Corporate Malefactors Of Great Pelf Really Grease The Skids

On the same day they sacked John Walter, I was commiserating with an old acquaintance who’d been given the boot last winter. Come to think of it, we were talking over the same AT&T lines Walter is no longer responsible for. My acquaintance was telling me about his severance package. It amounted to something like six months’ pay, seven if he could be out of the building by noon.

He’s beginning to worry. The money’s about to run out and so are the prospects.

A lot of people are worried. Heads are rolling like logs downriver, the big timber along with the deadwood. I wonder if I shouldn’t lay mine on the block.

Last December, Michael Ovitz left Walt Disney Co. after 14 months with a severance totaling $90 million. Apple Computer’s top executive, Gilbert Amelio, lasted 15 months and left with $7 million. And now, AT&T has given Walter $26 million to pursue other career options.

You could get me for a lot less than that.

Ordinary Americans, even those solidly in the middle class, can’t begin to relate to money like that. They’re jaded reading about athletes signing contracts that sound like the GNP of a small country. But most people I know have come to expect it in professional sports; it’s only show business, not real life.

Somehow, it’s more obscene when the board of a corporation pays off a president or CEO who wasn’t around long enough to learn everybody’s name. What particular talents do these stuffed shirts bring to the workplace? None that I can see.

Walter had been president of AT&T for barely eight months, a few paychecks past the initial probation period at most places. The board decides he’s making a botch of it and puts him in clover.

You have to laugh at a bunch of clowns like that. This is a company that in 1993 spent $347.1 million on what it called “consulting and research services.” That was $210 million more than it had spent for the same services in 1990.

But it’s not funny to the 40,000 workers AT&T laid off early last year. The company wouldn’t come out and say in plain English that they were being laid off. That’s not the corporate way.

“The idea,” an AT&T spokeswoman said, “is that everybody has been asked to step out into a parking lot.” The ones not invited back in were being “unassigned.”

Unassigned, my eye. They were being told to get lost, and AT&T had brought in a team of “facilitators” to help them find their way out of town. “Sizing up their skills” is the way AT&T described it, having already sized them up. In the modern corporation, a facilitator performs a kind of lethal injection. (It’s a mystery to me where they get these people. Can you imagine a child saying, “Mom, when I grow up I want to be a facilitator”?)

This is all part of “re-engineering the corporation,” a phrase buzzing around boardrooms like a tsetse fly. “The payoff is dramatic improvement in cost, quality and customer satisfaction,” one of the panjandrums of corporate America blustered last year. It was none other than Robert E. Allen, AT&T’s board chairman.

Senior managers like to throw around two-bit words. “Quality” can mean anything and everything, and no one pinned Allen down. All we know is that this was the same visionary who hired John Walter, hailing him as a wonder worker, and eight months later wondered why he hired him.

Not enough “intellectual horsepower,” an AT&T board member condescendingly said. I don’t know what kind of management advice AT&T got for its $560 million, but senior management is the last place to look for intellectuals. The corporate mentality wants conformity, not contrariness.

I’m a contrarian all the way. I can’t think of a board anywhere in corporate America that wouldn’t be seething with discord within a week of my arrival. I’d make sure of it. But in my fantasies, I imagine putting in nine months somewhere - AT&T maybe - and bailing out.

I had no idea they were throwing that kind of money around. Then again, look at the company you have to keep.

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