5/16/2023
(Dallas)
My meeting with a Fortune 100 CEO started out with a belch.
The door opens to the wood-paneled room on a hardened, ultra-secure floor in the Dallas skyscraper belonging to technology giant AT&T. I hear the end of a conversation with an out-of-sight underling. "...and tell them they can f*** themselves if they don't like it."
It was a preview of things to come.
John Stankey has been the head honcho here for almost three years. He has a swagger befitting his large frame. He barely looks at me before emitting a sizeable belch. A small period of silence follows, one that would normally be occupied by a sheepish "excuse me." But none is forthcoming.
He just authorized the release of a missive to employees: the company is tanking. Oh, and it's your fault. You will return to the grimy, filthy, chaotic office. Or else.
Truthfully, it sounds like a bit of a stretch, a last ditch effort for someone who has nowhere else to turn, and almost certainly won't look inward.
See, it causes a bit of cognitive dissonance to see all the swagger. There's just no justification for it. Books for MBA courses already have entire chapters devoted to the astonishing missteps of Stankey and his predecessor, Randall Stephenson. They jointly turned the largest wireless carrier into the third largest. They gave - literally gave - billions of dollars to their competitor, T-mobile, so that it could overshadow them as #1 (Verizon steadily took over #2). They doubled- and then tripled-down on two of the most disastrous company mergers in memory - first with DirecTV, and then with HBO, only for both to fail catastrophically in less than four years. They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, paying Trump lawyer Michael Cohen hundreds of thousands of dollars for (ahem) "insight" into the president. They tanked the company stock price, and each move to right the ship has caused it to tank more. They laid off nearly 50% of a sizeable workforce through a series of bungled consolidations, force reductions, and "back to office" episodes, the latest of which is hot off the presses. The brain drain at headquarters is obvious, say employees. Empty suits with executive sounding titles like Associate Vice President bumble their way through the simplest presentations. A steady stream of buzzwords emanate from their mouths in a self-congratulatory manner to each other. The company has almost too many presidents and CEOs to count. They multiply like rabbits, each less competent than the last, but apparently not enough to get the boot.
Oh, and to get to this state cost the company about a hundred billion dollars. Yes, that's with a "B." AT&T is one of the most indebted companies in the world. And they have nothing to show for it.
So maybe it doesn't surprise me that the first sound uttered was that of a bodily function. The next one for this company might come from the other end, followed by a satisfying flush. Maybe this time it will include the right people: the C-suite that brought down this towering giant of a company within just a few years.
But I wouldn't count on it.