ExNext

Sprint's Hesse Continues to Show Leadership but Doubts Remain

To me it is a nearly impossible task to truly point out all of the parties that should be thrown over the side of this sinking ship. There are many. From a shareholder's perspective it would seem to me that this house cleaning actually needs to begin at the board of directors level.

Why would they authorize a 40 million dollar golden parachute for a CEO that has led this company into a disasterous situation?

Why would they condine a statement from Hesse indicating that the company is slated to lose 1.2 million net subscribers in the first quarter alone and an additional 1.2 million in the second quarter? Where is the urgency to correct that now instead of eventually?

Why did they condone the Xohm adventure before assuring that their current operations were first taken care of?

Why isn't the board demanding blood and the rolling of heads after the disasterous J.D. Powers report today over the atrocious state of our network? This report echos the previous disparaging reports by others that point out the obvious failures in customer service, network, customer satisfaction etc.

Why hasn't the board directed the CEO to finish the procurement of the remaining affiliates before throwing away billions on a Wimax shot in the dark that many anaylsts claim is due to fail before it even gets off the ground?

Why isn't the board demanding action in regard to the gaming of the system by Sprint employees who are deactivating IDEN units by porting them over to CDMA and receiving full commissionable credit even though they have actually sold nothing?

Why with the supposed increased focus on IDEN did the engineering budget for the enhancement of the IDEN network get cut by an enormous percentage in late 2007?

Why did the board back the decision of the previous CEO to eliminate an IDEN full QWERTY BlackBerry therefore eliminating the possibility of selling this device to clients (such as police) that require full qwerty functionality? (A very irritating problem in the affiliate territory.)

There is a lot wrong here. The need to fix it is now. Urgency should be paramount. However you have got to love the way they are handling things like churn. Let's throw more money in terms of bonuses to the fat cat executives that are so rediculously overpaid allready to reduce churn. Like anything they are going to do is going to make a significant difference. This should already be a significant part of their job. How dare the board condone this foolishness. The churn is where it is in part due to their previous failures. To incent them to fix it now is an insult to those of us in the field.

Since the merger, Sprint has removed our car allowances though gas costs are the highest it has been in U.S. history. It has removed the legacy Nextel Stock Option plans precluding us from sharing in the success of the company. It has eliminated merit increases for this year. It has reduced out monthly commisionable at risk money by 10% by moving that portion over to a churn factor for sales that it knows we can not hit based upon Hesse's own predictions of a 1.2 million net subscriber loss in Q1 and again in Q2. And to add insult to injury raised sales quota's beginning in April when the vast majority of the sales reps are not achieving them currently due to the mass exodus of our subscribers to the competitors. With all of this they also managed to terminate over 4000 staff. I wonder what percentage of that 4000 are at the executive level. I have not seen any of their positions eliminated that has not been backfilled.

As an employee I am ashamed to work for such a screwed up company currently. As a stockholder I am outraged at the decisions being made by Sr. Management and approved by the Board of Directors.