Whitacre sent out a really stupid email to all employees literally every month.
I remember one that was titled "Stand and Deliver."
I got in trouble for suggesting that maybe just once we try to sit and think, first.
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Every large company goes through this. Apple will, Google will, Amazon will. Its called hubris. Consumers taste and needs change and these large companies dont adapt so they start failing. ATT (original) started failing after the 1984 break up, it accelerated due to new technologies and changing consumer taste. The leaders made decisions that made things worse.
Well... the failed T-Mobile merger and corresponding 6 billion dollar payment propping up our competitor along with overpaying for DirecTV by about 25 billion didn’t help... buying Warner Media right before a pandemic that shut down movie theaters was unfortunate timing as well.. then getting our a-shanded to us in the latest spectrum auction was a real kick in the nuts... but other than that T leadership has been on point last 10-15 years.
AT&T could have been a real competitor to Verizon and TMobile if we would have invested rather than racked up debt and got into loser businesses. The debt will always be a boat anchor to the business. $6Bin debt servicing every year isn’t easy to swallow
I do think the FCC’s anti-incumbent, anti-AT&T agenda through the years is partly to blame for Randall looking for seemingly less regulated, confiscatory areas to invest in. That said, DIrctv, Vrio and Mexico were really poor alternative investments to Fiber. AT&T would be way better off today if Randall had concentrated on winning in the primary markets he was already in.
Stephenson and Stankey are popular fall guys (and rightfully so) but don't forget about Donovan and his Merry Mo--ns - Arnoldi, Asplund, Biry, Knight, Robertson
Did the terrible “Leadership” in place over the last 15 years kill att, or did changing market conditions kill us?
Poorly framed question - it offers a false choice. Effective leadership requires managing effectively in a changing environment.
Market conditions have changed but AT&T is stuck with the same old thinking workers that is stubborn to change. Just complain at even at a hint of change.
I joined the company (SBC) in 1998 - which makes me a liability to them, and a dinosaur - despite being barely 45. But I digress...
At that time, the idea of broadband was exploding. Sure, the internet was a thing, but its potential was barely tapped, and EVERYONE wanted on-board. It was to the point where dial-up was just not acceptable. The same with the extant mobile technology of the time, and what was sure to come. Even between my house in a suburb and "the city" were dead pockets, and even worse, 'roaming' pockets where you could unintentionally pay $5 if you were accidentally on a call when happening to pass through even for a second.
DSL was just getting started in my area. Fiber existed in theory, and nobody would have argued that it would have been economical to run fiber to all existing homes (yet). But running it to new developments? Yes. Multi-dwelling units? Yes, definitely. Anyone knew that copper 'broadband' would be a stopgap at best.
So with all of this untapped potential in wireless and broadband - with the sky as the limit - what did the company do? I clearly remember an e-mail that Whitacre sent to the company:
Long Distance is the Only Thing that Matters
Yes, he just knew the future of the company was in long distance - even as mobile usage (which was exploding) was eroding that market under his nose. The company spent tens or hundreds of millions - and worse, several fruitless years - chasing the laughable goal of being able to offer long distance to compete with AT&T and MCI offerings.
That was stupid in itself. But it gets worse: not many years later, after having achieved what he set out to do, he purchased AT&T, eliminating the advantage that "getting" long distance was supposed to provide us in the market.
That has replayed over and over again.
Let's build our own TV service (U-verse) to compete with DirectTV and cable! When they finally achieved that (and actually pretty well...) what did we do? Buy DirecTV. What was the point of building up a TV service from scratch if just a few years later we would pay a premium to buy a different one?
Let's buy DirecTV so we have leverage on content providers! Then when they did that, we went off and BECAME one of the content providers we wanted to have leverage over.
Now we're not only spinning off DirecTV, but the analysts are suggesting that we spin off the media division as well. Everything the company did with its right hand, its left hand undid.
Now, it's looking like 25 after I joined, the company just might again be doing what we "idiots" thought it should be doing 25 years ago: making the best, densest, fastest, most accessible mobile and broadband network in the world.
So we were right and all these other machinations they did in the intervening 25 years were just noise that distracted us from it. Yet who's getting axed? Who's getting benefits punitively cut for having the nerve to work here so "long"? It wasn't Ed. It's not Randall. And it sure as hell won't be Stankey.
Well, the market landscape has shifted drastically in 15 years, but other companies not only adapted, but managed to thrive. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in the Stink.
The market changes all the time. Corporate success depends on having senior executives who can navigate the changes and exploit new opportunities. Unfortunately, T has Stink in charge, so they are doomed.
AT&T is far from dead, but i'd say some of both is the cause for the situation we are in now. The 1990's were the last time the phone company was still the phone company. The internet, Telecom Act of 1996, and smartphones changed us from a utility into a company that had to compete. Poor leadership made the transformation as awkward and difficult as possible. The acquisitions that have been made were terrible. The only one that made sense, T-Mobile, was botched, and we ended up reinvigorating them into a major competitor due to the buyout collapsing.