End of the Line

AT&T watchers will probably spend years, if not decades, debating the finer points of what went wrong and who, exactly, was to blame for the company's spectacular collapse.

No single decision felled AT&T. Rather, the company's demise came about by a thousand cuts, starting with the decision to bring in Armstrong as the CEO. That was compounded by the decision to keep Dan Somers on as the CFO. Then came the MediaOne deal, and everything unraveled from there. There were scores of other bad decisions in between, each linked to the other in a mad daisy chain of managerial incompetence. By the time it all came to a head in the summer of 2000, AT&T was teetering on the edge of financial ruin. By one measure, it was quite a feat to pull off. In just 36 short months Armstrong and his team managed to take one of the sturdiest survivors of history and reduce it to a question mark. The last time AT&T was in that much financial trouble Alexander Graham Bell, quite literally, was still on the payroll.

1. End of the Line
2. In the Beginning
3. Trouble in (Long-Distance) Paradise
4. Changing of the Guard
5. The Salesman from Central Casting
6. The Big-Picture Guy (a.k.a. Dan Somers)
7. Rescue Plan
8. The Cable Cure
9. Sprinkling Stardust
10. The Scent Gland on the Deer
11. MediaOne — Going for Broke
12. A Giant Leap of Faith
13. The Perfect Storm
14. Cash Crunch
15. The End

• Epilogue: The Next 100 Years
• Appendix A: So How Did Investors fare?
• Appendix B: How This Book Was Put Together

It starts of bad, as the author seems to have a chip on her shoulder against the whole upper management of AT&T. But it gets better, when she describes the different political turns internal to AT&T, which is pretty enlightening, but not very flattering.

All in all, it is an OK book, but it is mostly of interest to those who have worked for AT&T or have an emotional tie to it (i.e. mostly Americans). For us Europeans, it is a book about a company, that you may miss, but wont kill you if you read it.