DECEIT AND BETRAYAL AT WORLDCOM

WorldCom was a true success story. Combining ground floor understanding of a new technology with all-too-American brass and brashness. It grew from a tiny company in rural Mississippi into a 20 million customer global telecom juggernaut.

This explosive growth, however, is not what will be forever burned into the public’s memory. It will instead be WorldCom’s spectacular implosion. The largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, billions of dollars in retirement savings erased, congressional and SEC investigations, corporate leaders smiling grimly as they are led away in handcuffs.

This is WorldCom’s lasting legacy

Disconnected, Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom provides you with a front row seat to this WorldCom disaster. Journalist Lynne Jester uses her two decades of experience covering WorldCom, along with her inside connections at a long-time Mississippi business reporter, to examine how a company that created so much wealth was able to lose so much so quickly. Filled with fascinating financial details and entertaining anecdotes of the Runyonesque characters that created, and then all but destroyed, WorldCom, Disconnected takes you inside this telecom giant to explore:

• How CEO Bernie Elbbers parlayed ownership of a two bit motel into stewardship of the nation’s second-largest long-distance provider, and the world’s largest Internet carrier
• WorldCom’s failed 2000 courtship of long distance competitor Sprint, and how the details that emerged revealed the company’s growing pains, and foreshadowed its eventual demise
• WorldCom’s June 2002 revelation of overstated earnings, and the debacle of mistakes, missteps, and downright unethical management behaviour that followed.

Much more than a simple corporate biography Disconnected is a compelling narrative on winning big, and losing everything, on the stages of American and global business. It provides fresh insights into WorldCom’s inner workings and corporate culture, while describing the social setting , religious influences, political gamesmanship,  and cultural climate that drove the company and its leaders. Stories of Bernie Ebbers’s laid-back workplace attitude share space with first-hand accounts of being reassured of your position over lunch with the boss, only to return to find your office locks changed and your possessions waiting in a cardboard box.

The WorldCom story has a little of everything: rags, riches, humility, hubris, and ultimately tragedy. Get the real story, from the people who were there from the start, in the fast-moving first-hand account.