Walloping Walter

Let's review the response to AT&T's big personnel move.

Facts: AT&T names John R. Walter, 49, former chairman and CEO of R.R. Donnelley and Sons, its new president. Walter has spent his entire career at Donnelley. AT&T Chairman and CEO Robert Allen, 61, plans to turn the CEO job over to Walter in January 1998 and the chairmanship in May 1998 (Telephony, Oct. 28, page 6).

Spin: Disaster. Catastrophe. Another mammoth mistake by AT&T and the jinxed Allen. Everyone to the lifeboats, and good riddance to the hindmost.

The mass media and the general business press have climbed up one side of Allen and down the other on the Walter hiring. Media critics who weren't firing on Allen were strafing the AT&T board, which they depicted as Allen's numb, dumb, willing puppets.

Days later, the New York Times ran a head that read, "AT&T Choice Under Fire: Did Search Go Wrong?" The headline was posed as a question, but the story answered in the affirmative, mainly by soliciting the disapproval of executive recruiters who may-just may-want to be wranglers themselves on the next big executive cattle drive.

Admonitory though it was, media reaction was relatively mild. Wall Street reaction has been truly harsh. Financial analysts were particularly unhappy. The Street hit where it hurts: in the share price. In the three-day period following the Walter announcement, AT&T stock lost billions of dollars of its value.

Rewind: Walter could turn out to be the worst executive in human history. But Walter hasn't made any bad decisions for AT&T yet. Ever heard of another new executive who cost his company a paper loss in the billions before he even received his photo ID? Did the word "paper" come up? Therein lies the big problem: Donnelley is widely viewed as a nice, mid-sized company that does printing-puts information on paper.

The critics zero in on the paper but not the information.

The critics' chorus: Nice company, nice executive, nice career. But what's it got to do with the information age?

Counterspin: If executive recruiters, financial analysts and the general business press all think Walter is wrong for the job, he must have a lot going for him. I can think of two specifics to start.

First, R.R. Donnelley is an information company that has become remarkably successful in the digital age-unlike many ostentatiously "digital" companies. Donnelley nearly died before Walter got his hands on it in the late 1980s.

It has been a roaring success since. And not just on paper. Donnelley's ability to use digital technology to create new revenue streams has been at the core of its success in the 1990s.

A lot of the hysteria about Walter is based on the false assumption that "technology" is a contemporary synonym for a type of "magic" that can only be understood by an elite "priesthood."

Walter is deemed to lack the sacrament of ordination.

Ridiculous. True, technology is complicated. But understanding technology requires discipline and application, not ordination.

The technology business rests on business-not engineering-principles.

Nothing in Walter's past disqualifies him for this job. Those people who talk about technology as if it were a body of arcane knowledge not available to the general population are deeply conservative, even reactionary, choosing through their choice of language to protect their own status by building up the importance of their knowledge and tearing down other peoples'. The denunciation of Walter is the latest example of a destructive, self-protective, ultra-conservative tendency too deeply embedded in the technology industries and their financial sector satellites. The tendency is wholly destructive.

Second, Donnelley is local, based here in Chicago. Word locally is that Walter is far from being a mild, go-along, get-along type, a corporate Officer Friendly. In fact, he's a true executive heavyweight. Reports say he can take a punch, has knockout power in both hands, can go 15 rounds and enjoys a brawl.

Walter may not be up to the job. But there is nothing in his background that should prevent him from climbing into the ring. Or winning the fight.