End of the Line: Rise and Fall of AT&T

[cr6196]

[amazonsearch]End of the Line: Rise and Fall of AT&T[/amazonsearch]

 

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned here as this is a John Malone recommendation.

 

Really good book about a really interesting topic. As with most business books, depth is a bit lacking and you have to be willing to draw your own conclusions. The writing is also fairly poor and confusing in parts. Despite this, the book is worth reading because the subject is so interesting and, whilst the execution is poor in places, the writer clearly benefited from interviews with those involved.

[Guest ajc]

 

I finished this a few days ago. It was easy to read and gave some good insights into how difficult it is to merge different business cultures, even if their technologies have some real overlap.

 

John Malone doesn't face much criticism, Mike Armstrong gets a ton.

That's probably how it should be. However, I couldn't help but wonder if his failure was as much of a sure thing from the start as Cauley seemingly made it out to be. Maybe it was, who knows?

 

That said, Armstrong and his top people definitely made a bunch of extremely risky, leveraged bets and that stupidity was something they absolutely couldn't recover from when the market turned downwards.

If nothing else, it's a relatively good read about various industry cultures, the danger of trying to please Wall Street and the importance of always running your business in a financially conservative way.