Take another look.

The Frontier that lies before you now isn't what it was a few years ago.

Frontier Corp., formerly Rochester Telephone, has a nice gold star to its credit for launching the pro-competitive Open Market Plan in 1993. It was a bold move by the late Ron Bittner, then CEO of Rochester Telephone. After all, telecommunications legislation was hardly more than a good idea then. A principled goal without much sense of direction or realism.

The OMP gave us all something to latch onto. It was a model for unbundling, which had vexed other incumbents. The plan called for diversifying the company's competitive businesses. A wholesale/retail marketing strategy-at that time unheard of-was its centerpiece. A self-imposed price freeze was expected to keep consumers happy. Meanwhile, it ambitiously put the company on path to national expansion and aggressive technology deployment.

This was how competition was supposed to be. And would be. The OMP made Frontier the company to watch, both in the industry and on Wall Street.

Here comes the but. Does the OMP give us enough evidence to declare that Frontier was the first true upstart? You need to know the rest of the story.

The OMP would go on to glory, becoming a blueprint for the Telecom Act of 1996. Frontier itself, however, would suffer from a succession of problems:

* Brand weakness

* Legacy back-office systems

* A lack of Internet-related investment

* Old-school marketing

* Poor customer service

* Exorbitant operational costs

These factors and others combined to slow Frontier so much that in a matter of two years it lost its biggest customer. And about 30% of its market value. It watched other emerging carriers grow wildly in the environment it had championed and compete successfully on the principles it supposedly had mastered.

It turned out that while the OMP was an inspired move, Frontier failed to extend strategic competitive thinking to every point of its enterprise.

In such a competitive field, you'd think that might close the book on Frontier. A great competitor that almost was.

Luckily, the company's current CEO is no average Joe. With drama and flair, Joe Clayton, picked by Ron Bittner to be CEO before Bittner's death last year, is leading Frontier's resurgence.

In less than a year, the marketing-savvy and technology-adept Clayton has:

* Aligned Frontier's eight business units under a single brand

* Initiated a project to integrate the billing processes of these units

* Acquired and expanded an Internet unit

* Introduced a new sales philosophy based on consultative marketing

* Improved customer service

* Cut costs by cutting headcount

As Clayton sees it, Frontier is now one-third of the way through a three-phase makeover. Phase One was about correcting past mistakes. Phase Two is about gathering momentum to make these change stick. Phase Three will move the remade company into the operational fast lane.

"It's really a two-year to three-year process," Clayton says. "You can change somethings quickly, but changing a whole culture is more difficult."

So why even try? Before he lit out for Frontier, Clayton was colorful star player at Thomson Consumer Electronics, another company he helped turn around. By the mid-1990s, he decided to parlay his marketing strength, technology experience and telecom industry connections (with Ameritech's Dick Notebaert, among others) into a new career.

After a quick stop at the doomed Baby Bell's Tele-TV venture-"good technology, lousy planning" is Clayton's review-he took note of Frontier's diverse collection of businesses. "I talked to AT&T, GTE and a lot of start-ups [about jobs], but I liked the asset base here."

Lucky for Frontier that he did.

Frontier was not an upstart competitor when it launched the OMP. It was a company with a pretty good idea. A company that probably wasn't in the best position to execute it.

Frontier is remaking itself, tossing out its diploma from the old school and working its way through the new. It's refitting itself with a new culture and new attitude, and acquiring the leanness and muscle to meet its ambitious ideals. Most important of all, it's led by a person who thinks differently, acts differently and expects more of those around him.

Now that's what I call an upstart.