The Journey Begins

Friends

Since high school, I have always wanted to write fiction. I have an old three ring binder in a box somewhere that contains some of my earliest efforts that will, for many good reasons, never see sunlight. One of my first jobs after the Air Force was a reporter for for the Orlando Sentinel in Sanford, Florida.

During my career as a manager, then later as a management consultant, writing was a prominent part of my success. When I worked for a telephone company in Kentucky, I wrote tariffs  for our company and others in the state and my first effort at writing a non-fiction book gave me the confidence to try ever expanding projects. It was in Kentucky that I wrote my first article for a telephone industry trade publication, something I would continue doing as a consultant until the middle 1990s.

But in the early 1990s, I began to seriously contemplate a novel.  As a consultant, I traveled extensively and spent significant time sitting in terminals or on airplanes; I decided to put the time to good use. The telephone company in Kentucky where I was a senior manager in the late 70s and early 80s, had been one of the more interesting experiences of my career, so I decided to use that setting for my first novel, thus the title, "Dial Tone."  My time on the road, became my time to write.

In the early 1980s a series of federal court rulings, and the Justice Department's order that AT&T divest themselves of the local telephone companies known as the Bell System caused a extreme shift in the way telephone service would be provided. This meant that many small rural telephone companies (there were nearly 1500 then) lost their monopoly and were forced to allow others to compete with them for the their business. This created some very serious problems and hardships on these small businesses. This meant that all of these small rural companies had to change. They had to reduce waste, decrease costs, improve technical training and streamline operations so that they could compete and retain customers. While these changes were needed for companies to survive, many of these changes were not popular with employees of these small business. Between cooperative type companies and privately owned telephone companies, competition created very unique challenges for cooperatives in making that transition.

Of the 1500 companies, nearly half were "cooperatives," companies owned by the people who used their services. These corporations were created in the 1950s by the federal government to bring telephone service to rural areas and many of them grew into very large companies, like the one in Kentucky that I worked for. That company served 25,000 customers and provided service in nine counties.

Since the company was owned my the members, the members elected board members to represent them. The board would then hire a manager, presumably a professional, to run the business. Because board members ran for office every two to four years, and since employees of the company were also members of the cooperative, board members lobbied employees for their vote and in many cooperative's people serving on the board had little or not business experience. The political result caused interesting issues for managers running a cooperative telephone company. For example, if management tried to enforce new business practices that would make the company more competitive, or save the company money, employees could lobby the board, bypassing management and get the directive reversed. The board would side with employees to retain their vote. This political reality would create a situation where the good of the member was pitted against the good of the employee. The employees won out because they represented a block of votes that could be counted on by a board member to remain in office.

This conflict created a tremendous problem for manager's who ran these cooperatives, especially during a time of such significant transition. It was this tension that created the basis for the Dial Tone story. I created a fictional company set in Glasgow Kentucky and created a plot that would carry these internal political tensions to an extreme - a breaking point.

The cooperative I worked for in Glasgow Kentucky, while it struggled with the realities of the politics that pervades their business, they have done a fine job, and will continue to do a fine job ministering to the needs of their members. Board members serve on these boards with little in compensation and do yeoman's work worthy of praise and thanks.  While I used Glasgow as a setting for the story, it is entirely a work of fiction and does not reflect in any way on the fine work that cooperative is doing.

Dial Tone, It will be published on Amazon Kindle in electronic form in July of 2012.


June 17, 2012