Oceanic chairman has local concerns

By Glenn Scott
Advertiser Staff Writer

As he approaches retirement, the genial chairman of Oceanic Cablevision has his eyes fixed on flies, those featherlight fishing lures of the leisure class.

Don Carroll of Oceanic Cablevision believes local autonomy is a crucial issue. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

As one of the state's most community-spirited business leaders — and certainly one of the most long-lasting — the 59-year-old Carroll wonders if the growing pattern of corporate acquisitions will dilute crucial support for local community services.

At issue, he says, is the danger of eroding corporate commitment to local concerns if large corporations decide to run their businesses here as little more than branch operations, with little local autonomy. He worries that key decision-makers would be too far away.

"If they look at Hawai'i as simply a market to sell stuff or buy talent, then we're going to be hurting," he said. "We need people who are more involved in the fabric of the community than that."

It's a deep issue, but one the retiring Carroll can legitimately raise after more than three decades with a company that grew, under his leadership, to become the state's largest cable company and one of Hawai'i's largest businesses.

From his corporate post, Carroll has witnessed and weathered immense changes in Hawai'i, from an era of economic dominance of a few large local companies to the years riding (and falling from) an inflationary bubble of Japanese investment to today's demands to stay afloat through national and global networks.

At the same time, Oceanic advanced with the tide of consumer technology to become a $200 million a year company that today serves 17 out of every 20 O'ahu homes, as well as customers on all Neighbor Islands except Kaua'i.

Oceanic also went through its own ownership transfers, evolving from an outfit locally owned by a Castle & Cooke real estate subsidiary to a marquee multinational, AOL Time Warner.

Through those changes, though, Carroll managed to stick with the Island-based Oceanic for a third of a century. That may explain why he's not panicking when he sees locally run stalwarts like First Hawaiian Bank and Liberty House sold to huge, offshore owners.

"So far so good," he says. "But it's something to keep an eye on."

He wants Hawai'i's next generation of corporate leaders to get the chance he and his contemporaries had to stay long enough to accept Hawai'i as home and to commit company resources toward helping local people and institutions.

"We've been so used to having corporate business support here," he says. "It's been there."

Carroll isn't the only one concerned about the issue, but he's an easy example for others to cite. Roger Dickson, president of the Hawai'i chapter of the American Red Cross, calls him a "great example" of a business leader tied by co-axial to his community.

When the Red Cross recently completed its emergency center inside Diamond Head crater this spring, Dickson said, Carroll saw to it that Oceanic installed Internet and cable TV connections. It wasn't an impromptu act. Carroll has been a local Red Cross board member since 1994. In the past decade he has served on 10 nonprofit boards and advisory committees.

He estimates he attends about three major fund-raisers a month.

"Here you have a guy like Don who is part of a very large organization," said Dickson. "He's that linkage for us. He's the face of AOL Time Warner for us here, and he understands that."

Irv Lauber, president of the Aloha United Way, says Carroll understands that a successful community makes for good business, and vice versa. "We can't succeed without people like Don," he said. "We have to have them."

Lauber observed that concerns about loss of local corporate influence are not exclusive to the Islands. Many of the other 1,400 United Way chapters are struggling with the same pattern, he said, as mergers and acquisitions move corporate decision-making farther from traditional locales.

The distinction in Hawai'i, he said, is that island life, with its lack of escapes, reinforces the need to work toward common goals.

Said Carroll: "It makes sense from a business point of view to keep involved. You want to be here making investments in the long haul. You're not here for the short haul."

Fresh from Harvard

Seventeen out of every 20 O'ahu homes are now serviced by a control room such as the one above run by Oceanic Cablevision, a subsidiary of the multinational AOL Time Warner. Advertiser library photo • February 1997

Hawai'i had plenty of lure. This was, after all, the great and popular era of surfing romance — a fact not lost on Carroll, whose high school classmates in Southern California included Beach Boys band members Brian Wilson and Al Jardine.

This was also long before MTV. Cable television was more a set of ideas than a proven service, and Oceanic was a tiny business related to Castle & Cooke's real estate subsidiary, Oceanic Properties, which was developing Mililani.

Some within the company speculate today that the genesis of the cable operation had more to do with building neighborhoods without ugly TV antennas and overhead wires than with bringing a new technology to the Islands.

Carroll remembers this: the unlimited promise of a quirky new pay-TV product that, early on, offered the unnecessary total of 20 network channels.

Who could ever need that many, right?

Known for his disarmingly friendly manner, Carroll speaks of those first years as if everything had been a little too remarkable and, thankfully, a bit beyond prediction.

He liked the work, and his career safari stopped here. Thirty-five years later, he heads a staff of 583 and says the pace of change remains exciting.

Aside from new digital cable boxes, the company's growth product, broadband Road Runner internet service, has been doubling the number of subscriptions by the year. Today, it reaches 61,000 customers.

Carroll wraps up the whole experience in a word: fun.

"When I was starting out in the cable business," he said, "it was built on blue sky."

The industry, he said, was full of visionaries. They were the inventive types, he recalled, who would rather test another new idea, even if it failed, than be mired in mainstream jobs.

"And it's still true today," he said. "We're working on things today that are still fun. There's always interesting stuff going on."

As competition stiffens from satellite TV services — notably from the rival empire of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. — Carroll believes AOL Time Warner will accelerate its capacity for video-on-demand, a system in which customers ideally will call up programming from a huge list of titles.

If it were up to the cable people, still known as the company risk-takers, he says the system might be running by now.

Plans for fishing

These days, Carroll keeps the television in his office tuned to the Outdoor Channel. His computer's screensaver flashes scenes of fly fishing. On one of two maps of Montana on the wall, he has neatly inscribed a pencil notation on a raised map showing the precise location of his vacation house.

This is Carroll's new office, and as the maps suggest, it carries signs of transition. He cleared out of his former corner office to make room for successor Nate Smith, who became president and chief operating officer in February.

As chairman, Carroll watches over the big picture, an apt metaphor for both the cable company and the maps on the wall.

In his transition, Carroll is moving from blue sky to Big Sky. But, as he points out, the Montana house is strictly for vacation and his permanent connection is to Hawai'i.

And Smith, who arrived from New Zealand to run the operation, says he's aiming to fit in with the Oceanic platform that Carroll and others have established. The local focus, he says, will remain.

"This is interesting because I've been in a lot of different cable operations, mostly replacing someone who has been there two or three years," he says. "Replacing someone who has been here 35 years is a slightly different animal."

For Carroll, retirement will be different, too. He doesn't hide his enthusiasm for sharing time with his wife, Eunice, in Montana and flicking lures onto the cold currents of the Gallatin River, which flows just beyond the cottonwoods near their place. Their house has a TV, by the way, but no cable. A small satellite dish hides on the second story.

"But as it turns out," Carroll says, "we don't even watch TV."