Excerpt
More than any other individual alive, Craig McCaw embodies the incredible transformation and likely future of the telecommunications industry. He is one of the most fascinating executives in business today, an acknowledged visionary in communications, the billionaire whom even other billionaires find interesting.
This book's title refers to McCaw's long-term business focus: invisible airwaves that carry high-profit voice and data services. But it also suggests a deeper theme -- the managerial magic he brings to business. McCaw is astonishingly good at finding value where others see obstacles, doom, or just plain nothing. He seems to make money from thin air.
Describing himself as the master of the obvious, McCaw has redefined the idea of the executive. This is one guy rarely found in a suit, in the office, at a desk. More likely, he's kayaking, waterskiing, or piloting his jet high above the islands of British Columbia. When he talks about the freedom that wireless communications brings to the mobile worker, he knows it because he lives it. Contacting subordinates by voice mail, he is the virtual executive, more felt than seen. He makes money the new-fashioned way.
For the first eighty years of the twentieth century, people like McCaw had no place in telecommunications. The industry revolved around men in blue suits, white shirts, and sensible shoes who spent their lives inside a single gigantic company, AT&T, which resisted ideas that threatened its monopoly. Creative thinkers and quirky personalities worked elsewhere. Bill McGowan's MCI provided the notable exception, but the universe remained Ma Bell's until AT&T was broken up in 1984.
Today the telecom world is in turmoil. Giant companies are vulnerable because of their entrenchment in old technology and high cost. So they merge: Bigger must be better. At a different level, start-ups tap new pools of capital and maneuver to exploit opportunities created by stumbling giants and collapsing regulation. Everyone wants a share of the profit created by huge demand from businesses and consumers tapping the Internet. Increasingly, it's a game for the nimble and the daring. The telecommunications world has come around to Craig McCaw's way of business.
McCaw made one fortune in cable TV and another in cellular telephones. Now he's building a telecommunications empire of staggering potential through a collection of companies he controls: Teledesic, a satellite partnership with Microsoft's Bill Gates that is building a global "Internet in the Sky"; NEXTLINK, a company positioning itself to rival the Baby Bells with its own vast network of fiber-optic cable, wireless transmission services, and switching systems; CablePlus, a company that provides voice service, Internet access, and TV signals through coaxial cable; and Nextel, an international wireless telephone company with an expanding role in data services.
Each company is breathtaking in its ambition, hunger for capital, and risk-taking management style. Together, they provide a glimpse of McCaw's possible goal: one company capable of providing high-speed access to any point in the world, be it a cabin in the Cascade Mountains or a remote village in Asia. On the ground, a Teledesic community could also be served by a wireless network. For the Third World, that's the telecommunications equivalent of jumping from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. The idea has enormous social implications, and the potential for equally enormous profits.
Though this book focuses on McCaw, his story represents how the entrepreneur has moved from the fringes of the telecommunications business to the forefront. People such as McCaw, not the executives of major companies, have emerged as the visionaries who can adapt to a rapidly changing competitive landscape. They are the hunters, not the hunted. The management style and values they used to reach this point will be crucial in the future as the Internet fuels huge demand for sophisticated data services.
This book shows how McCaw's unique management style evolved by instinct and from periods of intense personal reflection and self-scrutiny. His emergence as a remarkable presence in global communications began with a crucial event in his youth.