Charles M. Cole III

Biography

Charles Cole, retired Vice President of MCI WorldCom, was a founder of WilTel, the telecommunications subsidiary of The Williams Companies.
In the 1980s, Williams Pipe Line, a subsidiary of The Williams Companies, a Tulsa-based energy firm, was faced with a challenge. It needed a much more reliable communications system and it had older pipelines that it was taking out of service. Interested in diversifying their business, Williams Companies executives examined their assets and the economy and discovered a curious coincidence. During this same time frame, significant change had occurred in an apparently unrelated business. The federal government had broken up AT&T, ending its monopoly on telecommunications in the United States. These events produced a unique opportunity for Williams. A new market for long-distance telecommunications had opened, and Williams had an advantage that few other would-be competitors could claim: they already had conduits in place for communication cables. By running fiber optic cables through the pipelines, Williams was able to build its telecommunications network much more quickly, and at a lower cost, than other companies and as a result became one of AT&T’s first nationwide competitors in the long-distance business. Mr. Cole held various positions with WilTel, managing such diverse departments as Engineering, Construction, Operations, Planning, Regulatory Affairs, Marketing, and Sales. In 1995, WilTel was acquired by WorldCom, and has since become part of Verizon.

Of course, Mr. Cole did not start his career as a founder of a telecommunications company. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from OU, he joined Hercules, Inc., as an industrial engineer performing time and motion studies, production optimization, and other entry-level IE functions. After four years, he joined Williams Pipeline, Inc., where he held various management positions in planning, project management, maintenance, and operations. In 1985 he transferred his talents to the telecommunications arena with the founding of WilTel.
Mr. Cole’s experiences are exemplary of a modern business concept: entrepreneurship within corporations. He credits his industrial engineering education with giving him the tools and confidence to take the risk starting a telecommunications company within an oil company. IE, he says, provides “a combination of technical and business knowledge [which] better prepares one for the ever changing world of business. To be successful, one must be able to address technical issues, business issues, and human issues. Industrial engineering is the only discipline, that I am aware of, that addresses all three. Most college graduates learn only one of these in college and the other two with company-based or on-the-job training.”

Mr. Cole currently is a Senior Member of the Industrial Engineering Advory Board after serving as a member for 14 years and serving as its Chair from 2000 – 2004.
Mr. Cole serves and has served his community in a variety of roles. He serves on the Alumni Advisory Council of the Oklahoma Arkansas Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association after serving as its president and as a Board member. He has served as Vice Chair and a Board Member of the National Alzheimer's Association. He currently serves as a member of Board of Directors of the Oklahoma Methodist Manor and as Community Advisor for Life Senior Services.

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