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Success Down Under: How Frank Blount Took American Know-how Overseas to Transform Australia's Biggest Telecom
"Help the export situation. Send Frank home,"
read the sign carried by the worker picketing the
Sydney office of Frank Blount, an American,
who had just arrived in Australia to transform
the country’s government-owned telecom into
a public company. As one of his first actions on
the job, he’d let go 5,000 workers on the padded
company payroll, hence the demonstration in
front of his office.
But whereas the union was nervous about
changes the Yank might make, government
officials and board members who chose Blount
were delighted with his arrival. They had wooed
him for 11 months to take the job.
Blount, MBA ’69, was the right man for the job.
With a 30-year career at AT&T, he was one of
five group presidents reporting to its chairman.
He was in charge of four business unit divisions
comprising the Communications Products Group,
and two large cost centers: Information Technology
and Material Logistics. Working his way up through
the AT&T company beginning in engineering at
Southern Bell (later BellSouth), there wasn’t
one piece of telecom that he hadn’t worked in,
making the executive a well-vetted and proven
leader – one the Australians were bound and
determined to hire. They were offering Blount
nothing short of the capstone of a career.
 State: You took on a big challenge in 1991 in
accepting the CEO position at Telstra. What made
you interested in the job?
Blount: At first, I turned it down flat. It was halfway
around the world. I already had moved my family
17 times in 30 years. My wife, Mary Ellen, and I had
two grown sons. Both were out of the nest and
working at AT&T at the time. Three of our parents
were still living. Plus, with pressure from the sitting
president, George Bush, I had accepted an interim,
part-time position as CEO of the New American
Schools Development Corporation in Washington,
D.C., along with continuing my group president
responsibilities at AT&T.
Still, the recruiters had planted a doubt in my mind
about staying at AT&T. I was at the number two
level at AT&T, and at 54 years old, I realized that
I might not ever get the top job. The Australians
were proposing something that resembled the old
Bell System before divestiture in 1984, a completely
diversified but integrated telecoms company;
putting all the services together – yellow pages,
long distance, local mobile, etc. This represented
a much better opportunity for competing telecom
companies rather than being banned by regulation to
offering an integrated group of products. In addition,
the Australian government had a plan to introduce
full-bore competition for Telstra for all customers
and for all communications products beginning in
1992, months after I would start as CEO of Telstra.
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