Sprint Corp.

 The Once Benevolent Corporation Who Now Eats Its Young

In the early eighties when I began at Sprint Corporation it was a young, ambitious company who was bent on doing great things in telecommunications and doing them right.  Though it struggled through the complexities of being a big corporation it did – for the most part – do the right things.  It wanted the right products, it wanted the right technology and it treated its employees with respect.  Remember the old commercials of the young Sprint, the funny ones that made you laugh?

I have always believed Bill Esrey to be a good guy and I believe much of the positive Sprint culture was due to his leadership.  He was a smart guy, a funny guy and someone who had a strong moral fiber.  Through its struggles, Sprint occasionally took the easy path and performed small layoffs.  Bill Esrey said he felt the need to layoff employees was fundamentally the result of bad management and he announced he would no longer resort to layoffs.  That was a long, long time ago in a far, far away place…..

In the late nineties, as everyone knows, Sprint made a bold bid for the WorldCom Corporation.  In those days, I was working in a great group.  Our Vice President was a remarkably talented woman, the kind who made everyone seem to perform better than they could by themselves.  She reshaped the billing department and lifted Sprint from one of the world’s worst billers to one of the world’s best.  She had the highest retention rates of any department and the highest job satisfaction rates.  I enjoyed my work in this group and was valued enough that I was even paid twice my salary the year of the announced merger with WorldCom to keep me in my job.

There are always bad people in corporations, people who don’t really have souls, they have no values.  They do whatever they have to do to receive the rewards and they always latch onto, much like leeches, those who reward people who have no soul and no values.  At lower levels they are smaller black clouds but as they rise in rank so does the expanse of their black cloud affect more and more people and more and more of the business.  Our sad day came when a reorganization, of which Sprint is very very fond, removed our good guy Senior Vice President and replaced him with an older woman of the “old boys” school.  She was rather dithery and I was always amazed she was at the level in the corporation that she was.  I once told her I was taking a trip to Virginia Beach and she asked, “Oh, really, where is that?”   “It’s in……Virginia,” I replied.  

This Senior VP had the kind of business understanding and human values that would soon consume the company.  When Sprint said they wanted you to be “creative” and “think outside the box” they didn’t really mean it.  That meant wear a shirt with a muted pattern in it on occasion.  Our beloved VP, bless her, really did literally think outside the box and so her boss, the dithery SVP, soon began a plan to get rid of her.  Never mind the VP had earned for her department the first Baldridge-like internal award ever given in Sprint.  But the SVP was the type to fall asleep in meetings – no, she wasn't just that "type"she actually did fall asleep in meetings on a routine basis – and so "creativity" to her was just another word for "radical" which was just another word for "Democrat."  Nope, the stunningly talented VP had to go.

And so, through the political machinations that bad companies allow to exist, our beloved VP was whisked off to some other group and she was replaced by a heinous little devil of a man who not only didn’t have a soul, he had a black hole.  To merely say he was unethical is like saying Bush has some issues with cognition.  This man’s idea of management was to fire, rid and pillage every single department under his control and to blame any and all negative fallout on someone else.  I do believe when he dies there’s gonna be one spectacular weenie roast in hell.   And what he hated the most was anyone who even acted  like they might harbor a smattering of respect for our former VP.  

Well, stupid little me.  I dearly wanted out of this insane hellhole and so made the misjudgment of applying for an open job in our former VP’s new organization.  My intent was logical, Sprint was getting geared up for its first of many really BIG layoffs and because I managed a group who was dedicated to the soon-to-be dead ION project, I felt it was not unreasonable for me to look for another job.  When I sent in my job application our VP - the bad guy in the black hat – phoned me at my desk to say, “Oh, I just wanted you to know I was copied on your job application.”  A nice, cheery little phone call.  It meant I was a goner.

In leading up to the BIG layoff, our group had done great due diligence in preparing an overall analysis of every person in our group and a ranking – by the management team – of every person from 1 to N.  Supposedly, if and when the call for layoffs came, we would utilize this analysis and cut from the bottom.  Oh, my….but no.  I seriously doubt our VP even so much as looked at the spreadsheet.  His method was simple.  People who spied for him were saved and then any open spots were filled by whomever made the least amount of money.  Forgot job skills.  They can be trained or fired later.  

Off I was tossed into unemployment land in a bad economy and I won’t detail here the string of bad things that went on in my life, just suffice it to say 9 months after my severance money ran out I found myself back on at good old Sprint.  I was hired in another group to do stuff I had more expertise in than anyone else and it was a skate.  But by now those corporate executives with the great big black clouds were now virtually everywhere.  Their idea of corporate stewardship was based on the theory that if you reorg enough times eventually all the pieces will fit.  It’s kind of like thinking if you shake a box of puzzle pieces enough times they will form the puzzle.  They also really loved the idea of laying people off.

Sprint’s typical reorganization every 9 months now routinely happened every 3 months.  And they brought in some consultants who said the thing to do was to just reorg at the top and then just let every level get picked by the level above in a waterfall formation.  I call this, “How to save a job for my friend.”  It’s a brilliant strategy and results in ensuring almost everyone has no knowledge whatsoever about what they are supposed to do but one needn't worry because you’ll be reorg’ed in 90 days anyway.  Naturally, the type of person who survives in this job is the one who understands you blame all failures on the person who had the job before while at the same time you ensure your plans don’t actually have to deliver anything in the near term so you aren’t responsible for anything.  I think Sprint paid a lot for those consultants.

Needless to say I tried to hang on as best I could.  Most of my sponsors and respected peers had long ago left the company as talented and skilled people are wont to do when working for a circlejerk company.  So I was not on many friend lists.  Eventually, a reorg came up that put my group under a woman I had known and worked with-and-for about a decade previously.  As peers we worked well together but she had a certain lack of good judgment when becoming a manager and I fled her organization ten years earlier.  Ah, revenge must taste sweet.  She ensured I was laid off again and my job replaced by someone who didn’t even have the credentials to apply for my job had it been posted.  And just as an added bonus, Sprint makes you sign an agreement that you won't sue them for treating you like crap or they won't give you your severance.  So, in a way, I guess you could say here's my belated Christmas present to Sprint....

Sprint is now a company filled with negative energy; much like our country these days.  But we know negative power cells eventually implode.  Sprint went from caring about its employees and customers to caring about its executives and no one else.  I know that soon its commitment to pensions will be diverted just to ensure its employees receive as little benefit as possible.  Like the Bush Administration, it believes many must be sacrificed for the good of a few.  It has become a poster child of the self-centered American corporation.