The Antihero

Ralph Faison: Didn't follow entrepreneurial father into family biz. Chose corporate world in 1983. Ran AT&T's cordless division, then Lucent's venture arm. Now consolidating RF path as CEO of Andrew. Thanks God for good fortune and wife for a knock on the head.

AT&T put me through Stanford. It was a gift. But later, as I was showing frustration with their manufacturing process, they remedied it by sending me to Bangkok to run the operation myself. So you have to be careful what you ask for. My first twelve years with AT&T, I moved eight times.

When AT&T launched Lucent, I led marketing and brand management. But after eighteen months, Lucent started a VC arm of its own. I became VP of that new ventures group. It allowed me to move away from the big corporate structure and into something more entrepreneurial. It was like going back to my roots.

We never did launch any dot-coms. I'd like to say it was our brilliant strategy, but, well, God looks after children and fools — and we didn't understand dot-coms. We were all just telecom guys. We did launch eight wireless companies and most are still successful: iBiquity Digital, Flarion, WatchMark, and Celiant, of course.

Celiant went from an internal group to a business overnight. But we couldn't find what we were looking for in a CEO. I credit my wife for the knock on the head that made me realize I wanted to do it. I had been in the VC arm for about five years, so there wasn't anybody saying, “Oh Ralph, don't go.” They had pretty much forgotten who Ralph was. Our strategy at Celiant was to become the consolidator of the RF path, not to be consolidated. But it was eerie how Floyd [English, chairman and then-CEO of Andrew] and I thought about the industry in the same way. Flying home it clicked: We would have to buy four companies to get the combination we could with Andrew.

Again, God was looking after children and fools. Andrew and Celiant together provided the strategy and balance sheet needed to withstand the downturn. Still, we had to get our house sized for the market. It's never pleasant to tell 1200 people their livelihood will be affected. Even with all the stories about mean, robber-baron CEOs, I have never met a human being that doesn't affect.

I am adamantly against the hero model of leadership. My job is to facilitate the talents of the people around me. If you haven't won their hearts and minds to the common vision you are trying to achieve, you may as well go home.