Thursday, September 11, 2008

Why Would You Hire an AT&T Exec?

I re-read an email today sent from a reader about a comment I made in Phone+ last year about SunRocket CEO Lisa Hook. The reader reminder me that AT&T has produced quite a few "Wunderkind". Here's some of them:

  1. Joe Nacchio – leaves AT&T for Qwest - convicted of insider trading case in 2007.
  2. John Zeglis – AT&T Wireless: "Was my oversight of the operations inadequate? Everything was inadequate," says Zeglis, who was widely blamed for the company's deteriorating service. Eventually, AW was sold off.
  3. Gail McGovern - Executive Vice President for the Consumer Markets Division at AT&T, which she ran into the ground, then moved to Fidelity for 4 years before moving off to Harvard Business school. Now she is CEO/Prez of Red Cross.
  4. Pat Russo – Lucent’s CEO and just booted from Alcatel-Lucent after a big failure.
  5. Carly Fiorina – Senior Vice President at AT&T who went to Lucent and then was widely viewed as ineffective at HP. Now running the McCain campaign and peeved that she did not get the Veep slot.

I am reminded that many of these execs worked for a monopoly and don't know what it is like to COMPETE. So why would you hire them in a non-monopoly company? this goes for their sales folks too. If they worked at an ILEC, in general, they will be unable to sell effectively for your company. When everyone is/was/will be your customer, do you know how to hunt or farm?

Side note: Dave Rusin thinks that his Frontier alumni are BK proof.

No comments: