Leader of Verizon’s Va. operations is driven to solve

When Robert W. Woltz Jr. walked up to the "cord-board" in Petersburg on his second day with the phone company, he stepped to a corner of the business world that has long since disappeared.

"My first job, there wasn't a men's room on the entire floor," recalls Woltz, who, as president of Verizon Communications' Virginia operations, now oversees all the company's landline and wireless business in the state.

Woltz was supposed to help manage a 50-foot-long room full of telephone operators -- all women, because that's the way things were in those days.

It was 1971, back when operators connected long-distance calls by plugging wires into a cord-board. Many of the women on the Petersburg cord-board had worked for the phone company since before their new boss was born.

"I walked in there with two things going for me. I played sports and I loved math," Woltz said.

So the one-time captain of the 1970 Knute Rockne Bowl Hampden-Sydney football team created competitions for the operators.

And he pored over a foot-high stack of statistics to make sure there were always enough -- but not too many -- operators for the likely volume of calls.

"It was like a giant math puzzle," Woltz said.

He solved it. And went on through a head-spinning series of promotions that taught the former college fullback, accustomed to bulling his way toward the goal posts, new ways of approaching the world.

"I got used to being in places where I didn't know much and had to listen and learn from people who did," he said.

. . .

As Woltz worked his way up the corporate ladder, the phone company was changing.

In 1984, when a federal judge ordered AT&T's breakup, he was a top officer in the company's regional pay-phone business.

With the breakup, he had to recommend whether the company kept the business. The conventional wisdom was to dump the pay phones as money losers.

"I said, 'Well, let's look at the revenue, let's look at the costs,'" Woltz said.

He wanted to look at the business as a whole and at its many pieces. He called his approach "profitability triangles."

When the company decided to keep the business, Woltz's colleagues commissioned a cartoon of him, in a pharaoh's headgear, sitting -- apparently painfully -- on top of a pyramid, in honor of the profitability triangles. It still hangs in his office.

He went on from that job to help Bell Atlantic, the regional company formed after the breakup of AT&T, adopt new, regionwide operating procedures.

"I learned the assumption of competence," or the idea that other people are likely to be good at their jobs, he said.

"Once you do that, then if we see something we think is stupid, it means either I know something you don't or you know something that I don't. And that we'd probably better talk about it."

. . .

His success working on new regional processes led in the late 1980s to a promotion to the phone company's wireless venture in Norway.

"I called home one night and heard that my child is lying on the floor saying, 'I want my daddy, I want my daddy.' I put the phone down, went to the airport and caught the next plane. No luggage, I just went, and spent the weekend being a daddy. Flew back the same way, not even a briefcase. I was stopped each way, because they thought I was suspicious."

His son now is a college senior, thinking of becoming a missionary. His daughter has just earned graduate degrees from Columbia University in counseling and in psychology and is planning to use her training to help troubled children in Richmond.

Woltz thinks one reason his children are looking at those careers may be the other children he and his wife, Pam, have hosted over the years.

The couple, married when Woltz was just a year out of college, are longtime volunteers with the Volunteer Emergency Families for Children, providing a safe place for kids to stay for a brief spell -- sometimes because their parents were just arrested and are in jail, sometimes because foster parents had a last-minute crisis.

"We've probably hosted 50, 75 kids over the years," Woltz said. "I think we all learned things about the world."

One young man stayed two years, through his junior and senior years of high school. The Woltzes proudly keep in touch as he wrestles with all the challenges of college.

"Our [own] kids, sometimes they don't call for two weeks; he'll call sometimes every two days," said Woltz, who associates say won't think twice about leaving a business meeting to take a call from the young man.

"It's not a piece of cake, but he's doing OK and I'm always glad to hear from him."

. . .

To most of the world, Woltz looks to be all business.

"He pays attention to detail, and he's very savvy," said K. Clayton Roberts, executive director of Virginia FREE, a nonpartisan policy group.

"He can be very tenacious, very focused . . . and he is someone who cares about people and about doing the right thing," Roberts said.

"He's intense about his business," said Theodore W. Morrison, a retired legislator and a former State Corporation Commission member.

"You can know Robert for a long time and never hear a thing about the things he and Pam do for those kids, the outreach they do overseas for their church."

. . .

Woltz didn't really plan to end up at the phone company.

The son of a boiler-room worker and a math teacher from Clarksville, Woltz got a full ride at Hampden-Sydney -- because of his grades. When he got out of college, he wanted to go to graduate school. But there was the matter of money.

"The phone company offered me $10,300. That was $300 more than my father made; I figured, that's it, I've made the big time. . . .

"So now, I'm a full-grown man, making my way in the world, and there's the car, and the apartment, and I've got to eat and I'm not saving for grad school," Woltz said.

"I went and talked to my dad and I said, 'I'm making this money and I don't have four children and I can't get caught up. How did you do it?' He said: 'Remember we talked about it. You're a full-grown man, you've got to figure it out,'" Woltz said.

What they'd talked about, Woltz added, was budgeting and planning and being careful.

"What he didn't tell me is that he did a lot of 80-hour weeks to get the overtime pay."

And Woltz admits he has a lot of the same kind of driving intensity -- expressed for many years by a habit of snapping out rhetorical questions to colleagues and immediately answering them.

"Then a friend came up and said: 'Time out. We need to talk.' He said: 'We know you know what you're doing, but sometimes, maybe you do want our help. When you do, ask the question. Then count to 100.' . . .

"I may not do it all the time now," Woltz said. "But I think I have learned to count to 100."

Contact David Ress at (804) 6496051 or .