Armstrong, C. Michael 1938–

International Directory of Business Biographies, (2005) by C. Chien

C. Michael Armstrong 1938–

Former chairman and chief executive officer, AT&T Corporation

Nationality: American.

Born: October 18, 1938, in Detroit, Michigan.

Education: Miami University of Ohio, BS, 1961; Dartmouth Institute, Advanced Management Program, 1976.

Family: Married Anne Gossett; children: three.

Career: IBM Corporation, 1961–1978, various positions; 1978–1980, president of Data Processing Division; 1980–1983, corporate vice president and assistant group executive; 1983–1986, senior vice president and group executive for Information Systems and Communications Group; 1986–1987, director general of IBM Europe and president and a member of the board of directors of the IBM Europe/Middle East/Africa Corporation (EMEA); 1987–1988, president director general of IBM Europe and CEO of EMEA; 1988–1992, president and chairman of EMEA; General Motors Corporation, 1992–1997, chairman and CEO of Hughes Electronics; AT&T Corporation, 1997–2002, chairman and CEO; Comcast Corporation, 2002–2003, chairman; 2003–2004, nonexecutive chairman.

Awards: Honorary Degrees, Pepperdine University, 1997; Loyola Marymount University, 1998; Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2000.

■ The 31-year IBM employee and former AT&T chairman and CEO C. Michael Armstrong retired as nonexecutive chairman of the board of Comcast Corporation in 2004. In a bold, historic move to reestablish itself as an end-to-end carrier during the dot-com boom, Armstrong's AT&T acquired two of the four largest U.S. cable-television companies for $102 billion in 1998. With the dot-com collapse, fraud-assisted telecom depression, unyielding regulatory battles, high debt load, and the sheer complexity and size of the acquisitions, Armstrong was forced to break AT&T up in 2001. He had joined AT&T in 1997 after five and a half years as chairman and CEO of the Hughes Electronics subsidiary of General Motors Corporation. At Hughes, Armstrong expedited development

C. Michael Armstrong. AP/Wide World Photos .

of DirecTV to establish one of the first digital-broadcast systems. Armstrong had joined Hughes after 31 years with IBM Corporation, where he eventually led international operations and was a member of IBM's senior executive committee. He was described by analysts and co-workers as a strong, affable, and intensely competitive sales and marketing executive who managed to salvage many investor assets during the fraudplagued dot-com era.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Armstrong's athletic and future U.S. Marine Corps careers ended due to a gridiron shoulder injury. Surgery upon the shoulder resulted in his right arm being shorter than his left. In the place of football Armstrong made time to be the president of his fraternity, Sigma Nu, and to work for the allfraternity council, the college publications board, and the honorary business society. In the April 22, 1996, issue of BusinessWeek he recalled how his mother's motto—"no limits"—inspired the family while his father struggled to start a business after being laid-off; Armstrong worked odd jobs to pay for tuition, successfully attaining his degree in business and economics in 1961.

Shortly after his graduation Armstrong married Gossett and joined IBM Corporation in Indianapolis as a systems engineer. Once inside the rapidly growing computer company he soon moved over to sales and marketing, attending sales training programs with the future IBM CEO John Akers. Colleagues described Armstrong as intensely competitive; with respect to the tennis played during the training programs, one colleague told BusinessWeek , "He'd always be the last guy off the court" (June 20, 1988).

Following Akers up the IBM corporate ladder, Armstrong attended a Dartmouth Institute for advanced-management education, which he finished in 1976. In 1978 he was named president of a high-level IBM division, Data Processing, and in 1980 became corporate vice president. In 1983 he was named a senior vice president and group executive in the communications division, where he was responsible for the development and manufacture of minicomputers, personal computers and software, and communications-network technology—the last of which included an early joint attempt at global communications networking, dubbed Satellite Business Systems, with the future competitor MCI Corporation.

CLIMBING THE IBM SENIOR-EXECUTIVE LADDER

In 1986 Armstrong received his toughest assignment from the CEO Akers: to reenergize IBM's European operations, in which annual sales had stagnated at $19 billion; although the European market for computing products had been growing at 10 percent annually, revenues for IBM Europe had remained flat. Customers and analysts alike said that IBM's lack of success in Europe was due to the company's single-minded devotion of attention to the U.S. market—IBM failed to either focus on individual-country markets or prepare for the single-market structure that emerged in Europe in 1992. In most ways IBM's European efforts were no different from U.S. efforts to boost sales and customer satisfaction, cut bureaucracy, and contain costs—all in the shadow of the growing threat to IBM's computing architecture from the personal-computing alliance of Microsoft and Intel.