Jeff,

I have been thinking about AT&T. I realized that at least the first three levels of the company, the technicians, the managers and the area managers as well as the engineers and specialist (Non supervisory managers) are no longer interested in the senior management at all.

It appears that everyone from the director level up has been purged of anyone that has a clue about what the company does and have been chosen for how well they agree with what ever commands come down from the executive suite.

The problem is the company is now being run by a CEO that is trying to chase the latest fad rather than be a telecommunications company. This is the same type of work that previous CEO did and that CEO left the company with debt equalling its market cap. But now the problem is worse. The current CEO wants to push people the way Elon pushes people, but Elon runs companies that make people millionaires, make people take ownership and offer challenges and advancement. AT&T does none of those things. The vast majority of the employees at AT&T will spend 30 years doing the same or similar job with similar responsibilities for 30 years. What AT&T offered was good wages, good benifits and the ability to work where you grew up. The current CEO actually wrote memo saying that was gone, and he has take away pride, and benifits.

From my perspective, most of the frontline and first and second level managers no longer care if the company stays in business or not. Some see it as being better if it didn’t stay in business.

The owners elect the board. The board hired not one but two disastrous CEO’s, it is apparent that the owners are no longer capable of operating a telecommunications company. What is more, this seems to be the norm for most of the industry.

While AT&T is no longer is in the S & P 500 it might actually be the norm for major companies in the USA right now.

So, yes over valued. Possibly extremely over valued. The infrastructure underlying the USA is crumbling, the people who actually do the work are at best ambivalent about the work that they are doing and the state of the company they work for, at worst they see the company as a corps to be carved up and the executives as bozos to the be despised and ignored as much as possible.

Cheers
Qazulight