Verizon CEO Dan Schulman Talks Using Tech to Transform Telecom | Bloomberg Talks

Well, I think we live in a time right now of change I've really never seen before. The pace of change is dramatic. I say inside the company right now anytime the pace of change outside is greater than the pace of change inside, we're falling behind. And that's a really high bar to get over. I think there's some similarities and some differences. I mean, way back when I was at AT&T, you know, we're a big bureaucratic company. Verizon is a big bureaucratic company. It loves its processes. It loves to show its work. But I'm about outcome and how fast can we move the company forward. We're very risk-averse. And I get that, there should be places where we are risk-averse when it comes to cybersecurity, when it comes to the integrity of our financial numbers. My tolerance for risk is like a one. But for the most part, my tolerance for risk for trying things and failing fast and then learning from it and moving forward is like an eight or a nine. And I think in general the company's probably at a two to three. We're very hierarchical. I need to be very careful what I say. Because it's taken as gospel. And the truth of the matter is things are changing so fast. I'm always learning. I can't predict the future. I can try and do my best to ascertain the direction of it, but I'll frequently be wrong on that as well.

Well, I think leadership is like three things in my view. The first is to clearly define reality. And nobody really wants to hear that. Certainly my first coming on stage in front of all the employees of Verizon, I had no slides, nothing on screen, no talk track, just kind of like what I saw. And what I saw was a company that was losing in the market. We had lost market share for five straight years. We had gone from being number one in market cap to being last. Our forward PE was last in the market and terrible. And so I kind of laid that out for everybody. And I think we had just gotten used to gently ceding market share as opposed to playing to win, and that just doesn't work for me. That's just not who I am. When I first came in, I think people were scared because I said that we wanted to play to win. We wanted to stop losing market share and start gaining market share, and people were worried that was going to lead to a price war. But that's not the way that you compete. Anybody can compete on price. Price is easy. It's about competing on other parts of the value proposition where you can actually differentiate yourself and create lasting value. If somebody puts a promotion out there, I can match it now in two hours. So there's no competitive advantage to that. So I think it's really about laying out the reality of where you are, and people don't want to be part of a losing team. And then the second thing a leader needs to do is inspire. Lay out a vision of what you want to do. How are you going to reclaim your market leadership? And then clearly lay out the path between reality and that vision and how are we going to get there and over what time frame and what things are we going to chew off first and start to work on. So, it is going probably faster than I imagine. I'm proud of the team. I don't like giving out compliments that easily, but I am proud of where they are. There's a lot more work to do.

Well, I think at the end of the day, the reason people leave Verizon is one, when we price up with no incremental value, and we had done that for three years in a row. We had done something like 30 price ups with no incremental value, and that obviously distresses customers, and so we had started to see our churn go up. I told the company the first rule of getting out of a hole is stop digging. And so we're just not going to raise prices without any corresponding value. And I'm beginning to see that as our churn starts to come down. The second is friction in the process. When you come into our store, how quickly can we help you? When we sell you something, is that reflected on your first bill? When you call into customer service, do you get somebody who's empathetic? Does what they see match with what you heard in the store and on your bill? And that's really, really difficult. That's the end-to-end customer experience. And that's hundreds if not thousands of things that you need to do better. And we are focused on every single one of those just incrementally getting better because I feel if we can have the best end-to-end customer experience, that's real differentiation because it's very hard to imitate and it's extremely hard to do but extremely appreciated by customers.

Yeah, there will be.

No. I want to be conscious to your point. The answer still is no, I won't. But I think that when we talk about this end-to-end value proposition, there are little things, there are bigger things, there's how do you simplify things? How do you add elements of loyalty into what you're trying to go do? And so, my view is there's never a big bang in what you're going to do in front of customers because if you can do a big bang, then your competitors can do a big bang. It's really, unfortunately, it is like having a long-term plan and every single day matters. I want to see incremental improvement every single day. And so learning to use the tools of our time, whether that be AI in how we serve customers much better, whether it be specific offers we put in front of you, elements of the value proposition. So when you see things, expect that there will be other things a month from now, the next month, the month after, because it's got to be a steady drumbeat of improvements.