pare the role of a business leader to that of a conductor, how they have to harness talent on several levels—the individual, the instrument section, and the orchestra as a whole—for the greatest output. “One wrong move from one person on the team can destroy the whole symphony.” Chow’s current symphony is helping her business clients disrupt themselves before they get disrupted. AT&T is working with the University of Miami to make it the first college campus with 5G+ and edge computing. This will enable next-level educational tools, such as virtual reality headsets that allow students to interact with a 3D DNA strand. The tech is also expected to revolutionize the health industry. Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center hopes to shed its wired infrastructure and use AT&T’s technology to download MRI images in seconds, employ connected devices such as blood pressure cuffs, and train med students with augmented reality, among other goals. The company is also helping clients find ways to get people off couches and into stores and entertainment venues. The 5G-enabled AT&T Stadium now has augmented reality experiences and a “Pose With the Pros” activation, through which fans use a giant touch screen to take a startlingly realistic photo with five Dallas Cowboys. Retail shoppers can try on clothes without undressing in the “magic mirrors” AT&T demoed at a recent business summit. “Every company now is a technology company, whether they like it or not,” Chow says. when most kids were watching saturday morning cartoons over a
bowl of Corn Flakes, Anne Chow was mastering Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in the hallowed halls of Juilliard. She started taking piano lessons when she was barely out of toddlerhood. Her parents had left Taiwan for the land of opportunity before she and her brother were born, and they expected their American progeny to take every advantage— school, sports, Scouts, and music—and see their talents to the limit. As it turned out, Chow’s talent in classical piano was good enough to get her into Juilliard’s prestigious precollege division at the age of 10. And so, every Saturday morning for seven years, Chow would load into her parents’ hatchback for the two- to three-hour trek from the south New Jersey suburbs to Manhattan. “My parents have always wanted me to be the best that I could be,” Chow says. “And this is what I have told my children: ‘I don’t want you to be the best. I want you to be your best.’” No doubt, that foundational value played a major part in the shy musician’s evolution into a boundary-breaking corporate leader. Last September, Chow was named CEO of AT&T Business, making her the first woman to hold that position, the first woman of color CEO in AT&T history, and the highest-ranking Asian American in the company. She now oversees more than 30,000 employees and must defend AT&T’s position as a leader in business tech solutions, serving 3 million business customers worldwide, which includes government agencies and nearly all Fortune 1,000 companies, earning nearly $37 billion in 2018—more than a fifth of AT&T’s total revenue that year. Chow’s appointment comes at a critical time: the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, powered by 5G, the low-latency, high-speed digital technology. As Chow sees it, her Juilliard experience provided a formidable grooming ground for such a momentous role. “I think leadership and organizations are a lot like an orchestra,” says Chow, sitting in a lounge room on the sleek executive floor of AT&T’s blue-lit skyscraper in downtown Dallas. She goes on to com-
--f chow is at&t business’ conductor, she sure has proficient experience with most of the unit’s instruments. This coming June will mark Chow’s 30th anniversary with the company. Arriving with a trio of degrees from Cornell University, a B.S. and masters in electrical engineering plus an MBA, Chow started as an engineer, then made an upward zigzag through roles ranging from sales and P&L management to marketing and strategic operations. She has updated the title on her business cards 17 times in those three decades. The ascent wasn’t always easy. Early on, she was turned away from opportunities in sales, but that just made her try harder. Chow is a self-described “transformative executive” and “servant leader,” brought up on Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And, through years of management training, she has become an admitted motivational junkie. She loves a good quote and uses them liberally. In our conversation, she recites one by Billie Jean King and another by Louis Pasteur about chance favoring the prepared mind. (“I first heard that in a Steven Seagal movie,” she admits.) Chow once embarrassed her family when she whipped out her phone in a movie theater to write down a particularly profound line from Harry Potter’s Dumbledore. Most of Chow’s employees are probably familiar with her “7 Cs for Leadership” or her “8 Ps for Unleashing Your Greatest Potential.” Au-
“I think leadership and organizations are a lot like an orchestra. One wrong move from one person on the team can destroy the whole symphony.”
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