Charles R. Lee, chairman and chief executive officer of GTE Corp., will deliver this year's Hatfield address at Cornell on Thursday, Sept. 23, at 4:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall. His talk is titled "Net Gains: Opportunities and Obstacles in a Networked World." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Lee is the 1999 Robert S. Hatfield Fellow in Economic Education, the highest honor Cornell bestows on outstanding individuals from the corporate sector.

GTE began as a provider of telephone service to rural communities passed up by the former Bell System. It has since grown to a $25 billion international telecommunications provider, with customers on five continents and national long-distance telephone and Internet services as well as telephone service in 28 U.S. states and wireless service in 17.

Lee plans to merge GTE with Bell Atlantic, and the resultant firm is expected to be a major player in the dynamic telecommunications industry. The merger is the outcome of Lee's drive to make GTE a growth company. To show his commitment to winning, according to The New York Times, he once hired an actor to portray Gen. George Patton at a company meeting with securities analysts.

Lee and Bell Atlantic head Ivan Seidenberg will be co-chairs of the merged firm. Such a power-sharing arrangement is the second in recent years with a Cornell connection. Sanford I. Weill '55, chairman of Travelers Group, and John S. Reed, chairman of Citicorp and last year's Hatfield lecturer at Cornell, agreed to share power as part of their companies' merger in 1998.

Chairman and CEO of GTE since May 1992, Lee joined the firm as senior vice president of finance in 1983 and rose steadily, becoming president, chief operating officer and a director of the corporation in 1988. Lee was senior vice president-finance for Columbia Pictures Industries from 1980 to 1983, and before that was senior vice president-finance for Penn Central Corp.

Lee, who is 58, is an emeritus Trustee of Cornell. He grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from Cornell in 1962 and a master's degree from Harvard Business School in 1964. He began his business career with United States Steel Corp. in 1964.