Sol Trujillo U S West Chief Eager To Test Mettle Against New Competition In Telephone Industry

When Sol Trujillo got his MBA, the last place he wanted to go was a monopoly like a phone company.

Trujillo was looking for an aggressive business environment where he could test his mettle. But he ended up banking his aspirations because of an unbeatable offer from Mountain Bell, then part of the mega-monopoly Bell System.

Now, 22 years later, he’s back to pursuing his original dream, leading U S West Communications Group into a new era of competition.

It is a formidable task. U S West, once the only local phone service provider in its region, will have rivals thanks to the federal telecommunications law enacted this year. And competition comes as the phone company contends with criticism from regulators, consumer advocates and other companies, calling U S West anticompetitive.

Consumers have also lambasted U S West, one of the Baby Bells born of the 1984 breakup of AT&T, over its service record.

Trujillo believes in taking a straightforward approach, whether he’s responding to criticism or planning for the future: “You don’t try to sugar-coat it.”

Of the charges, he said, “My belief is you deal with it by earning your way out of it. You perform your way out of it.”

Trujillo, 44, is president and chief executive officer of U S West’s telephone group, which has 25 million residential and business customers in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho and Minnesota.

Trujillo is a rolled-up-shirt-sleeves kind of manager, often found among workers, whether it is in the field, the customer service center or the board room.

“I believe in passion. I believe in intensity. I believe in preparation. I don’t like laziness. I don’t like people that don’t care about things. Indifference is like a puzzle to me,” he says.

Trujillo is a good leader because he has the rare ability to simplify complicated situations, and he helps employees realize their value, said Frank Pereira, president of Bell Atlantic Video Services Co.

After graduating from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Trujillo started as an economic forecaster for Mountain Bell. It was the mid-1970s, when consumers mostly used rotary-dial telephones and dealt with a single telephone company.

An energy boom in the Rocky Mountains had Mountain Bell scrambling to keep up with skyrocketing demand.

When U S West was created, it included Mountain Bell and six other independent regional telephone companies. The company later split into U S West Communications for telephone services, and U S West Media Group for cable, wireless and other services.

With competition starting to open up in local markets, consumers will choose a company for local phone service, much as they select a long-distance carrier now.

“Today, what’s happening, is that you have the marketplace that is so vibrant and so dependent upon communications that it’s just pushing everything out of the way, whether regulators like it, whether companies like it, whether, you know, technology is ready,” Trujillo said. “And that’s the exciting part to me.”

Under the new law, U S West and other Baby Bells will be required to offer local service via their networks to rivals at wholesale rates. The intent is to create competition without requiring competitors to build their own networks.

The negotiations have progressed slowly between U S West and companies that want to move into its territory.

Trujillo says the company has work to do to improve a poor reputation for customer service. But he also points out that 99.97 percent of the time, when a customer wants to make a call, the phone works. To him, that’s what matters.

“At the end of the day, I can talk to you all I want, tell you about the great things we’re going to do, but it means nothing if we don’t deliver,” he said.