CORPORATIONS
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The world's biggest company is a bundle of paradoxes wrapped in a string of superlatives. It makes a product that cannot be bought and lives on a commodity that cannot be seen. In a nation that idealizes competition, it has practically none. Unlike other corporate giants, it cannot set its own prices, which are carefully regulated not only by the Federal Government but by individual states. It has more direct contact with Americans than any other company, yet it often feels misunderstood. Few companies are more conservative; none are more creative. It has grown huge by paying attention to little things—little efficiencies, little economies, little people. It is that ubiquitous firm whose business is talk and whose product is the telephone: the American Telephone & Telegraph Co.
At A.T.&T., superlatives recur with the persistence of a busy signal. An outsize and aggressive utility, the company owns, operates and services 83% of the nation's 84 million telephones—nearly half of all the phones in the world. Its assets of $28 bil lion top those of General Motors, General Electric and U.S. Steel put together, and since 1945 it has raised enough new capital ($26 billion) to buy up the gold reserves of the U.S., Britain and several European countries. With 733,000 workers, the company employs a labor force greater than the population of Boston; its annual wage bill of $4.7 billion exceeds the gross national product of Ireland and Israel combined. A.T.&T.'s 1963 revenues, which reached almost $10 billion, amounted to more than the combined incomes of 30 state governments and accounted for 1.7% of the gross national product.
Long Noses. By virtue of his position as head of this colossus, the chief executive of A.T.&T. is automatically the biggest businessman in the nation. For eight years that post has been held by a square-cut, thin-lipped man named Frederick Russell Kappel, who happens to be very much like the corporation he heads—a creature of power and paradox. Chairman Kappel (rhymes with apple) mixes freely among the mighty in science, politics and business. The 65 corporate chiefs who make up the prestigious U.S. Business Council, a group that advises the Government, have elected him their chairman. Lyn don Johnson often calls Kappel to discuss the state of U.S. business, is also one of A.T.&T.'s best customers.
But for all the importance and respect his position brings, Fred Kappel, at 62, remains essentially a small-town boy who retains the earthy and often unsophisticated ways of the heartland. He runs the most modern of corporations from an old-fashioned office in a lower Manhattan building whose Doric columns and tiled floors are defiantly unmodern. In this Parthenon of the William Howard Taft era, Kappel still converses in the slangy, twangy argot of his native Albert Lea, Minn., can still cuss on occasion like the pole-hole digger he once was. One significant term that often salts his conversation is "long-nosed." Says Kappel: "It's a term I use to mean looking ahead, planning ahead. I like to think of the Bell System as a long-nosed company."
See-As-You-Talk. Today, the company that thrives on talk is creating quite a bit of talk about itself—most of it by being long-nosed. In search of new and better ways to transmit words