Musings between Tom Farley and J.R. Snyder Jr.
J.R.: It seems wireless operators are becoming "virtual" networks where some companies may merely operate in name only, like Virgin Wireless, others may operate by owning the spectrum but not the towers, or they may own everything. Verizon Wireless and Cingular seem to be the new empires, but Cingular has no assets currently in Qwest states, so I don't have a feel for them at all.
Tom: I can't tell Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile apart. They're just wireless carriers who may have wireline also, for all I know. Regional names give connectedness to place, an anchor, a local reference point. These new, strangely named companies could exist anywhere, which is what their marketing people want. No place identity. Roseville Telephone spent half a century building their good name, then ditched it when they became a regional telecom. They now call themselves SureWest. What the heck is a SureWest?
J.R.: Cingular, Verizon, and Qwest, are all names contrived by some socio-psychobabble-marketeer over paid MBA's. Even though U S WEST was post '84, I clearly remember the name U S West was created by Jack McAllister, an old Bellhead Network guy, the last CEO of that RBOC who was from Network. Forever after the company was run by Marketing people from Sales and the Business Office who hated the original U S WEST "mustangs riding in the dust" commercial campaigns and stamped every vestige of that out by 1989. It says something that they're trying to recreate that now with a hokey "Spirit of Service" campaign which tries to evoke the old image of the corporate culture we know is dead. It obviously irks me.
The name Qwest was the brainchild of that crook Joe Nacchio, the architect of the hostile takeover of U S WEST in 1999. He's still under investigation by the SEC, has paid one fine but that hasn't stopped him from, not ironically, resurfacing as part of the restructuring of MCI from bankruptcy.
My stomach literally flipped when Verizon and Verizon Wireless came out with its new name based on a cross between the Latin word "veritas" and "horizon." Oh, yuck.
T.F.: "Spirit of Service" indeed. They are capitalizing on the slogan used and made famous by The Pioneers, the retired Bell System employee group. History is no more important to the major telecoms than place identity; why are they using it now? Perhaps marketing has discovered, too late, that history is important, customer service over the generations is something to be proud of. It's too bad the old names are gone. How does a Nevada Bell customer relate to their local telco now called SBC? Strange times.
J.R.: Is it me or does this seem like a weird business climate all-together and telecom is an example of the larger picture? AmericaWest Airlines actually runs and owns part of its fleet. Mesa Airlines really owns the new small regional jets and operates them under the name of AmericaWest, U S Air and others. Airtran does the same thing for United and Delta.
Pan Am burned cash for almost 30 years before it died an ignomious death. United and American are on the verge. Therefore when AT&T says it's writing off $885 million of $43.8 billion, it may seem like a small change in percentage but I can't help but think that it's an indicating a deeper, more systemic problem. When analysts upgrade Qwest to "neutral" from "underperform" or "outweigh" while it's bleeding millions, that seems wrong to me.
T.F.:Telecom is personal to us so change bothers us more than it should. If we tracked how many companies Sony bought over the years, or how many airlines have changed names or gone out of business, well, we just wouldn't care. But we do care about telecom and want it to be more than an ordinary business. It no longer is. Some of the people and technology are still special but the old corporate culture special to telecom is gone or going. So we will always have a melancholy attached to these changes. It was a nice time, now we can only remember it.
J.R.: Hmm. Melancholy. From telephony to telecom. It isn't just the unique telecom culture, which fit me personally. It's also the larger picture: the loss of company culture in general, which I started bemoaning about 6 years ago. I think when I went to college in the early 70's we were the last of the college graduates who were told to get a liberal arts degree. With a broad education we'd go to work for a company, small, medium or large, and be "molded" in the ways of IBM, AT&T, BofA (then confined to California and Arizona only), Motorola, Chrysler, the Arizona Republic, Sturm Ruger and so on. I have a friend I went to high school and college with who worked for Motorola since college until he was laid off a few years ago and has the same sort of nostalgia about that business. For him, Iridium killed it. Different company culture, product (although somewhat related) but same outcome.
After that universities and colleges encouraged people to go to business schools, not liberal ed. People got rubber stamped in the philosophy of the Wharton School of Business. Something unique about Kathleen Pierz (internal link) is that she went to what was then called the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management in Phoenix which bucked this trend until recently when it completed its about face and renamed itself after Steven Covey and then fully embraced "The Seven Principles of Highly Effective People" or some such nonsense. Some time in the 80's they force fed on us, the managers at U S WEST, "The One Minute Manager", which I never read or any of those subsequent books, much to their chagrin. Which probably is what did me in . Now I hear it's a book called "Who Moved My Cheese?"
http://www.whomovedmycheese.com/ (external link)