Robert E. Allen, Led an AT&T in Transition

Robert E. Allen, who as chief executive and chairman of AT&T for almost a decade presided over major reorganizations of the company as the telecommunications industry remade itself in the late 1980s and ’90s, died in Chatham, NJ. He was 81.

Allen had a 40-year career with AT&T, beginning straight out of college in 1957 managing telephone operators at Indiana Bell. He reached the top post after the death of James E. Olson in 1988. Allen took the reins in a time of great uncertainty for AT&T. The company was struggling to become a competitive computer and communications business after the federal government, in a landmark antitrust case, had broken up its telephone monopoly. Long-distance carriers were posing a challenge, and mobile phones and the internet were coming into their own. Allen oversaw the acquisition of McCaw Cellular, which helped AT&T become a force in wireless communication as it spun off most of its manufacturing divisions under the name Lucent Technologies. (Lucent became Alcatel-Lucent through a merger in 2006.) His efforts to turn the company into a computer giant were less successful. The company acquired NCR for $7.5 billion in 1991 but decided in 1995 to jettison it as part of a breakup plan that cut 40,000 jobs companywide.