GTE's Charles Lee will deliver annual Hatfield Address

By Linda Myers

Charles R. Lee, chairman and chief executive officer of GTE Corp., will deliver this year's Hatfield address at Cornell Thursday, Sept. 23, at 4:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall. His talk is titled "Net Gains: Opportunities and Obstacles in a Networked World." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Lee is the 1999 Robert S. Hatfield Fellow in Economic Education, the highest honor Cornell bestows on outstanding individuals from the corporate sector.

GTE began as a provider of telephone service to rural communities passed up by the former Bell System. It has since grown to a $25 billion international telecommunications provider, with customers on five continents and national long-distance telephone and Internet services as well as telephone service in 28 U.S. states and wireless service in 17.

Lee plans to merge GTE with Bell Atlantic, and the resultant firm is expected to be a major player in the dynamic telecommunications industry. The merger is the outcome of Lee's drive to make GTE a growth company. To show his commitment to winning, according to The New York Times, he once hired an actor to portray Gen. George Patton at a company meeting with securities analysts.

Lee and Bell Atlantic head Ivan Seidenberg will be co-chairs of the merged firm. Such a power-sharing arrangement is the second in recent years with a Cornell connection. Sanford I. Weill '55, chairman of Travelers Group, and John S. Reed, chairman of Citicorp and last year's Hatfield lecturer at Cornell, agreed to share power as part of their companies' merger in 1998.

Chairman and CEO of GTE since May 1992, Lee joined the firm as senior vice president of finance in 1983 and rose steadily, becoming president, chief operating officer and a director of the corporation in 1988. Lee was senior vice president-finance for Columbia Pictures Industries from 1980 to 1983.

Lee, who is 58, is a Cornell trustee emeritus. He grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from Cornell in 1962 and a master's degree from Harvard Business School in 1964. He began his business career with United States Steel Corp. in 1964.

Before his 4:30 p.m. address Sept. 23, Lee will participate in Associate Professor Bruce Anderson's undergraduate class, Strategic Management, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences's Agricultural, Resource and Managerial Economics program. He also will visit the College of Engineering for a demonstration of Cornell's "RoboCup" soccer triumph, address lecturer Jan Katz's International Competitive Strategy students at the Johnson Graduate School of Management and tour the school's Parker Financial Center, a state-of-the-art trading and learning center in the school's Sage Hall. In the evening, Lee and his wife, Ilda Lee, will be honored at a Hatfield presidential reception and dinner at Cornell's Johnson Museum, hosted by President Hunter Rawlings and Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings.

Lee's visit to Cornell is organized by the Office of Corporate Relations and supported by the Hatfield Fund for Economic Education, which was established at Cornell in 1981 by the Continental Group Foundation to honor retiring Continental Chairman Robert S. Hatfield.