Verizon CEO Dan Schulman Talks Using Tech to Transform Telecom

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Tom Giles** (0:07)
It's always great to have the CEO of a company that you've been a customer of for like most of my adult life. So all my grievances, I'm just gonna bring them to the table here. In all seriousness, you've been CEO of Verizon since October. Something of a homecoming for you, having grown up at AT&T, getting Virgin Mobile off the ground.
When it comes to running a wireless company, and you had that long interlude in the middle at PayPal, so we'll talk about that later, but what are the old rules no longer apply?

**Dan Schulman** (0:46)
Well, I think we live in a time right now of change that 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, 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 like I'm about outcome, and how fast can we move the company forward? We're very risk averse, and I get that, like there should be places where we are risk averse when it comes to cybersecurity, when it comes to the integrity of our financial numbers. Like 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 had 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.

**Tom Giles** (2:33)
It's still less than a year that you've been there, but how do you get from that? You said around two in those areas where you want to see people take more risks. How do you get closer to that 8, 9 level of tolerance?

**Dan Schulman** (2:48)
Well, I think you, or I, I don't know if you would, but I think leadership is like three things in my view. The first is to clearly define reality. Nobody really wants to hear that, to tell you the honest. Certainly, my first coming on stage in front of all the employees of Verizon, yeah, I had no slides, no, 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 P was last in the market and terrible.
And so, you know, I kind of laid that out for everybody.
And I think we had just gotten used to gently seeding market share as opposed to playing to win. And that just doesn't work for me. I mean, that's just not who I am. You know, 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. Like, 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. Like, if somebody puts a promotion out there, like, I can match it now in two hours. So that's, 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 like 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.