), AT&T’s storied but underutilized research and development wing. Her pitches made buttoned-down institutional investors rise to their feet and applaud. Carly Fiorina, an executive noted for her steely ambition, managed the stock offering with energy and dash. When Lucent was spun off as an independent entity in an initial public offering in April 1996, investment bankers expected it to be a dud.īut Lucent’s rebirth coincided with the deregulation of telephony and the twin revolutions of the Internet and the cell phone. It would be hard to imagine a less glamorous role than that of foot servant to a utility – and a regulated utility at that. The former manufacturing arm of AT&T, it variously supplied switches and phone systems to Ma Bell, her former customers, and her offspring, the Baby Bells. Lucent’s origins were anything but dramatic.

But though her book is rich in detail, she leaves it to us to determine exactly how Lucent (which means “marked by clarity” and “glowing with light”) illuminates the recent period of folly. “Perhaps some light can be shed on the boom and bust at the turn of the century by adopting a micro point of view,” she tentatively suggests.

Of course, Endlich believes that Lucent’s story is instructive. However, if Endlich’s assessment were true – if Lucent had merely been hit by a bolt of lightning – the story would have no culprits and little to teach us. If this strategy ultimately failed, Endlich concludes, Lucent’s executives cannot be faulted for lacking the clarity that “only hindsight affords.” Therefore one should not be too harsh in judging their strategic blunders – for who could have foreseen the utter collapse of growth that stunned the telecommunications industry? It had to win friends on Wall Street, or it wouldn’t be able to use its stock to acquire other simi-larly overpriced firms, as its competitors were doing. The company had to increase its stock price, or employees would depart en masse for Silicon Valley. She doesn’t exactly approve of this, but she argues that, given how pervasive the -bubble was, Lucent had little choice but to ride the wave. Setting and meeting those expectations “subsumed all other goals,” according to Endlich. How did it all happen, and given the financial euphoria of the 1990s, could Lucent have done better? Internet mania was certainly beyond the company’s control, but the expectations of Wall Street were not.

Lucent hearts review metacritic