One Communications – “ChoiceOne mgt driving this company into recievership direction”

For the record, I don't work at One Communications but reading this thread stirred memories at a former company where Howard Janzen was the "alleged" CEO -- WilTel Communications. The tone of this thread contains EXACTLY the same issues people had with Janzen @ WilTel (aside: the real chiller for me that I saw in this blog was his continued drum-beating for your company to be "EBITDA positive." He constantly preached that at WilTel when we all know that EBITDA was a step toward profitability and not the end goal.

My simple advice: don't walk, but RUN away from any company that has Janzen in ANY kind of mgt role. This is what we discovered at WilTel:

1. He doesn't know technology, nor does he want to learn.

2. He would claim in defense of the first point that he hired brilliant people who knew technology -- a smart approach, but one that assumes his own knowledge of tech allows him to see it in others. Umm, 'fraid not.

3. The poor communication & micromanagement -- that, too, has followed him everywhere he's gone.

4. The guy LOVES to spend money on gee whiz toys and technology. Before he went over to WilTel, he spent $2 million on upgrading a SINGLE conference room on the 42nd floor of the BOK Tower in downtown Tulsa. At WilTel he spent $21 million on a state of the art A/V system in what we call "the dirty icecube," i.e. One Technology Center. In the case of the A/V project work continued all while round after round of layoffs were taking place.

5. At WilTel his ultimate downfall came on a Thursday in Feb, 2004 when he emphatically told a company-wide all-hands meeting WilTel was definitely NOT going to file for chapter 11. According to HJ, we had a great balance sheet, SBC (our biggest customer) loved us, etc. That very next Sunday the front page of the Tulsa World proclaimed WilTel was now going to file Chapter 11. We surmised he either knew the bad news on the horizon and spun it OR he truly believed what others were saying and wasn't in the loop. Either way, it came off as a horrific integrity blow to HJ. It's also worth noting that the official story is he resigned only after it became apparent Leucadia (the holding firm that bought WilTel in b/k for something like 10 cents on the dollar) wouldn't give him autonomy to run the company as he saw fit.

6. And finally: the most amusing trait of his (if you can call it that) was his constant badgering of the local press whenever a negative story would break about WilTel's real financial condition. Many of us wondered why he'd spend time fighting things he couldn't control vs. working to save the company.

The bottom line: this guy is the Peter Principle incarnate. The real travesty is this zero continues to get CEO-type jobs then proceeds to run companies into the ground (WilTel, Sprint, now One Communications).

Good luck.