A professor taught him to speak
English and he became an organic chemist; Lee and her siblings moved a lot as
children as his career blossomed, living
in Germany, St. Louis, San Francisco, and
Wellesley, Mass.
“There were some pretty big cul-
tural shifts,” she says. “I didn’t wear the
right clothes and I got teased for being
Asian. My dad taught me to always strive
for excellence and that became a very
important tool to success. It starts with a
belief that you are as good as anybody and you don’t have
anything to apologize for or adjust for.”
Lake comes from a tiny town in rural Kansas with one
stoplight. She attended Kansas State University, studying
journalism, and worked on daily newspapers in her native
state. She got her first corporate job in 1986, moving into
communications at Southwestern Bell Telephone, one
of the many forerunners of the current AT&T. “I did the
employee newspaper and communications. It was a good
starting place because communication is foundational to
the success of all people in their work,” she says.
She moved up through the ranks in corporate advertising and marketing as the company merged and changed.
In 2003, she started a public-affairs discipline at what was
then SBC, and in 2007, she launched AT&T’s centralized
corporate citizenship and sustainability function. Today,
she is responsible for leading the company’s philanthropic and volunteering efforts and also coordinates
critical initiatives connecting social needs with business
objectives.
“Our philosophy is that our interaction with society is
fundamental to our business … we need healthy customers and healthy businesses to buy our products and
services. We need sustainable practices for our customers,
investors and employees,” she says.
The Long Haul
Both of these women are critical to AT&T’s insistence
that its future—as well as the future of human society—is
dependent on the ability to innovate to create long-term
solutions.
“The easy thing is to throw money at a
problem,” says Lake. “We ask, ‘How do I
solve this problem?’” She cites two exam-
ples: the Aspire program, a $100-million
program to address the growing prob-
lem of high-school dropouts, espe-
cially among Blacks and Latinos, and the
Peace Through Business program, to
which AT&T donated $100,000 to help
women business owners in Rwanda and
Afghanistan.
What’s Next?
What’s critical to innovation, Lee says, is to allow dif-
ferent perspectives to come to life. Lake echoes that
thought: “Our employee base is so diverse. The ability to
develop and train people, and turn them into leaders, is
dependent on diversity. I can’t define sustainability with-
out diversity.”
So what’s the next frontier for the company and these
two leaders?
“We need to engage all of our employees in the effort.
We want them to be passionate about understanding that
what’s good for society is good for the company,” says
Lake.
Lee notes that the speed of change at AT&T is far more
rapid than any she’s seen before. “In the one year I’ve
been here, I’ve seen the business model
transform at least a couple of times. The
ability to be able to pivot very quickly,
to seek out the next big hill, to be able to
drive a very large-scale organization to
those changes is unique. I’ve never seen
the imperative this high at other compa-
nies,” she says. I
