Leadership Summit 2026: AT&T CEO John Stankey on Developing Technology and Talent in the AI Era

**Alison Beard** (0:02)
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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast, I'm Alison Beard.
There was a time when running a legacy institution was a sure path to success. But incumbency can now be a liability too, if leaders aren't able to adapt to quickly shifting industry dynamics. It's a balancing act. How do you change strategy without losing the parts of your culture and business worth keeping? AT&T CEO John Stankey has spent more than four decades inside the technology bellwether. But when he took charge, he didn't try to preserve the status quo. He sold off major businesses, refocused the company on connectivity, and began reshaping a culture built over 150 years to compete in a market that's changing faster than ever. I recently spoke with him as part of our HBR Leadership Summit, and we talked about why culture changes more slowly than strategy, how to reinforce corporate values through every talent decision, and why in-person collaboration is so important during periods of transformation. Here's our conversation.
When you stepped in as CEO, you made a quick strategic pivot, you sold off media assets, and I said refocused the company on its connectivity routes. And you've also spearheaded a cultural shift toward more market-based thinking. So what are the first steps in getting a large workforce like yours on board with both strategic and cultural change?

**John Stankey** (1:55)
I think the strategic aspect of it is a lot easier than the cultural aspect of it. From a strategy perspective, it starts with being really aggressive and consistent about your communication, and that communication has to start with the rationale of the strategy that's believable to your employees that they can look at and say, yeah, I can get behind that. And I understand that it seems to be consistent with the purpose and the direction of the business as you've defined it. The second thing you need to do is you need to lay out what the objectives are on that rationale. What are you trying to achieve? How are you going to evaluate whether you're making progress and having success around it? And then the third thing is you go and you build the right incentives that are consistent with that. So however you're going to measure those objectives, are you going to incent people in a variety of different ways? Certainly pay is one, but there's other ways that you incent and motivate folks in a very consistent fashion that's aligned with those objectives. And if you do those things well, and you're very consistent in communicating it, then usually you can get the organization to at least say, yeah, I know what the strategy is and I'm behind it.
Culture on the other hand is, first of all, it's not something that's entirely homogeneous. It lives in different ways and companies, and it's something that takes a long time to work through. Now, similar to strategy, you have to be pretty deliberate in your communication about it, in your direction, and how you're thinking about things. But it's got to be integrated literally into everything you do. It has to be a stated direction that shows up in how you communicate with folks, how you advance and promote individuals, how you recruit and bring individuals into the organization, how you manage performance and provide feedback.
Everything that you do literally has to be built around that culture, constantly reinforcing it. And the more that it's in the drip of the water every day, the more likely it's going to sprout, grow, and ultimately become part of what the business is moving forward. And like a plant, it takes a long time to grow.

**Alison Beard** (4:15)
Talk a little bit more about what you mean by a market-based culture and how you ensure it does spread and filter throughout the organization.

**John Stankey** (4:25)
It's a term we use because I think it's relevant for AT&T and maybe where AT&T is in its history.
And it starts effectively with the customer and the market and looking back in.
And I would draw that distinction because maybe for many years, AT&T was maybe more of an engineering-based culture. If you think about the legacy of AT&T-built labs and how communications and data communications infrastructure were built in this country decades ago, most of the ideas about evolution and innovation occurred in a lab someplace in New Jersey oftentimes. And then those individuals kind of decided what got worked its way into public consumption and into networks and into products that were that were put in place for customers. And that engineering culture is kind of in the DNA of the company as a result of that, where we think about what the technology can do internally, and then we'll decide how to package it and take it out and let the public consume it. And obviously, in the society we're in today and where technology is today, we've moved well beyond that. There's innovation coming from all different corners. And so now it's teaching people to understand that we really need to understand how customers want to use the products and services, what their pain points are, what the market requires needs to be met and filled, and how do we react and put our energy and talents around that. And that's one thing that's at the essence of a market-based culture and shift. And the second thing is kind of the deal with how we think about employees. Again, in that previous model, there was a lot of tenure-based constructs, and people who became very good and expert at what they did, based on repetitive cycles over long periods of time, doing that refined engineering and development that I talked about just a moment ago.