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Bankruptcy protection was not what trim, sinewy Mike Zafirovski had in mind three years ago, when he strode into a meeting room at Toronto's Park Hyatt Hotel and took command of Nortel Networks Corp.

It was the last thing the supremely confident executive could conceive of when, in an accent still reflecting his Macedonian birth, he declared: “I'm convinced Nortel will be a big winner again.”

That will clearly not happen. Instead of closing his career with a spectacular turnaround, this former golden boy of U.S. business has presided over Nortel's effective death spiral – leading to a likely dismemberment of Canada's former technology champion.

The question will always linger: Could Mr. Zafirovski have saved Nortel if he had been more alert, more strategic, or was it already so damaged by the time he took over, that it was just a matter of time.

In hindsight, Mr. Zafirovski, now 54, had the stamina, the integrity, discipline and the leadership abilities to stage a turnaround. He was a leader in a military sense, the commander you would want to lead you into battle.

But he was a better executioner than strategist, at a time when Nortel desperately needed a clear sense of its place in the world. And perhaps Nortel needed a more accomplished marketing and sales leader, instead of a strong operational hand.

To his credit, Mr. Zafirovski wisely hired strategists, visionaries and marketers to try to complement his hand-on-the-tiller style. But in the last final gasp, this wisdom had to be jettisoned, or ignored, as survival became the only priority. Now even that goal seems unlikely as well.

In essence, Nortel's fate was probably determined by the time the new CEO arrived in October, 2005. The global asset meltdown and recession simply hastened the inevitable end of the Nortel saga –- as it will with many crippled companies that have entered the downturn with severe competitive liabilities.

Mr. Zafirovski was realistic in understanding it would be a tough haul. “These things do not happen overnight” he said in an interview in summer of 2007. “We are not looking for a 50-year turnaround but we did say on Day One it would be three to five years to recreate something special. We are now 19-20 months into it so obviously the time frame is narrowing.”

What is surprising, in hindsight, is that Mr. Zafirovski could have had a number of gilt-edged jobs, but he chose downtrodden Nortel, a company wracked by scandal, collapsing share values and an uncertain future. It had been run most recently by Bill Owens, a U.S. Navy admiral plucked from the directors' ranks as a fill-in CEO.

In Mr. Zafirovski's view, it would be kind of turnaround he had accomplished at Motorola's cellphone unit – only to be passed over by the U.S. manufacturer for the CEO's job. Before that, he had spent a number of years being groomed in the executive boot camp of General Electric Co. under Jack Welch.

Along the way, the young man who emigrated from Macedonia as a child became a student of leadership: “I am a student of leadership. I love to study leaders in politics, business, sports and military.”

He was sensitive to the criticism that he was much better at operations than providing a vision for Nortel's future. When confronted with that allegation, he responded that, “I am very confident that everything I have touched has been very transformational and inspirational for the employees and the business – at G.E., Motorola, and I'm sure it will be the case at Nortel.”

He said Jack Welch himself saw the younger Mr. Zafirovski as a change agent. “The way we repositioned the handset business in Motorola was among the most strategic turnarounds,” he argued. “Anyone can manage for the short term, they can squeeze and look fantastic. And anyone can appear to be a visionary, coming up with a speech on what will happen in 2013. But I do think that great companies find ways to do both of them at the same time.”

But Mr. Zafirovski also acknowledged that he faced an enormous challenge in overcoming Nortel's deviation from its once sterling culture of performance and execution. After years of bubble, bust and scandal, of distractions, it had lost track of its own identity.

“Nortel used to have some of the best processes in the world in developing people, in communications, and developing products. But in the late 1999-early 2000, there was the view that the market was moving so fast, if you'd a structured process, you'd never be able to keep up with the newcomers. So lot of Nortel's old processes were thrown away with a view to having a faster, go-to-market process.”

Asked if Nortel had lost its discipline, he replied it had. “We have tried to put those things back in place – with contemporary processes, and with a great level of employee engagement.”

In fact, Mike Zafirovski was the right leader to turn around Nortel, but he came too late to the game. He expected he might have up to five years to fix Nortel, but it was less than three years until the market collapse, which has simply thrown more gasoline on Nortel's bonfire of cash flow.

“Discipline is something I've worked very hard to get to but it is not the single definition of Mike Zafirovski,” he insisted in an interview.

Unfortunately that definition will now include other less generous words – “the last CEO of Nortel as we knew it.”