Benjamin Ola. Akande, dean of the George Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology at Webster University, is a widely accomplished and experienced executive. Yet at one moment during his interview of AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson on Tuesday at World Wide Technology’s headquarters in Creve Coeur, Akande sounded like an eager youth.
“AT&T and Apple enjoy the mother of all partnerships,” Akande said of the partnership that created the first iPhone. “How did you do it? Did you call Steve Jobs and say, ‘Hey, man, let’s do business!’?”
In large part because of his leadership of AT&T through the development of the first iPhone, Stephenson was recognized by the Walker School at Webster University as its 2014 CEO of the Year. Stephenson visited St. Louis on Tuesday to receive the award and talk to Akande before a standing-room-only auditorium of faculty, students, alumni, executives and host David Steward, founder and chairman of World Wide Technology (WWT).
Introducing Stephenson, Steward said that AT&T was the first client of his systems integration firm that now has more than $6 billion in annual revenue and more than 250,000 employees throughout the world. “That’s when we should have been called ‘Weldon Parkway Technology,’” Steward joked, referencing a road that runs past WWT’s world headquarters where its first office was located.
Stephenson talked at length about how AT&T and Apple worked together to develop and launch the iPhone. After two years of secretive development, Stephenson said, Jobs first showed his partners at AT&T a prototype at a meeting in Atlanta in 2007 – not long before “the worst financial crisis anyone in this room has ever experienced,” Stephenson said. Given the economic climate at the time, many companies would have delayed a new, untested product or given it a soft launch. AT&T did just the opposite.
“In 2008 and 2009, the world contracted and there was a vacuum just as the mobile internet was in its infancy,” Stephenson said. “We decided to invest at historic levels. People were pulling out, but we jumped in.”
Now AT&T is “the largest telecommunications company on earth,” Akande said, with $129 billion in revenue in 2013.
Stephenson shared credit for the leadership at AT&T that gambled on this product and partnership and won. Edward Whitacre Jr. was president and CEO of AT&T in the early development days of the iPhone. Stanley T. Sigman was president of wireless at AT&T who first brought the project to the company board. And Stephenson said he did not care if he is remembered by name, so long as he leaves the company in strong hands when he steps down.
“I don’t care if anybody remembers my name,” he said. “I just want to find somebody smarter than me to do my job when I am done.”
Stephenson’s annual salary is $26 million. Forbes places him 34th among all CEOs for compensation. That is not bad for someone who entered the industry mounting 9 inch tapes onto tape drives “a thousand times a night” in a Southwestern Bell computer room. And he did not land that first job for what he knew, but rather who.
“I was hired in the old-fashioned way,” he said. “My brother got me on.”
For extended coverage of Stephenson and Akande, see the Business section of The St. Louis American on May 15.
