Tom Bolger died last week.

Bolger was the first CEO of Bell Atlantic, one of the companies formed by the breakup of the old AT&T. Reading his obituary, I was struck by something he said way back in 1983: “Right now we largely transfer only voices. But if the information age is as real as competent sociologists tell us, and you start imagining the transfers of data by all these people, the business could be immense.” That, as it turned out, may have been the understatement of the decade. It was all the more remarkable by the fact that Bolger made it a dozen or so years before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet.

Changing dynamics are a given in the modern economy. Not all of Bolger’s strategies at Bell Atlantic panned out, but he knew his charge wasn’t to preside over a telephone company—it was to keep Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) at the forefront of the communications business. That kind of thinking makes me pause and wonder what’s around the bend in my industry. That can only be a good thing.