Be careful what you wish for.

Dorman's hunger to lead a major company has led him, in the past five years, from a comfortable executive spot at Sprint in 1994 to the No. 2 chair at Pacific Bell, which was sold, to the hot seat as CEO of Pointcast, a start-up that faltered.

Now, at age 45, he is the freshly minted CEO of a newly created, $10 billion joint venture between AT&T and British Telecommunications. All he has to do is keep two telecom powerhouses with vastly different cultures happy and moving in the same direction. Fortunately, he has some solid life lessons to draw on:

Lesson No. 1: Associate yourself with engines of growth. Dorman's career advanced rapidly, at least in part, he says, because he was swept up in a rapidly expanding industry. "It's a tremendous elixir," he says. He helpedbuild a software business at Norrell Systems, a unit of Norrell Temporary Services, reaching the managerial level before he was 25. Then, lured by the promise of an equity stake, he joined Isacomm, a tiny digital communications start-up that was gobbled up by United Telecommunications, which was largely unknown.pSitting on a volcano
"It didn't strike me as something exciting," he recalls. In fact, he eventually learned, "we were sitting on a volcano." With the breakup of the Bell monopoly, United Telecom evolved into the aggressive, fast-growing Sprint.

Dorman built a reputation by spiriting away some major AT&T customers. By 1984, he was running Sprint's business division, which he built from $5 million in sales to $5 billion in a decade. "I couldn't have predicted the dissolution of the Bell system when I joined Isacomm, or our acquisition by United Telecom," he says. "That came from being in a business that was growing.

Lesson No. 2: Failure is a great teacher. In his early days as amanager at Sprint, Dorman was discouraged when some of his bright hires didn't fit in at the company. "I kept asking the question: 'Is there a way we can know more about people when we hire them?'"he says.

The result: He developed a process, adopted companywide, to use psychologists to profile job candidates and to teach managers how to interview. "It's amazing to me how few people in managerial assignments know what they're trying to find out," he says.

Lesson No. 3: Keep your eyes on the horizon; what's out there could trample you.

Fuzzy role
After an unsuccessful courtship between Sprint and EDS, Dorman tried to peer out five years into the company's future. He didn't see himself succeeding a young and vigorous CEO. Moreover, he saw the possibility of Sprint being acquired. "That was unsettling to me," he says.

So he accepted the No. 2 spot at Pacific Bell. He should have looked more closely into that company's future, which was filled with new competition and huge layoffs.

Infact, the company was eventually acquired by SBC Communications, which asked him to stay on but was fuzzy about his role. "The acquisition by SBC put a kink in my career plans," he says. "If anything, it reinforced for me the importance of being with an organization that's an aggressor. When businesses get in defensive postures they're not a fun place to be."

Lesson No. 4: You don't have to rule to have a good career. Dorman next decided to pan for Internet gold, a risky foray into a vastly different realm. While he had some initial concerns about fitting in -- "It was mind-boggling to go from being the young Turk to being the second-oldest guy in my company," he says-he was enticed by the potential for a big jackpot. But after just 45 days, he concluded that Pointcast's primary product was seriously flawed and that the company's best hope was to be acquired.

"Nothing gets your attention like having $12 million in the bank, burning $3 million a month and knowing you need six months to fix theproduct," he says.

Obsessed by success
Dorman insists he did considerable research into the company, interviewing the venture capitalists who recruited him and key company personnel. "I don't think the venture-capital firms understood how bad a shape the product was in," he says. After some sleepless nights and efforts to put together a sale, he decided to move on. "This wasn't what I signed on to do," he says. "I was brought in to clean it up and take it public."

Besides, he says, recruiters were approaching him about several substantial CEO opportunities, easing concern that Pointcast's problems might hurt his reputation. ''You'd have to be brain-dead or supremely self-confident not to think about it," he says. "But in balance, people look at the track record I had and sensed that I was just riding the wrong horse."

Still, Dorman says he is no longer obsessed by success. "Ten years ago, I was motivated by having a great desire to run a very large company," he says. He recalls a formercolleague who jumped at the chance to run a big waste-management company but bailed out in six months. He might have made the same leap five years ago, he confesses.

Now, he would look much more at the environment, the company's situation and the people involved. "The fact is, there are some places you just don't want to be," he says.

The Asian Wall Street Journal