Why Great Turnarounds Start with Culture, Not Strategy

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I think most people say that they wanna put the customer front and center, but it's not easy to go and do that. The initiative we have inside the company is entitled Every Customer Has a Name. It means we treat you as a person, not as an account, not as a line. Almost like, you know, if one of my family members had a problem, how would I want the company, uh, to treat them? And so there are tons of small things that basically assure that we're putting a customer front and center. And my view is that customers fire companies all the time in quiet ways because they feel disrespected. [upbeat music]

So Dan, thanks for sitting down with HBR.

It's a pleasure, Adi.

All right. So I wanna ask you, you're at Verizon. You, you turned down the job, as I understand it, twice, maybe more than twice, before you agreed to take it. W- what made you wanna get back in the game?

Well, I turned it down 'cause I was very happily retired. I was, uh, living on our ranch in Montana with my beautiful wife, who I love very much.

Yeah, I noticed the cowboy boots.

Yep, yep, always with me. I wasn't looking to come back into, uh, corporate life. Um, but, you know, I was on the board. I was the lead director. We needed to make a change. I felt a keen sense of loyalty to the company, and I felt like the company had a tremendous amount of assets that we could leverage, and that there was a real opportunity to take a iconic American company and, you know, at least have the shot at turning it around. And so, you know, after a lot of discussions with my wife, you know, I, I agreed, uh, reluctantly to go do it. But here I am, you know, nine months into the job, and I'm loving it.

But w- what was wrong? Like, what, like, at, at a high level, what was wrong with the company?

You know, we had been losing market share, uh, for five years. We went from having the largest market cap, uh, in the industry to having the lowest. We had the lowest PE multiple, which, you know, is the market's way of saying that they don't really believe in your growth, uh, going forward. Our churn rates, uh, were going up. Our customer satisfaction results were going