Vladimir, the restructuring I meant was mainly a reduction in the number of levels of management at AT&T, as mentioned recently by John Walter. It seems that the current structure is leftover from pre-1984 days, when T had a lot more employees. Now that T is much smaller in terms of personnel, Walter feels that there is no need to maintain the same number of levels of hierarchy. In other words, T has too many chiefs for the current number of Indians. His comments about this recently were heartening to shareholders, which is why I had hoped he would focus more on that this week, rather than the "growth initiative"/"core earnings" semantics (and obvious decrease in 1997 earnings expectations). Also there was the matter about T spending too much on outside consultants - nearly $1 billion/year (I had seen a prior figure of $600 million/year, but the near billion was Walter's figure). This would indicate that management needs to do more of its own work, rather than passing it off to an outside firm. Walter used the analogy that "we need to learn to fish, not pay someone else to fish for us", or something along those lines.
Thanks for the comments. As far as telecom goes, I think T has a lot of potential but a lot of work to do in improving its management at all levels. Sprint and WorldCom are better managed, in my opinion, but lack the economies of scale that T has. Similar story with MCI, though that will now be part of British Telecom.
I wonder about the RBOC's also as an investment; they still have the highly valuable connections to the local customer, worth even more probably with the potential copper wire capacity expansion available with ASDL and similar technology. And with many households adding multiple lines, the extra lines are virtually all gravy for the RBOCs. I happen to like SBC as a reasonably well managed RBOC in a high growth area, potentially being able to increase profits if its buyout of PacTel goes through. SBC also has a large investment in Telefonos de Mexico, which is not often reflected in the price. The RBOCs also seem to get the upper hand politically. Hard to say where to put one's money in telecom. But this is just the AT&T folder and I don't claim to be an expert. Best wishes to all, this is a well-commented "thread".
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