I found this post this evening over on the AOL thread for Loral.
Subject: My take on Bernard's disastrous error.
Date: Sat, Apr 14, 2001 9:52 PM
From: Mrr8
Message-id: <20010415005220.21844.00000210@ng-bj1.aol.com>
The following is my personal opinion. I worked for Loral until I retired some years ago. During the years when Loral was beating their quarterly results every quarter for, I think over 10 years straight, the company was run by two men. Bernard was the CEO and Chairman of the board. The other man was Frank Lanza who was the President and COO. Bernard and his CFO personally handled the many acquisitions that got them from about a 20 million dollar company to a multibillion dollar company.
But, the technical brains of this defense company was Frank and his staff. Bernard deferred to him, almost exclusively, when judgments had to be made about the future of the technologies Loral was involved in.
When Loral Space spun out of Lockheed, Frank did not go with Bernard. It is my belief that the tremendous success that Bernard had experienced up to then caused him to mistakenly believe that he could predict the future for technology himself -- a form of self-delusion. (He was self-trained in technology, and his technical knowledge was not very deep.)
His key, disastrous, errors, as we all know, was not foreseeing the growth of cellular, and the critical importance of providing wireless communications cheaply. Maybe, just maybe, if Frank had gone with Loral Space, he might have dissuaded Bernard from betting the farm on Globalstar.
All of this won't help you to get well in this stock, but it is something to ponder!
Good luck to all of you. |
