David W. Dorman (born 1954 in Georgia, U.S.) is an American Telecommunications executive and is currently the non-executive chairman of Motorola.[1][2]
In 2000, he took on the task of rebuilding AT&T, whose total stock value had fallen from a high of $110 billion to a low of less than $11 billion. Prior to SBC Communications's acquisition of AT&T Corp. on 18 November 2005, Dorman was chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T.
Dorman graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1975, with a bachelor's degree in industrial management. He joined a company that was to become Sprint Communications in 1981, as employee number 55, and climbed to become President of Sprint Business - with 10,000 employees and revenues of $4.5Bn.
In 1994 and the age of 39, Dorman became youngest President and CEO of a BabyBell at Pacific Bell, a division of Pacific Telesis. The company was taken over by SBC Communications in 1997, and after being reassigned as Executive Vice President, Dorman resigned to join PointCast - an internet service provider. After PointCast Dorman left to become Chief Executive Officer of Concert Communications Services, the joint venture between BT and AT&T.
After Concert failed, Dorman became President of AT&T. On becoming CEO, he reorganized the company into 4 divisions, and floated AT&T Wireless in 2001, and merged AT&T Broadband with Comcast in 2002 - resulting in Chairman C Michael Armstrong leaving AT&T to run the new Comcast, while Dorman became CEO and Chairman of AT&T.
In 2003 AT&T became the largest provider of Internet services. With AT&T still under considerable debt, Dorman negotiated a merger with BellSouth that made him CEO, after F. Duane Ackerman had retired from BellSouth. However, the deal fell apart and on 18 November 2005 SBC Communications purchased AT&T. Dorman served as President of the combined company for a short while. [3][4][5]