Party Like It's 1999

As we move into this new year, I am remembering back to 1999…

At the height of my career as an independent management consultant, I flew to San Antonio, TX, to meet with the executive team of SBC Global. Leading the team were the President of Global and the President of Global Sales. They reported to the CEO, a legend in the telecom business, who a few years later would go on to buy AT&T, merging all operations under that brand, ‘cuz well, AT&T has a pretty darn good brand.

SBC was a massive conglomerate made up of several Regional Bell Operating Companies, such as Southwestern Bell and Pacific Bell, commonly known as “baby bells”. Actually, they were big businesses with even bigger concerns. The explosive growth of the internet was changing the game. Even more pressing, Y2K was fast approaching, and many feared a technological apocalypse.

I was at the table because the President of SBC Global had the bright idea to bring in the CEOs of their biggest customers for a series of tech conferences. That essentially meant hosting many of the senior leaders of the Fortune 50. You know, behemoths such as General Motors, Walmart, IBM, and the like. The objective was to address technology challenges like the explosion of the internet and the potential Y2K meltdown. As you may recall, at that time many people felt the future of the companies, perhaps even the future of humanity, was at stake. People feared that technology everywhere would just stop working. You know, power grids would fail. Planes would crash. Governments would collapse. Scary stuff like that.

With my black oxfords properly polished, my slate-grey gabardine neatly pressed, and my canary-yellow single Windsor knot carefully tied around my white button-down collar, I sat in that San Antonio HQ conference room to help those executives figure out how to pull off such a highfalutin series of conferences.

In those days, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates had been hosting events for CEOs on a private island. I explained to the SBC Global execs, if we were gonna attract Fortune 50 CEOs, while their CEO, Ed Whitacre, was making quite a name for himself, he wouldn’t be quite the draw of Buffett and Gates. We would need something more. As it happened, an associate of mine had just led meetings featuring the then Fed Chair, Alan Greenspan. We’d need a headliner like Greenspan. I thought we could get him.

I went on to explain that, in addition to Greenspan, we’d need to send private jets and hold the meetings in some exotic location, providing the most luxurious accommodations. I may have even joked that, instead of little mints on bed pillows, we’d need to leave gold bullion.

Finally, I explained that, at the end of the day, most wouldn’t actually come for any of that. They would come if other Fortune 50 CEOs were coming. FOMO is a powerful motivator. I was confident that once we got confirmation of one CEO, we could leverage that to attract others—two begetting four, four begetting eight, and so on.

All that took about ninety minutes. All that was really intended to illustrate how difficult and expensive the endeavor would be. Doable (yes, maybe), but extremely costly. Prohibitively so. Way, way outside the budget.

You see, I knew that no one there, except the executive in charge, thought this was a plausible idea. At the end of my presentation, there was a long pause. The question hanging in the air was: Do we really need to gather CEOs?

No one spoke. We all just let the question hang. A pregnant pause.

Then, I simply asked, “Who actually makes the strategic technology decisions in these big companies?” I thought I knew, but they needed to answer it together.

Chief Technology Officers, Chief Information Officers, and various related EVPs and SVPs. That’s who! They were the appropriate audience. They would be much easier and far less expensive to enlist. This was definitely doable! We spent the next ninety minutes outlining content, location and a list of likely attendees, including our plan to entice them, still applying the FOMO principle.

At the end of that first meeting, the President of Global Sales pulled me aside to tell me privately that it was the “best bit of consulting” he had ever seen. Yeah, well, have you ever had that moment playing a game—maybe tennis or basketball or softball or ping pong or chess or whatever—when you were playing with people way above your skill level yet somehow, miraculously, you rose to the occasion and played way above your game? It was like that.

We went on to hold those conferences with the appropriate tech execs, about thirty attendees in all, spread out over eighteen months, in San Antonio, featuring the Riverwalk instead of a private island beach. They were remarkable—both the meetings and the executives. Once trust was established, those execs, some from competing companies, shared their fears and ideas in complete, unvarnished candor. At the end of the first conference, the CTO from one big industrial company felt compelled to rise and proclaim, “I’ll be coming to our next meeting with my strategic plan ready to share it with all of you!” He did so, and so did most of the others. This was unprecedented.

At that time, the average tenure of a senior tech exec in a big corporation was only about eighteen months. Burnout was extremely high. They all had an impossible job, in a volatile time, with massive consequences. That made them compadres.

It was my great honor to serve with them during that stressful time. And they prevailed. Internet tech eventually went mainstream, making it somewhat more manageable. More importantly, at the dawn of 2000, we all had good reason to party and heave a collective sigh of relief. That Y2K bomb never did go off. Plus, as a keepsake bonus, everyone associated with those conferences got to experience just how truly great we are when we come together and, no matter how dire the circumstances may seem, rise to face the future.

As we move into this new year, I am remembering that…

#Happynewyear #Happynewyear2025 #Y2K #1999?

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