11/23/98 LUCENT: CALLING ALL MAVERICKS

Return to main story

LUCENT: CALLING ALL MAVERICKS

Lucent Technologies Inc. (LU) has two women in the highest reaches of its management team and has installed dozens more just below them. Its playbook: Ignore the usual diversity somersaults. Toss hiring quotas and gender-based succession planning. Just find good people, hold them to high standards, and judge them on performance.
That's Lucent's line, anyway. Its executives also talk about the quest for intellectual diversity--for people who bring specific talents, who have lived abroad, or who have a special experience with a market or client group. ''If you bring in diverse perspectives, the demographic diversity follows,'' says Patricia F. Russo who, as executive vice-president for strategy and administration, is Lucent's highest-ranking woman.
In truth, Lucent does promote the same sort of mentoring relationships that other big companies do to foster women's advancement, and it sustains some 30 women's employee networks. Yet it also mostly lives up to its own billing as a meritocracy. Spun off three years ago from AT&T (T) and caught up ever since in fierce competition with telecommunications-equipment rivals Cisco Systems and 3Com, Lucent simply hasn't had time to install a glass ceiling.
HEIRS APPARENT. Just 3 of its 20 corporate officers are women, an above-average but unspectacular statistic. What's more impressive is that Russo, 46, and her near-equal female counterpart, 44-year-old Carleton S. Fiorina, have jobs at the highest level in what was long a male-dominated industry. Both are fair bets to take over as CEO someday. Below them, women make up 19% of Lucent's 328 vice-presidents and executive directors and 25% of all middle managers.
Lucent started out with a strong inheritance from parent AT&T, which has long pursued diversity and family-friendliness. But as it prepared for independence, the new company was also able to draw together a varied management team, mostly from outside the corporate mainstream. Russo, an IBM (IBM) sales veteran, was the first woman to head an AT&T business unit. Fiorina, now group president for the key Global Service Provider business, joined AT&T after drifting through a succession of jobs, then moved from sales to engineering to marketing. Lucent ''was a part of the [AT&T] organization where people who were mavericks gravitated,'' bringing diversity with them, says David A. Nadler, chairman of Delta Consulting Group.
Then-CEO Henry B. Schacht, recruited from Cummins Engine Co. (CUM), and President Richard A. McGinn tried to define a new culture based on performance. ''This company is more of a meritocracy, and these are people who thrived in the environment,'' said Peter Bernstein, president of telecom consultant Infonautics Consulting Inc. McGinn, now chairman and CEO, encouraged managers to take on unfamiliar challenges, something that appealed to women such as Russo who, after turning around Lucent's business-communications-systems unit, was handed responsibility for strategy and administration.
It's not a company for the faint of heart. ''I'm not going to tell you this place is heaven,'' says Kathleen M. Fitzgerald, 48, the daughter of an AT&T operator who is senior vice-president for public relations. ''It's relentlessly going after customers,'' setting a pressure-packed pace. But top women seem to be thriving in that culture. No diversity somersaults needed.
By Roy Furchgott in Murray Hill, N.J.

Return to main story