Life & Living:  A Tribute to Larry Mead.

Larry Mead passed on May 24, 2022, peacefully at home surrounded by family.  His son called me when Larry was on his deathbed in NJ.  Since I was in Baltimore, I wrote a “thank-you” to Larry and emailed it to his son and asked him to read it to Larry and his family.

Along with my Dad, Larry was the most important person in my life.  He changed my life and that of my family.  I loved working for him.  He was a professional role model:  inspirational, visionary, smart, hard-working, brave, stylish, cool, and fun and funny.  Everything I aspired to … and still aspire to.  Larry and my Dad never coached me; I just watched them go about their lives and work.

Larry was a role model Husband and Dad too.  He and wife Sue, Sue’s Mom, and their 5 children lived in a beautifully restored huge older home in Morristown, NJ.  As near as I could tell, Larry had done much of the restoration work himself.

I left The Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland (“C&P”) in 1978 for a rotational assignment at the Bell System’s headquarters (aka the AT&T General Departments) in Basking Ridge, NJ.  “Rotational” meant I would return to C&P after 3 years.  Daughter Emily was 5 mos. old then. Our 3-year rotational assignment in NJ ended when Emily was 28 (years not months).

Talk about whiplash:  from a remote outpost in a small local operating company to AT&T headquarters … from living in a small town in rural Western Maryland to the New York metro … from a house we sold for $35,000 to the house we bought for $90,000.

I had the good fortune of working for Larry for my entire time at the General Departments, from 1978 to 1983, first as a newly minted and one of the many 3^rd-level district managers in his “Central Office Maintenance” directorate and later, after Larry promoted me, as a 4^th-level division manager reporting directly to him.

It’s odd what you remember. 

The Mead home had a swimming pool which I first saw one summer Friday afternoon.  I was dropping off something important from the office that Larry needed to see on his day off.  I still remember he was in swimming trunks and topsiders planting shrubs around the pool.  Imagine that, an AT&T bigshot all dirty and doing his own landscaping!

We were invited to a really fun Holiday party at the Mead home and discovered it had a manual elevator; you pulled on ropes in the car to raise and lower it. 

Larry and Sue had a pop-up camper and used it for an annual family vacation to their favorite campground on the Gulf Coast of Florida.  The license tag was something like 7TToes, for the 70 toes in the immediate Mead family.

Larry grew up in Buffalo and graduated as a civil engineer from Clarkson College. 

He was a seasoned Long Lines 5^th-level, with the typical Long Lines pedigree of engineering and operations assignments around the country.  He did the 1^st 4ESS in Chicago when he was the Long Lines Central Region’s Chief Engineer.  I still remember a commemorative 4ESS circuit pack on his desk at Basking Ridge.

Larry had the vision and the guts to blaze new trails that were useful … and used … well into the future.  A useful description of leadership is vision, alignment, and motivation.  Larry was a big L Leader.

While leading the Bell System’s Central Office Maintenance initiatives was his “day job,” Larry, along with Mal Buchner and Tom Herr at Bell Labs, were, as far as I know, the pioneers and champions for the then nascent operations planning idea in the Bell System.  This was at the dawn of using minicomputer-based software systems to automate operational workflows.  Operations planning involved documenting “as-is” operational workflows, systems, and work centers … Measuring their performance across the Bell System. … Identifying the best automation opportunities for improving the workflows’ effectiveness and efficiency … Documenting the desired “to-be” state … Using a collaborative, transparent decision-making and governance process to prioritize investments … and Driving implementation and benefit capture.  The operations plan was documented in a big 3-inch binder called TNOP (Total Network Operations Plan).

This operations planning role naturally evolved to Larry leading a big chunk of the heavy lifting in planning and implementing the Bell System Divestiture.  At the time, it was the largest corporate restructuring in history.  A million people and $150B of assets needed to be divided among the 7 Baby Bells and AT&T.  And the damned thing needed to work after we separated something which had been designed, built, and operated as an integrated whole for nearly a hundred years.  Nothing like that had ever been done before.  There was no “how-to” to learn from.  There was only a 19-page legal document, the Consent Decree, to guide us.   It had to be completed in 2 years.  We figured it out and got it done.

In the waning days of 1983, Bill Ellinghaus, AT&T’s President, directed a small team of us to “inspect” the Bell System’s readiness to operate after Divestiture.  Four of us:  Larry, Errol U, John B, and I traveled all over the country for 2 or 3 months.  We went to all 19 Bell Operating Companies and all 6 AT&T Long Lines Regions.  We avoided the 7 Baby Bell headquarter cities, opting for the likes of Cedar Rapids, IA … Albany, NY …  Oakland, CA … Dallas, TX … Albuquerque, NM … Pittsburgh, PA … etc.   We tried to listen to a bare minimum of executive “dog and pony” shows.  We wanted to see the real world and the real people who would have to make Divestiture work.  We’d fly out Sunday night and visit network equipment sites and work centers and talk to the staff there. On Thursday night, we’d write a report on what we’d observed.  On Fridays, we’d fly home, polish our report, and get it to Ellinghaus.  It was grueling long hours of work and travel … but, thanks to Larry and our compatriots, fun.

After Divestiture, Larry moved to AT&T Network Systems as the sales leader responsible for building business with a new set of customers.  From near zero to hundreds of millions of new sales in a few years.  Unfortunately or not, I went to a different part of AT&T Network Systems … and learned I could fly on my own.  But when Larry was strategizing the next phase of his campaign to build the new business, he would invite me to a brainstorming session in an upstairs private room at the Il Gardenia restaurant.  It was like the good old days.

One last memory. 

Larry was a blackbelt workaholic. (Yeah, yeah … I hear you:  It takes one to know one.) 

Larry and I had this never-openly-acknowledged contest every day. Our communal coffee pot was in a hallway, about midway between his office and mine. The ”winner” was whoever got to work 1st and started the coffee. So, one night I’m worrying about some work thing and can’t sleep. I finally give up and head for the office. Basking Ridge was a massive building with underground parking, and maybe a dozen of entrances to the garage. But, before 6:00am, only 1 was open, presumably for the security and cafeteria staff.  So, about 4:30am, I come in that entrance and drive towards our parking area. Then I see a car coming towards me.  Who can that be?  As we pass, I see it’s Larry’s diminutive wife, Sue, in their family station wagon. WTF, I mutter to myself, it’s impossible to beat this guy; his wife drops him off at work at 4:30! 

Smile.

Larry lives on in my mind and my heart.