Craig McCaw Interview (page: 3 / 5) Pioneer of Telecommunications	Print Interview

Did you realize going in that telecommuting would help women?

Craig McCaw: Along the way I think we recognized full well that the situation of women is the most pure example, and also the place where society has the most to gain and lose. Their relationship to their children is vital. The children must not be abandoned, but to lose the intellectual contribution of women is significant to a society.

If there was any hope we had for the technology in that area, it was that people could use it to make a contribution, but they would also take the efficiency of time and use it to spend with their children. Knowing my own experience as a child, you cannot raise children by remote control. Children cannot grow up properly without the personal relationship to an adult.

Was your mother a role model for you?

Craig McCaw: My mother was an interesting role model for us, in that she was so financially oriented, as a result of having been the first woman graduate in accounting from the University of Washington, which is one of the largest universities in America. She gave us a lot of benefit of that precise thinking that came from accounting.

My father, on the other hand, was an extremely creative, almost wild-eyed visionary, and we saw the balance of the two. If anything came of that, it was that my mother added the anchor, the balance to my father's creativity. I learned fairly young that if you didn't do the precision part, the creative part would evaporate. You had to have the foundation under the creativity. She continues to provide that kind of foundation for me today.

How can you be an incredibly successful businessman and keep this equally strong humanitarian side?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Craig McCaw: I think there's clearly a conflict at times between the humanistic side of a person and their success in a business career. But their ability to balance those is their very definition. It is not a question of how much you can achieve in life if you do it in an immoral manner. Ultimately, you will pay a price greater than you ever would dream it might cost you. And so, my belief has been that if I have a definition it is: "How much can we accomplish as a team, a group of people, without hurting others?"

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

What is the minimum consequence to others we can have? In so many businesses, particularly those where ideas dominate and they relate not to manufacturing a commodity, but focusing on extraordinary value to others, it's not necessary to hurt someone else in order to get somewhere.

"I've always said, "I don't want to throw someone else in the ditch, so that I can go by." I see very little need, particularly in the new world order, where ideas are totally dominating over mechanical aspects, that it's absolutely unnecessary to make those moral sacrifices in order to be successful.

Talk about your idea for the global network.

Craig McCaw: Teledesic is an interesting business model, in that it reflects what almost always happens, which is that when you start, the very idea of what you were going to do evolves as technology changes and as you realize the changes in the marketplace.

Initially, Teledesic was to be pay phones, as it were, for the rural areas of the world. Later we realized that wasn't going to work. Wireless, the cellular child that we had been working on for so long, was going to chew up that marketplace before we ever got there, and we'd have very little purpose. We had to do more than that for these rural communities.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Our dream in Teledesic is that we can change a paradigm, which is, "You have to go to the city in order to have opportunity." Environmentally, socially and every other way I can think of, tearing people from their communities as a choice between prosperity or being poor is unacceptable. If we think of the consequences of building roads, and sewers and everything else, when people already have a home, it's illogical. We thought, "If a billion people move to the city in China, the environmental damage will be extraordinary."

Moreover, we recognize that people have television in virtually every village of the world. They see the benefits of an industrialized society, the benefits of money. If we deny them that, we can be sure that they will move to the city, perhaps your city. They can drive from Guatemala to New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, wherever, looking for that opportunity. We can't keep them out ultimately, if the disparity is too large. So we must provide the tools.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you provide full-scale communications and computing architecture to the places where people live, they actually are very efficient. They don't have to drive an hour to work. They don't have to do all the silly things that we do in the city. If you can take the middlemen out of products -- whether they be carpets, or coffee, or something else -- if somebody can sell their rice crop in Vietnam directly to the restaurant in Paris, you have accomplished something, because you've given them enough margin for wealth.

Now, the question is, "Can we prevent those people from repeating the mistakes of an industrialized society, or will they bring it to the rural area?" We dearly hope we can figure out a way to prevent that from happening. As it were, to pave the rice paddy now that they're rich. We recognize the tool is there, now we have to use it for good, and find a way to make sure that's what happens.

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