Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, is a man who can’t sit still. He recently spoke to CNN about the company’s current situation, how they can’t find enough skilled labor in America. We’ll get to that in a second. The thing we want to highlight is an account that Alex Elizardo, a student at the University of Texas, had with Stephenson back in 2008:
“It all happened at a really fast pace. He’s always looking at the time and multi-tasks a lot. He’ll check the stock price, go to a meeting, check with his secretary, check the stock price again, and go to another meeting.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the life of a Chief Executive Officer. You sit in an office all day, check your stock, go to a meeting, check your stock, and hope that everything you do makes your investors happy. Is that the kind of leadership that AT&T needs? Analysts often talk about long term versus short term strategies. If your version of “short term” means checking your stock price every hour or so, that says a lot about how you run your company.
Now back to the gist of the CNN piece, Stephenson is pissed off that he has to interview 11 people just to find one who is barely competent enough to fill an open position. What’s AT&T doing to solve the problem? They’re pouring $350 million into project “Aspire”, which aims to help kids finish High School. That’s incredibly noble, but also a bit hypocritical. AT&T has 10,000 fewer employees this year compared to last year. Where have those jobs gone?
Anyway, if you want this author’s opinion, he thinks that American companies should adopt the German attitude when it comes to the labor market. Trade schools, internships, the type of programs that get young people into the workforce as soon as possible and trains them to do the jobs that said companies need. That gives young people skills and more importantly disposable income, which then gets fed back into the economy.