NewsDude
07-11-2008, 03:30 PM
Sprint Nextel was in a crisis as Daniel Hesse took over the chief executive's job last December.
Sprint was reeling from an ill-fated merger with Nextel. Customers were leaving in droves. Executives were threatening to leave, while those who wanted to stay were worried they would lose their jobs.
To motivate the staff, Hesse gave them DVDs of a documentary about Ernest Shackleton, the famous explorer whose ship was trapped in ice on an expedition to Antarctica. He liked the movie for its optimistic message: the crew survived.
Shackleton's ship did not. It was crushed by the ice and swallowed by the unforgiving sea. That parallel to Sprint was probably not lost on Sprint employees because many have been asking the question: Can Hesse save his crew and stop the company from sinking?
That task will be challenging. AT&T and Verizon, the industry's behemoths, are recruiting Sprint customers who have grown tired of years of inattentive customer service and a lackluster array of cell phones. Investors, too, have lost patience: the share price has dropped 58 percent since May 2007. And despite early success with the new Instinct smartphone, Sprint's challenger to the iPhone, the company still lags behind its peers.
Hesse has much to do to repair a corporate culture so tattered that executives made bets that he would not even show up on his first day.
"What do you do when you hit rock bottom?" asked Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG, a market research firm. "It's going to take a lot to turn this company around."
In an interview in his office, with its remote-controlled fireplace and hand-carved wooden mantel, Hesse was both practical and hopeful.
He is realistic about how much work he and his management team have to do to save Sprint from being irrelevant. "It's like trying to drink...
More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=60722)
Sprint was reeling from an ill-fated merger with Nextel. Customers were leaving in droves. Executives were threatening to leave, while those who wanted to stay were worried they would lose their jobs.
To motivate the staff, Hesse gave them DVDs of a documentary about Ernest Shackleton, the famous explorer whose ship was trapped in ice on an expedition to Antarctica. He liked the movie for its optimistic message: the crew survived.
Shackleton's ship did not. It was crushed by the ice and swallowed by the unforgiving sea. That parallel to Sprint was probably not lost on Sprint employees because many have been asking the question: Can Hesse save his crew and stop the company from sinking?
That task will be challenging. AT&T and Verizon, the industry's behemoths, are recruiting Sprint customers who have grown tired of years of inattentive customer service and a lackluster array of cell phones. Investors, too, have lost patience: the share price has dropped 58 percent since May 2007. And despite early success with the new Instinct smartphone, Sprint's challenger to the iPhone, the company still lags behind its peers.
Hesse has much to do to repair a corporate culture so tattered that executives made bets that he would not even show up on his first day.
"What do you do when you hit rock bottom?" asked Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG, a market research firm. "It's going to take a lot to turn this company around."
In an interview in his office, with its remote-controlled fireplace and hand-carved wooden mantel, Hesse was both practical and hopeful.
He is realistic about how much work he and his management team have to do to save Sprint from being irrelevant. "It's like trying to drink...
More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=60722)