Duane Ackerman, Chairman and CEO of Bellsouth

Duane spoke to my Entrepreneurs in Innovation class. He is a southern native and Sloan alum. I'm not so sure about the long-term viability of his company, but he had some interesting perspectives on leadership.

Duane Ackerman's Biography

Notes:

He has been CEO for 9 years

Was a Sloan Fellow (sent by AT&T)

Bellsouth has 63,000 employees

Mentioned several times the fact that his workforce is unionized which makes it difficult to compete in some situations with newer companies that aren't (e.g., healthcare is extremely expensive)

Can talk about communications for pages and pages not mention the phone:
* Instant messaging
* Email
* Skype
* Text messaging

2 fundamental trends for his company:
* From Narrowband voice company to broadband services company
* From a wireline to a wireless company

Gave financial background for Bellsouth

Wireline voice market is steadily declining

Cell and broadband DSL are growing

Been hard to make money retrofitting existing homes with fiber (due to digging up sprinklers, cable, etc.)

Most voice losses are going to wireless not cable (like 80%), but they are staying even w/ the wireless gains (from Cingular)

Have to adapt constantly in business; gave Bill Bryson analogy: earth is 3.8 billion years old and 99.9% of all species are extinct)

He looks for the following in a leader:
* Integrity
* Know your center
* Seek change
* Learn to live with ambiguity
* Treat associates with respect
* Be professional
* Take care of yourself (because no one else will)

You have to be pretty comfortable with yourself to be an executive because you will always have detractors and ideas will be critiqued constantly

Arrogance is a fatal flaw

Being professional means doing your job even when you want to

75 years = 650,000 hrs; Really need to think about what you want to do with the time you have left

Have to make tough calls w/o complete information.