James Olsen: AT&T’s Visionary CEO

(Four Seasons Magazine) — Ever since a federal anti-trust suit forced the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) to divest itself of three fourths of its $150 billion in assets, the company once regarded as one of the best run and most profitable corporations had been in a tailspin. The lumbering giant’s computer business was in shambles. The seven operating "Baby Bells" formed by the breakup appeared ready to overtake their progenitor.

The situation demanded Superman. Or, at the very least, a master impresario, a dynamo with fire in his belly who could shell shock a complacent, stuffy bureaucracy into no frills efficiency and do it with a smile. Enter James Olson.

Olson had done all the right things: Rising quickly through the ranks (his first phone task was shoveling silt out of manholes), he came to know more about the company’s diverse operations had people who ran them than just about anyone. He had even met his first wife Jean, a trainer of operators in Ottumwa, Iowa, during one of his numerous assignments.

But could a barber’s son from Devil’s Lake, North Dakota (pop. 6,000) weaned on cradle-to-grave corporate culture lead the charge into the computer age? Observed Paine Webber telecommunications analyst Jack Grubman: "He’s not the wrong man. He’s just not the right man."

Olson may not have sported an Ivy League pedigree. But his total immersion in the company, his shirt sleeve familiarity with all its underpinnings, his table-pounding, blunt-speaking, arm-waving style had given him a street smart edge that ivory tower critics would come to salivate over.

Indeed, Olson has transformed AT&T from a corporate fiefdom mired knee-deep in bureaucracy to the epitome of Fortune 500 leanness and meanness. For the first time, the company is market driven. It knows what the consumer wants, what he’s willing to pay and what is necessary to streamline itself into a broad-based telecommunications leader. In the last quarter of last year, AT&T moved from a $1 billion loss to a profit of $498 million in the fourth quarter. She is now crisply outperforming the seven "Baby Bells."

Although critics sometimes maligned Olson’s intensity and alleged lack of thoughtfulness, nearly everyone gave him high marks for hands on aggressiveness that got the job done. "He’s the most competitive executive I’ve ever met," said John Trutter, a former Illinois Bell vice president who particularly recalls Olson’s passion for golf and shooting birds. Adds Olson predecessor Charles Brown: "When Jim didn’t know something, he made a point to find out. He made himself an expert on everything."

Olson, at 63, believed his depression-era childhood galvanized his career. As a boy, he delivered newspapers to help out his family. AT 13, he spent a year working on the farm of his grandparents in Minnesota, getting up at 5:30 a.m. to do the chores then walking three miles to school. After high school in 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. While waiting to report for duty he took a temporary job at Northwestern Bell. He would never again work for another company. After military service he earned an accounting degree at the University of North Dakota but forsook a promising career in law in order to go back to Ma Bell. "We moved 14 or 15 times," Olson recalled. "My wife had to be a strong partner. My family was about to roll with the punches. Without them I couldn’t have done what I did."

Olson also credits his success to luck, good supervisors and teachers and wide ranging telephone experience. But he insisted that hard work was the key ingredient. "In all my assignments," he noted, "I think I may have worked a little harder than some of my peers."

AT&T may be back in the top spot, but Jim Olson would never have relaxed. "Anytime you rest on your laurels you’re going to go backwards. The only way that AT&T(and the U.S., for that matter) is going to maintain its leadership is to keep driving, run scared and continue to improve in every way you can."