DALLAS (BusinessWire) - The way AT&T CEO John Stankey sees it, most CEOs don't have the fortitude to change a company's culture over the period of two weeks.
"A lot of them think it means starting with the C-suite, things like setting a good example, acting with integrity, and winning hearts and minds," the balding, gravelly-voiced CEO boomed. "Quite frankly, we didn't have the time for that."
Instead, Stankey directed a subordinate to quickly come up with a new culture and post it to the company's internal social media site, tSpace, a reference to the once-popular but now almost barely extant site, MySpace.
"We told them something about being faster, pressing the pedal to the metal harder, things like that," said Stankey. "We had been harping on it for years but their reaction wasn't as robust as we would have liked." Indeed, the CEO and his predecessor, Randall Stephenson, have flailed at the helm, making monumental mistake after mistake. From literally creating their largest and fiercest competitor almost from whole cloth, to taking on mountains of debt to buy declining brands at shockingly high premiums, the two men have saddled the company with an almost impossible task. One that, Stankey claims, employees haven't been able to keep up with.
And a task the graying CEO doesn't take lightly.
"Not only did we transform the culture with a few posts to tSpace, but we're going to transform our business as well." Today, the company's core business is, of course, providing wired and wireless connectivity to users around the globe, a fact you could be forgiven for forgetting if you scratch your head at the more recent mega-acquisitions like DirecTV and Warner Media.
"We don't think people are associating us with communications anymore," Stankey bellowed, "and quite frankly, we may not want them to." Stankey revealed his plans to quietly outsource "future-non-core" functions such as wireless service, business connectivity, and consumer broadband to low-cost international partners, in favor of the company's new core focus: storytelling.
"Our partners at Accenture, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra are more than capable of providing basic technical services, while we focus on the future of storytelling" Stankey said in response to our questioning. "It doesn't take much of an education to plug in a cord at a house or office." In fact, through augmented technology - the kind used to train replacements for striking technicians in years past - Stankey thinks the company can be competitive with minimum or even sub-minimum wage employees by classifying them as gratuity-based. "By using a freelancing platform, we can reach out to the unemployed and underemployed, and offload some of that cost to customers who would be willing to pay extra to, say, get a prime Saturday appointment."
The future looks bright for Stankey and his C-suite cohorts at the company. He indicated during his interview that the shift to the core company business can happen even more quickly than the cultural shift achieved late in 2020.