Nortel's CMO Lauren Flaherty has a quick eye for separating facts from flash then focusing those facts to drive great ideas to flawless execution. This results-based approach is fundamental to Flaherty's energetic focus on transforming marketing from a soft corporate service to an essential business element, critical to building revenue.

Flaherty has been a marketer in the high-tech sector for 20 years. In her role as CMO for Nortel, she is actively building a marketing capability that is rooted in a strong metrics orientation across all disciplines, innovative execution and a deep integration with sales to drive measurable business results.

In a recent interview with B to B magazine, Flaherty said, "The increased level of accountability is a huge issue for marketers, particularly in the last five years. There has been an enormous push across Fortune 500 companies to make sure there is a marketing operations capability or function in place to rationalize the marketing investment. You have to have the metrics to show you're on the right track."

With an uncompromising rigor for facts, analysis and market statistics that systematically hone in on strategic target audiences to improve results, Flaherty leads Nortel’s worldwide marketing team in a wide range of activities designed to help open new markets and initiate new sales opportunities.

Responsible for global marketing strategy, sales effectiveness, brand development, advertising, internal communications and media relations, Flaherty is also a member of Nortel’s senior executive team, integrating marketing into all aspects of the company’s planning and execution.

Flaherty joined Nortel in May 2006 from IBM where she was vice president, Worldwide Marketing, Small and Medium Business. She played a key leadership role in IBM's defining era from 1993 to 1997 when Lou Gerstner embarked on one of the biggest turn-around efforts in corporate history. During that period, Flaherty led worldwide advertising for IBM and drove the creation of IBM's famous brand image campaign, "Solutions for a Small Planet." Later, she was the advertising lead on the team responsible for launching IBM’s e-business marketing initiative. This campaign moved IBM from the sidelines to the epicenter of the Internet revolution.

During her career at IBM, she also served as vice president of Worldwide Marketing for some of IBM's largest and most important global businesses where she drove long-term business strategy, channel and product marketing, and related communications and branding priorities including public relations.

Flaherty holds a bachelor of arts degree from Syracuse University. She is a frequent speaker at events focused on marketing, global brand management and brand building for revenue growth, including those sponsored by the American Marketing Association, the CMO Council - a global non-profit executive marketing group, The Conference Board, and Columbia University's MBA Program. Flaherty is based at Nortel’s global headquarters in Toronto.

About Nortel
Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.