The Boston Globe Business Book Review Column

Dec. 19–FORMER INSIDER CHRONICLES AT&T’S DECLINE: For a public-relations lifer at AT&T Corp., Dick Martin has written a surprisingly interesting, blunt, and dishy account of the crackup of Ma Bell.

And unlike so many corporate memoirs of its ilk, “Tough Calls” will appeal to people far outside the world of telecommunications with its universalized lessons about corporate management, communications, and coping with dysfunctional business personality types.

Martin spent 32 years with AT&T, retiring in 2003 as its executive vice president for PR. As such, he had a front-car seat in the AT&T rollercoaster ride, from its antitrust breakup in 1984 that spawned the Baby Bells, to its disastrous acquisition and spinoff of computer maker NCR and a spate of ill-fated diversification measures including former chief executive C. Michael Armstrong’s $100 billion gamble on cable television.

Once the dominant titan of corporate America, AT&T has shriveled to a business telecommunications service provider that largely abandoned the consumer market. Last April, Ma Bell suffered the indignity of getting tossed from the Dow Jones industrial average in favor of her offspring, Verizon Communications.

Citing the old saw that “experience comes from what you do, wisdom from what you do badly,” Martin gives his first-person account in 16 chapters, each of which begins with a one-paragraph summary of a lesson he learned about everything from managing expectations to mediating upper-management mudfights.

Here and there you’ll find a little too much untranslated telecom-speak, like “two-way fiber to the node.” But mostly Martin is candid, even catty at times.

Former AT&T chief executive John Walter was nothing but “a cardboard cutout.” Current chief executive David Dorman’s insistence on living in Atlanta and commuting to New Jersey cost AT&T shareholders $305,000 last year, he says.

Both led an executive suite that “adhered to the cesspool theory of decision-making, refusing to deal with an issue until it floated to the surface,” Martin writes.

And when AT&T got into the cable business, which by extension meant delivering late-night pornographic movies, the damage to the iconic brand was huge, the equivalent of “parading Ma Bell down Main Street clad only in a thong and pasties.”

If, as now seems likely, AT&T is bought by one of the Bell carriers, or just fades away to the legendary brand graveyard alongside Pan Am and Woolworth, Martin offers what may prove to be a fine epitaph for what went wrong.

“Great companies, like countries, need a ‘sustaining myth’ that binds their people together in a worthwhile undertaking,” Martin writes. As AT&T’s core long-distance phone business began crumbling in the face of competition and alternatives such as wireless and e-mail, Martin says, the company too quickly “suggested that AT&T’s past had come to a dead end in an ‘unsustainable business’ ” and moved into manage-the-decline mode.

“We failed,” Martin writes, “to articulate a mission that was worthy of our past and capable of driving our future.”

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.

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