Dallas (Newswire) - AT&T CEO and President John Stankey is not exactly the kind of person who walks into an interview unnoticed. Wearing snake leather boots befitting his role as benevolent dictator over a media empire and towering over the coffee table, with a little extra help from the boot heels, his booming greeting reverberates through the office.
We sit down and get right to business. The elephant in the room, I mention, is the stunning downturn of AT&T, much if it on his watch but also attributed to his predecessor, Randall Stephenson. The once-dominant communications provider, under their guidance, has embarked on a bizarre multi-year journey of gobbling up unrelated companies, trashing their value, and then selling them for pennies on the dollar. Witness DirecTV, a once-admired name on which AT&T just took a $15 billion - yes, with a "B" - paper loss. Or the once-revered Time Warner Media, whose HBO jewel was the envy of many a media crown. Its luster has been tarnished irreparably under cost-slashing and morale-k–ling moves by Stankey, most of them reminiscent of a bull in a proverbial china shop.
Stankey is unapologetic. "I'm not really concerned about that, because when you are in the storytelling business, you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet," the towering executive says as he taps out a message on his BlackBerry. "And we're going to be making some pretty incredible omelets in the next year." He winks knowingly.
I asked if the new "omelet" has something to do with the return of Randall Stephenson, who scored a million-dollar contract with AT&T just days after officially leaving the company with a massive golden parachute, much to the consternation of employees, investors, and legislators.
"You bet it does. Randall has the kind of vision we realized we just couldn't do without as we navigate our next big step," he bellows, slightly suppressing a belch as he sips the foam from the top of a cappuccino.
I pressed for more details.
"Listen, one thing I've learned from digital media is that people still yearn for tangible remnants to remind them of the story." He goes on, "Nothing will replace print for at least another century. Randall has identified the bedrock, if you will, on which the future of this transformed company will be built."
That so-called transformation has been a weeks-long effort, echoed in intranet social media sites, video productions, and missives over corporate email. Stankey assures me that this effort has put all of the remaining employees firmly behind him on the implementation of the long vision.
"The rest of the employees?" I asked. "We found out that some employees were stuck on things like fiber optics, mobile telephones, and business services," he explained. "We don't want to be a relic of the 1980s. We are future-oriented. They saw the writing on the wall, and parted ways, through no action on our part." He goes on to explain that those who aren't so closely aligned with the quickly-changing whims of executive leadership will likely see the door more quickly in the future. The lession? Vision is important.
But what does this new vision entail?
"Printers. Photographs. Fax machines. Envelopes. Letters. Pencils. Posters. Film," he says, and quickly adds, "REAL film. The kind that my generation grew up with." His eyes look deep through me and he explains, "There is a nostalgia there and I think that nostalgia is part of the grand story arc of humanity, and it's something we're going to need to embrace if we want to get deep into this century as an innovator."
He goes on to explain, "When you think of the web, the ecosystem, that supports physical media, you're not just talking electronics like printers. You're talking a thousand things like drawing supplies. And with that comes the whole value chain: not just paper and pencils but also forest management, sawmills, trucking, logistics, paper mills, squid farming, ink production, the barrels that you put the ink in, steel to make the barrels, iron mining, smelting, electricity production to run the smelters, uranium and coal extraction..." He stops, knowing he made his point.
"Why only get a piece of that pie when you can eat the whole pie?" he asks.
I have no answer.
The CEO checks his watch quickly and gets up from the sofa, leaving a large impression behind, in more ways than one.