Brown Family Executive in-Residence

Reg Murphy is the inaugural holder of the College’s endowed Chair of the Brown Family Executive-in-Residence. As the College’s first executive-in-residence, Reg Murphy engages students in conversations about work and life experiences, career interests and strategies, networking, and courses and extracurricular activities that can help prepare for various careers. Murphy himself has described the position as “sharer-in-chief.”

Murphy’s contributions to the College have been substantial. During 2009, he headed a campus-community Athletic Futures Committee that created the vision and strategy for athletics at the College, which had just become a baccalaureate institution. He is a two-time College of Coastal Georgia Foundation Volunteer of the Year award winner (2011, 2014), the moderator of the Coastal Conversations series on campus, and continues his work and advocacy for the College’s athletic department as a founding member of the Friends of the Mariners. The College’s Murphy-Kuchar Putting Green was named in honor of Murphy and golfer Matt Kuchar, another benefactor of the College’s campus sports programs.

Reg Murphy is a great friend of Coastal Georgia, the College of Coastal Georgia, and the College’s School of Business and Public Management. A native of Gainesville, Georgia, Mr. Murphy has had a remarkable career in journalism and business, having served as president and CEO of the National Geographic Society, president and publisher of the Baltimore Sun, publisher and editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and editor of the Atlanta Constitution.

An avid golfer, Mr. Murphy joined the executive committee of the U.S. Golf Association in 1989, served as vice president of the USGA in 1992, chairman of the Championship Committee in 1993, and president in 1994. He co-chaired the World Amateur Golf Federation in 1994 and captained the U.S. team for the 1998 World Amateur Championship in Santiago, Chili.

The Reg Murphy Center bears Mr. Murphy’s name for all he has meant to the community, the College, and the School of Business and Public Management – but even more for the kind of man he is. He is a man of great intellectual honesty, integrity, and humility, and is devoted to serving the community. His name sets the standard for the work we do at the Reg Murphy Center.

The Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies was dedicated on Oct. 8, 2015.

Mr. Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1967 and was hired by AT&T into their Management Development Program – an accelerated program for high potential candidates to reach executive level. After many jobs in Engineering, Operations, Sales, Personnel, Labor Relations and Marketing, he was made Sales Vice President of New England and upstate New York… a territory encompassing some of the largest and most sophisticated of AT&T’s National and International customers, e.g. GE, IBM, DEC, major financial houses and insurance companies as well as world wide retailers.

In the four years he was in that position, he doubled the revenue while reducing overall headcount by 15 percent. This was accomplished by introducing a new sales and support methodology and, in a time when AT&T was ruled by tariffs, succeeded in pushing and urging the company and the FCC to allow AT&T to offer customized solutions to large customers. He also eliminated his support staff and moved the resources to field sales. His new sales methods and philosophy were incorporated into AT&T’s National Sales Management School.

It was after winning back competitive losses that had occurred before his arrival and reinvigorating sales in the Northeast, that AT&T was presented with an RFP for the largest telecommunications bid ever – a bid covering the entire civilian branch, both international and domestic, of the Federal Government…a bid worth approximately $25 billion. The top echelons at AT&T decided Mr. Carter should be the “Proposal Manager”…. should be the one to manage the RFP and build the solution and response. The current account team was left in tact to handle the normal, day to day business. Mr. Carter had to build his own organization, borrowing the best and the brightest from Engineering, Sales, Bell Labs and Accounting to build the largest sales proposal before or since …. then organize, manage and lead this makeshift group from very different cultures to beat out the competition that had a six-month lead. It was a real test of Management and Leadership skills over a two-year period, but AT&T won it going away.

After the win, Mr. Carter was out of a job. He had requested not to stay with the program after the win. He was, quite literally, asked what position or job he wanted and AT&T would do all it could to make it happen. Mr. Carter asked to run a new company AT&T was creating a new wholly owned company, a new entity by taking all the piece parts of undersea cables – Research from Bell Labs, factories from Lucent, Engineering from Lucent and Long Lines, Operations and the cable ship fleet from Long Lines. The Sales and Marketing organizations, as well as Accounting would have to be built from scratch. Mr. Carter asked for and was made President and CEO of the new Submarine Systems International (SSI) Company.

Submarine Systems (SSI) got off to a rocky start. AT&T had never been in the business of “selling” Undersea Cables. The various entities had only supplied cables to AT&T, never sold them to our competitors or consortium buyers. The first year in business revenues were $300 million and net income/loss was a negative $80 million, but after the first year, SSI started making money and kept on making money. By the seventh year, revenues were $1.5 billion each year, and net income was $150 million a year. In addition, the company had put away a cash reserve (warranty reserve) of $150 million and purchased three new cable laying/repair ships at a cost of $85 million each. SSI’s market share (with four major players and several minor ones) over the last three years was above 50 percent. They were putting in over half of the major undersea systems in the world.

It was in year seven of running SSI that Mr. Carter saw the potential (with the explosive growth of the Internet) to substantially increase revenues if we owned the cable and sold the services, rather than selling the cables. After lining up some International partners, he took the idea to SSI’s single share owner, AT&T. They rejected the idea, at which point Mr. Carter suggested they sell his company. After a couple of month’s consideration, the decision was made to sell it and Mr. Carter was assigned that responsibility. AT&T projected a reasonable amount for the Company would be $350 million. Mr. Carter managed to get two offers above $800 million and the company was sold to Tyco.

When it became evident that Tyco also did not want to “disrupt” the cable industry by owning cables and selling services, Mr. Carter submitted his resignation. He found an investor in California whose Investment Company raised enough money for a first cable and they went into business as Ocean Systems, later to become Global Crossing. In less than two years, the company was worth $18 billion.

Mr. Carter was on the Advisory Council for the International Telecommunications Union – a branch of the United Nations that sets standards and methods for world wide communications. He has also testified before Congress on occasions regarding the correlation of advanced communications and economic development.