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What Happened – Young People Don’t Want The Feds

What Happened is a question put to the former telecom giant Nortel. Nortel went from being the ninth-largest company in 2000 to filing for bankruptcy in 2009. The question was more like – What The Hell Happened? This well-respected telecom giant agreed to participate in a study conducted by the University of Ottawa. As a matter of fact, they were the case study.

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Nortel agreed to have nearly half of its top executives interviewed, as well as customers, partners and competitors in an attempt to answer the question. Professors conducted an extensive case study of Nortel. Some very interesting findings surfaced quite to the surprise of Nortel executives. The researchers found that Nortel had bred a culture of arrogance due to prior successes that proved to be lethal.

The researchers further found that arrogance had also led to lax financial discipline among the executives escalating to a kind of excessive pride that put customers on the back burner. The executives were only interested in themselves and not what customers wanted. The very component, good customer care, that had elevated Nortel to the top of the telecom game, was lost in the rise to the top and therefore sent the telecom giant plummeting into an abyss.

All organizations must understand the needs of their customers if they want continued success. It might serve the Federal Government well to begin looking at the behavior of top executives and their impact of recruitment and retention. I know the top executives at Nortel were amazed to hear that it was not losing their competitive edge and it was not that they no longer understood the technical market and advancements in technology. It was and is pure and simple that they got too big for their breeches.

The Federal Government would be wise to invest in an Innovation Summit targeting recent college and university graduates, young people under age 50 not employed by the Federal Service to explore why this population is running away from being a part of the public sector. I can assure you that it is not salary. The unemployment rate both nationally and internationally is highest among young adults under the age of 50. Foreign graduates are leaving their home countries looking for jobs in the United States. For many, once in the United States, they simply join the ranks of their peers looking for jobs that are not there. If the Federal Government has a number of vacancies, there are applicants qualified to fill them. But the mystery remains – What happened that young people don’t want to be employed by the Federal Government.