Chief Future Officer: Pascal Desroches, AT&T

Remember before dialing. Listen for dial tone. It's not like he was proposing to bring back the rotary phone.But when John Stankey became AT&T's chief executive officer in 2020, he sensed the company had strayed a little too far from its roots. There clearly was a need based on kind of where the investor base was and where performance was, to take a step back and say it was time to maybe simplify the business and get it more focused. America's oldest telecom had grown into a sprawling media and communicatio ...