Jozef Straus' Underwhelming Legacy
At the height of the telecom boom, JDS Uniphase was the toast of the Canadian high-tech scene with more than 10,000 employees in Ottawa. Meanwhile, its beret-wearing CEO Jozef Straus became the man of the moment - rocketing from a-little known telecom executive to magazine cover-boy. Then, the telecom boom came to an end, JDS moved its corporate headquarters to San Jose, and the company started to lay off thousands of employees, including most of its workforce in Ottawa. Straus, however, was savvy enough to walk away from JDS with more than $150-million - most of them from exercising stock options before retiring in 2003.
Perhaps the final chapter of JDS' sad story in Ottawa is news the federal government is about to sign a 25-year, $600-million lease for a new headquarters for the RCMP. When the lease expires, the government can buy the state-of-the-art complex for $1 from Minto Development, which purchased the complex a few years ago for $30-million. Does it seem perculiar to anyone that Straus is still well-regarded with Ottawa's high-tech community when, at the end of the day, there's almost nothing left of JDS? Isn't entrepreneurial success (at one important aspect) the creation of something tangible that benefits from community? Sure, JDS created a few millionaires if you were smart enough to sell at the right time but that's about it. At least the RCMP will be happy when they move into their new digs, which features a gourmet kitchen, 300-seat auditorium and gym.
May 11th, 2006 at 9:58 am
When I worked Nortel, we had an office cleaning day and found some old copies of Bell-Northern Research (BNR)'s internal magazine. The type of magazines that big companies used to produce then with articles on innovations.
We got a kick out of it because it was from the early 1980's and there was an article by Straus about early research in Optical Communications. It was ground breaking research. At the time, it made us wonder how many companies had been born out of BNR.
I suspect if Straus is well regarding in the community its because of that legacy of innovation and research. I'm not an expert on this but I suspect that the JDS collapse has as much to do with the times than some particular failure of Straus.
Siobhan