When there are so many nooks and crannies within a company that a manager can secretly divert several top scientists onto a hush-hush laser research project, you know you’re dealing with a behemoth.

And a behemoth the likes of Nortel Networks, which earns revenues of more than $20-billion a year as it battles two chief rivals (Cisco and Lucent in the U.S.) to rule the Internet, is a rare and mysterious creature. Larry MacDonald’s new corporate biography outlines, in wide-eyed but illuminating fashion, how this organism got to be so huge and how it manages, miraculously, to move faster than a slug.

Nortel Networks is informative and entertaining reading for Bill Gates hopefuls, executives, and entrepreneurs (high-tech or not) – for anyone, in fact, curious about the makings of a multinational corporate superpower that affects how many of us work, live, and communicate. MacDonald, a former government economist who writes on technology for the Financial Post and other newspapers, traces Nortel from its earliest days as a coddled Bell Canada manufacturer through several major transformations, chronicling regulatory struggles, near-death experiences, technological breakthroughs, and internal spats. His analysis of Nortel’s path from switching to digital switching to fibre optics takes a particular focus on the company’s main men, and the colourful personalities behind them: from the Sise dynasty, Colin “Darth Vader” Beaumont, and the shy Edmund Fitzgerald (yes, he is connected to the ship) in the early days, to the cutthroat Paul Stern, the “Trudeauesque” Jean Monty, and, finally, John Roth, known to send e-mails to 74,000 staff members at once.

The book has flaws. MacDonald too often lets platitudes such as “a renewed focus on the customer” pass without scrutiny. His later chapters, riddled with non-translated marketing lingo and convoluted product names (ATM, PBX, S/DMS TransportNode), read in spots like high-tech press releases. And the final chapter, a nicey-nice essay on how there will be room in the Internet economy for Nortel and its two main rivals – but especially for Nortel – rings partisan and false.

Underneath are nuggets worth sifting for. I suspect few Canadians know that Nortel was once the world’s largest manufacturer of sleigh bells. Or that if Josef Strauss’s research into fibre-optic components had been better supported he might not have left Nortel to start the wildly successful JDS Uniphase. Or how Dr. Rudolph Kriegler’s superiors reacted when they learned he’d secretly funnelled half a million dollars into the development of a laser technology they were planning to buy from a Japanese company. In Nortel Networks, MacDonald pays respect to the big picture and the oddball detail, creating a company tale that’s just a little more than a business book.