Executive edge: Oren Shaffer; Qwest CEO tapped retired friend to oversee telecom's finances.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: Attitude at Altitude

Oren Shaffer worked in the basement of the White House during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations installing critical "red phones" between Washington and Moscow and other foreign capitals during the Cold War. "That was a group of people who were very driven knowing they had a single objective," said Shaffer, who now is Qwest Communications International Inc.'s chief financial officer.

In a way, when Shaffer came out of retirement in 2002 to become Qwest's CFO, he was answering another critical call.

Qwest Chairman and CEO Richard Notebaert, whom Shaffer served for six years as CFO when Notebaert was chairman of Chicago-based Ameritech Corp., called on Shaffer to help him steer Denver-based Qwest clear of almost certain financial ruin.

Joe Nacchio and his executive team at Qwest had taken over the former U.S. West and inflated its reported revenues by billions of dollars, pumping up Qwest's stock price to $50 a share, and adding a staggering amount of debt to the company's books. When the tech bubble burst in 2000 and national financial scandals started to unravel in 2001, Qwest's stock value plummeted, leaving Qwest shareholders holding the bag.

"Qwest was an interesting situation and appeared to be a whole lot more complex than it really was," Shaffer said of Qwest's grim financial picture then.

"But it was all very simple--we had a financial problem and had to ask ourselves, 'Are we going to go bankrupt?' and I said, 'No.' I've always been in challenging situations in which failure would have been catastrophic, so I looked at this as another challenge."

Shaffer was part of a team that examined the company's assets and sold off Dex, Qwest's phone directory business for $7 billion, cut operational costs and made a run at acquiring telecom giant MCI in 2005.

"We gave it our best shot," he said of Qwest's unsuccessful...