I think a lot of people ar having a hard time picking 5 from the list. There appears to have been too many left off the list. If Bernie Ebbers made the list then what about Rich McGinn, Carly Fiorina, and Mr Chambers. Some one else already pointed Ed Whiteacre and of course there's Ivan.
Martin Cooper is under appreciated. Cooper pretty much invented the entire mass-market mobile phone industry. What's more remarkable is that he had the credibility with then Motorola CEO Bob Galvin to get resourced to build the first prototypes of a mobile phone, without so much as the benefit of a two-year business case study. And Galvin had enough pull with then Vice-President George H.W. Bush to force the FCC to start the proceedings that led to the necessary spectrum allocations and licensing.
Supposedly, Cooper made an appointment with Galvin without going through the chain of command, and told Galvin that he knew how to build a hand-held phone. Galvin instantly 'got it' as a business proposition, and told Cooper to pick as many engineers as he needed and come back with the prototype in 60 days.
How many telecom executives in these times would have that kind of trust in any senior engineer, or the ability to instantly recognize a latent need and envision an industry formed around it, or the willingness to run with a vision without having it analyzed it to death?
Probably more than anyone else in today's telecom leadership ranks, Ivan Seidenberg personifies the transformation of the U.S. telecom market over the past 30 years.
Ivan probably deserves a lot of the credit in overseeing such an unprecedented FTTP build-out.
Mark