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Tough Calls: At & T And The Hard Lessons Learned From The Telecom Wars
"For better and for worse, few companies have been so prominently and constantly in the public eye as AT&T. Through decades of growth and dominance, followed by its 1984 breakup and a litany of well-documented troubles, the company has soldiered on, by turns thriving and hanging on for dear life.
Perhaps no individual experienced as much of the roller-coaster ride as Dick Martin, an executive vice president and 30-year AT&T veteran with both a bird's-eye view of and a crucial role in the company's bumpy history.
Tough Calls is the ultimate inside look at how AT&T tried to cope with a "perfect storm" of fierce competition, economic turmoil, and punishing media scrutiny. Mixing unflinching candor with love for the company he helped steer -- and clear respect for many of his long-time colleagues -- Martin takes you through boardroom and back room to shed unprecedented light on:
* How the 1996 bungled announcement of 40,000 layoffs nearly destroyed the company
* How flawed succession planning precipitated sharp declines in AT&T's stock price
* The never-ending, ugly turf battles with the "Baby Bells" brought on by the AT&T breakup
* How even small interest groups can have a tremendous influence on business decisions, and how the media are largely responsible for determining what is business news on any given day
Tough Calls is also a cautionary tale to be heeded by all businesses, using AT&T's experience in the brutal telecom wars as a backdrop for new strategies in weathering unforgiving business conditions. Just a few of the lessons to be learned include:
* How to avoid the most common mistakes that executives make, such as being held hostage by unrealistic expectations, waiting too long to make critical changes, and building their celebrity rather than their credibility
* How to balance internal and external communications, and how and when to deal with the business media
* How to improve relationships between PR executives and the "C" suite -- CEO, CFO, Chief Counsel, etc.--and how to make public relations more strategic
* How to build and sustain favorable brand recognition and investor allure even in the face of bitter competition and unpredictable market conditions
As candid and fascinating as it is constructive, Tough Calls is itself a call to attention and to arms, in preparation for the many battles that every business must eventually face, against fierce adversaries, and even within its own camp."
Perhaps no individual experienced as much of the roller-coaster ride as Dick Martin, an executive vice president and 30-year AT&T veteran with both a bird's-eye view of and a crucial role in the company's bumpy history.
Tough Calls is the ultimate inside look at how AT&T tried to cope with a "perfect storm" of fierce competition, economic turmoil, and punishing media scrutiny. Mixing unflinching candor with love for the company he helped steer -- and clear respect for many of his long-time colleagues -- Martin takes you through boardroom and back room to shed unprecedented light on:
* How the 1996 bungled announcement of 40,000 layoffs nearly destroyed the company
* How flawed succession planning precipitated sharp declines in AT&T's stock price
* The never-ending, ugly turf battles with the "Baby Bells" brought on by the AT&T breakup
* How even small interest groups can have a tremendous influence on business decisions, and how the media are largely responsible for determining what is business news on any given day
Tough Calls is also a cautionary tale to be heeded by all businesses, using AT&T's experience in the brutal telecom wars as a backdrop for new strategies in weathering unforgiving business conditions. Just a few of the lessons to be learned include:
* How to avoid the most common mistakes that executives make, such as being held hostage by unrealistic expectations, waiting too long to make critical changes, and building their celebrity rather than their credibility
* How to balance internal and external communications, and how and when to deal with the business media
* How to improve relationships between PR executives and the "C" suite -- CEO, CFO, Chief Counsel, etc.--and how to make public relations more strategic
* How to build and sustain favorable brand recognition and investor allure even in the face of bitter competition and unpredictable market conditions
As candid and fascinating as it is constructive, Tough Calls is itself a call to attention and to arms, in preparation for the many battles that every business must eventually face, against fierce adversaries, and even within its own camp."
- GenresBusinessNonfiction
294 pages, Hardcover
First published November 26, 2004
2 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
Dick Martin
4 books1 followerDick Martin is a business writer specializing in marketing and public relations.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 26, 2014
This is an amazing read for PR people, and gives a great depth understanding of how trades of PR were in past. For a public company PR person, this is a must read.
Moreover, you must not expect global perspective from this book, from the title 'Lessons Learned From The Telecom Wars'. Dick Martin limited this book to AT&T and US industry.
Moreover, you must not expect global perspective from this book, from the title 'Lessons Learned From The Telecom Wars'. Dick Martin limited this book to AT&T and US industry.
October 19, 2019
The back cover says that this book is "an up-front seat for the roller coaster ride" and a "look at how a great company tumbled" that will give us a "tour of AT&T's wild ride" and "chart the dissolution of an American icon." Not one of those comments is even remotely warranted.
I was expecting to find interesting insider discussions of important questions like:
* Did AT&T make any mistakes during the "trivestiture" in January 1996 (akin to giving away the wireless licenses to the RBOCs in the 1984 breakup)? Martin doesn't say, beyond talking about the PR fallout of the layoffs, which right off the bat were themselves only a side issue of the broader business strategy.
* Was pursuing cable the right strategy for Armstrong to implement? Probably, but Martin doesn't weigh in on this.
* Did AT&T overpay for MediaOne? Of course, but again Martin is silent.
* Did AT&T further compound its cable problem by putting poor executives (first Hindery and then Somers) in charge of broadband? Not a peep.
* How should AT&T have handled the $2 billion @Home acquisition? Silence.
* Were all these problems unavoidable due to AT&T's pre-1996 succession planning problems? The only aspect of this question that Martin bothers to discuss is the PR fiasco surrounding Walter's departure. As if that were the most important aspect. He strikes me as having an exaggerated sense of his importance to the organization.
AT&T was a corporate icon for 130 years and had 4 million stockholders. Surely there were "hard lessons learned" as the subtitle claims, lessons that are valuable in the broader context of the modern corporation. However, from reading this book you would get the impression that AT&T's only mistakes were in communications. Martin gives us an incredibly myopic view of just the PR efforts related to AT&T's various missteps. Outside the PR business, who cares? Nobody! This could (indeed should) have been the business book with the broadest appeal in a decade. Instead we got a book that only PR people could stomach. It was so monumentally boring it literally put me to sleep. I bought this book to read about AT&T; if I cared about Martin's actions I would have bought his biography instead.
Despite naming the first chapter "Don't dance to the music of your own buzz" it seems that Martin has done exactly that. His book is the ultimate example of form over substance, confusing the important business questions facing AT&T with the buzz surrounding him and the communication of the answers to those questions. Whether the answers were the right ones or not, Martin is unwilling (or unable) to say. If this book is an example of the caliber of executive thinking at the level of Executive Vice President at AT&T no wonder the company sank so far so fast.
I was expecting to find interesting insider discussions of important questions like:
* Did AT&T make any mistakes during the "trivestiture" in January 1996 (akin to giving away the wireless licenses to the RBOCs in the 1984 breakup)? Martin doesn't say, beyond talking about the PR fallout of the layoffs, which right off the bat were themselves only a side issue of the broader business strategy.
* Was pursuing cable the right strategy for Armstrong to implement? Probably, but Martin doesn't weigh in on this.
* Did AT&T overpay for MediaOne? Of course, but again Martin is silent.
* Did AT&T further compound its cable problem by putting poor executives (first Hindery and then Somers) in charge of broadband? Not a peep.
* How should AT&T have handled the $2 billion @Home acquisition? Silence.
* Were all these problems unavoidable due to AT&T's pre-1996 succession planning problems? The only aspect of this question that Martin bothers to discuss is the PR fiasco surrounding Walter's departure. As if that were the most important aspect. He strikes me as having an exaggerated sense of his importance to the organization.
AT&T was a corporate icon for 130 years and had 4 million stockholders. Surely there were "hard lessons learned" as the subtitle claims, lessons that are valuable in the broader context of the modern corporation. However, from reading this book you would get the impression that AT&T's only mistakes were in communications. Martin gives us an incredibly myopic view of just the PR efforts related to AT&T's various missteps. Outside the PR business, who cares? Nobody! This could (indeed should) have been the business book with the broadest appeal in a decade. Instead we got a book that only PR people could stomach. It was so monumentally boring it literally put me to sleep. I bought this book to read about AT&T; if I cared about Martin's actions I would have bought his biography instead.
Despite naming the first chapter "Don't dance to the music of your own buzz" it seems that Martin has done exactly that. His book is the ultimate example of form over substance, confusing the important business questions facing AT&T with the buzz surrounding him and the communication of the answers to those questions. Whether the answers were the right ones or not, Martin is unwilling (or unable) to say. If this book is an example of the caliber of executive thinking at the level of Executive Vice President at AT&T no wonder the company sank so far so fast.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews