The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

4. French Toast

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU Quote) continues to fire at will.

The Paris-based telecom equipment maker posted its third straight quarterly loss Wednesday. Alcatel Lucent said revenue dropped 8% from a year ago as its telco customers trimmed their spending.

In response, Alcatel Lucent chief Pat Russo mailed out more pink slips. The company now plans to eliminate some 16,000 jobs -- almost 20% of the workforce that was on hand last April when France's Alcatel announced a plan to merge with New Jersey's Lucent.

Alcatel Lucent wasn't supposed to be such a chop shop. Back in the spring of 2006, the company said it expected to cut around 10% of its 88,000-strong staff in a bid to exploit so-called synergies. After that, Alcatel Lucent expected to cash in on "extraordinary opportunities for our combined company to accelerate its growth," Russo said back on April 2, 2006.

But the company has been shrinking instead, as customers pulled back on their upgrade plans and rivals like Ericsson (ERIC Quote) took market share. In response, Russo has repeatedly expanded the number of workers to be fired -- first to 9,500 last fall and then to 12,000 this past spring.

The repeated pratfalls have raised calls on Wall Street for Russo to join the ranks of the unemployed. In September, directors ordered Russo to put together a report showing how Alcatel Lucent would rise above the turmoil roiling the telecom gear business.

In response, Russo came up with a seven-member management committee and a revamped operating structure that cuts regions to two from four.

"This streamlined management structure," Russo said, "enables a more efficient, more focused company with clear lines of accountability."

We'll believe that one when we see it.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 88. "While they were at it," one Wall Street analyst told TheStreet.com's Scott Moritz, "they probably should have gone all the way to just one region and called it Earth."