But ATT failed to reckon with the likes of John J. Legere.
Mr. Legere, 55, was named chief executive of T-Mobile in September 2012, after the antitrust division of the Justice Department sued to block the proposed ATT merger and ATT threw in the towel. As a former chief executive of Global Crossing during the fiber-optic network company’s trip through bankruptcy and re-emergence as a public company, he had experience with difficult turnarounds. But nothing on his résumé quite prepared anyone for the John Legere who emerged at the helm of T-Mobile.
He dumped suits and ties in favor of hot pink T-shirts emblazoned with the T-Mobile logo, which he often wore under a black leather motorcycle jacket with jeans and sneakers. Gone was the corporate slicked-back hair: His modishly long hair now grazed his collar.
Mr. Legere not only looked but also acted the part of the “disruptive” competitor beloved by antitrust regulators but all too rare in most concentrated industries (there are just four major cellular carriers). He branded T-Mobile the “Un-carrier” and took square aim at the staid giants of the industry, ATT and Verizon, publicly describing them with language that can’t be printed in this newspaper.
This might have been dismissed as little more than a colorful stunt, given the depth of T-Mobile’s problems. But then the results started rolling in. Earlier this month, T-Mobile announced that it had added more than 600,000 wireless contract subscribers, its second straight quarter of subscriber growth. Its upgraded nationwide 4G LTE network was reaching more than 200 million users. And although still operating at a modest loss, revenue was up 9 percent. After going public in May at $16.38 a share, T-Mobile US shares have surged this week to over $26, a gain of 62 percent.
“It’s not just coloration,” said Albert A. Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, who lobbied fiercely against the ATT merger. “Some personalities are just disruptive. A disruptive-type C.E.O. can bring a company a long way in the right circumstances. That’s what Legere seems to be doing here.”
A wireless industry analyst, Jeff Kagan, agreed: “The T-Mobile of today seems to be a different company than the one we saw lying on its deathbed just a few short years ago. Legere is the reason. He is punching their way back onto the map.”
How did he do it?
Pinning down the peripatetic Mr. Legere for an interview wasn’t easy — a divorced father of two grown daughters, he works seven days a week, travels constantly and spends evenings listening in on customer conversations at call centers. This week, he jumped in on one of those and persuaded a customer to switch from ATT. He blasts out emails and provocative Twitter posts. “The difference between us and them? We have to work to keep you. They trap you and forget about you. … Until your contract is almost up,” he tweeted last week. But he took a pre-Thanksgiving break to share some of his strategies and insights.
The John Legere of the hot pink T-shirts and modish hair? That, he said, is “the real me. I’m totally comfortable with it.” He said his father wore conservative Brooks Brothers suits and button-down shirts, which he emulated earlier in his career. But now he has reverted to the jeans and longer hair of his college days, when he was a cross-country star at the University of Massachusetts. Next week, he’ll be in Washington meeting senators and members of the House, and he said he would be wearing his signature T-shirt. “I may tone down the sneakers a little bit and wear a suit over it,” he said. “That’s still under negotiation.”
Beneath the clothes is a fierce competitor who still runs marathons (including this year’s in Boston) and seems to enjoy nothing more than denouncing ATT and Verizon, which he refers to as a “pseudo duopoly.” (He doesn’t think Sprint is even worth mentioning.)
When he joined T-Mobile, “We had a limited time window and a sense of urgency,” he told me. “We were losing over two million customers a year. So we moved as fast as we humanly could. My board wondered if we were doing too much. But the fact is, speed has become one of our biggest weapons. The current industry is arrogant, stupid and slow, which gives companies like T-Mobile a real competitive advantage.”
Though the task of reviving T-Mobile seemed daunting, “I felt that as a challenger, we might just have a pretty amazing opportunity in front of us,” he continued. “We could take a completely different approach to this business, we could create real customer value by driving serious change in this ridiculous and broken industry.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/business/brash-ceo-revives-a-moribund-t-mobile.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.