Managing R&D in the telecom industry : the trials and tribulations of a Canadian in France

Imagine what it must be like for the pilot of a Boeing to suddenly find himself in front of the controls of an Airbus where the navigational instruments are in different places and react in the opposite way. This is more or less what a manager who spent most of his career working for Nortel (a North American telecom equipment manufacturer) felt when he became head of R&D at Nortel Matra Cellular, a joint Franco-Canadian company based in Paris. Jules Meunier’s mission was to make the company become a global force in the emergent GSM mobile telephony market, and he achieved this goal. He discusses the twenty years he spent with Nortel before leaving the company because of disagreements with senior management, and suggests reasons why bankruptcy was filed in 2009. He also presents his recent two-year mission for Alcatel-Lucent to launch the lightRadio and reorganise the R&D department, and explains the managerial lessons learned from his intercultural experience in France.