Dennis Strigl did not have to be a diligent student to become a first-rate manager.
“I disliked school,” recalls the chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless Inc., the biggest carrier in the United States. “I couldn’t wait until 3 o’clock when the bell rang.”
But before Strigl would stabilize in the telecom world, he experimented with other jobs, the most spectacular being as an airline pilot. Just as the bottom line matters to him today as CEO of Verizon, he desired more than the meager pay of $350 a month he earned as an airline pilot in the 1960s in Buffalo, N.Y., where he grew up.
“I learned if I worked in the telecom industry, I would earn twice that amount,” he said.
He moved to telecom, and his instincts have been right ever since.
But Strigl said the industry was a little boring when he began his telecom career with the monopolistic New York Telephone Co. Bearing the high-falutin’ title of communications consultant, Strigl was not satisfied working as a salesman plying such products as PBX boxes.
“I was impatient being a salesman in a monopoly,” he said. The impatience that diminished his love of school was creeping in again.
“My father was very competitive,” he explained. “But my mother was patient.” He now had to deploy the parental attributes in good measure. But he confesses to having more of his father’s competitive juice than the mellow temperament of his mother.
Strigl worked with New York Telephone for six years before securing new pasture at AT&T Corp. at a time when the telecom giant was about to crumble into several parts under the weight of anti-trust lawsuits. He worked there for a year before he was transferred to Wisconsin Telephone Co. as general manager of marketing and sales.
All this while, the wireless industry was sitting on the cusp of the telecom world.
Ameritech Mobile, which witnessed the first Trans-Atlantic call, was to come under his supervision.
“I had a ball. It was fun,” he said, explaining he had to build the company from scratch. Here again, he was working without competition. But this was different. It was an industry with lots of possibilities and challenges to succeed in territories yet uncharted.
He noted from the first week that he needed to work out a model for success. As a man with a marketing background, he needed a better understanding of the networks and the devices. The devices were expensive, and a better confluence of engineering and marketing would redound in a successful company.
“I drove the engineers nuts,” he said, explaining how he challenged his workers by traveling the streets of Chicago to test the coverage and see what could be done to ensure the service qualities lived up to his expectations. This was the precursor to the now familiar advertising refrain: “Can you hear me now?”
“Educating potential customers about why this was worth having was one of the biggest challenges,” he said. The price of the services were $50 a month plus 50 cents a minute. A car-installed phone hit the roof at $3,000, and a Motorola brick phone was $4,000.
In a new industry, he not only had to sell the idea of the technology, but also convince potential customers that they should pay high sums of money for the services in a culture cozy with landline communication. The industry was not going to be stagnant, competitors arose and he found himself in the familiar terrain of trying to prove he could win.
But three years later, he moved out of wireless to head a software company, Applied Data Research. The company was later sold. He returned to wireless with Bell Atlantic in 1991. There he ran Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems.
“It was an interesting time,” he recalled. “We learned that the bigger the footprint, the better the business.”
That mantra led Strigl to grow the business into Verizon Wireless, today the biggest operator in the country with coast-to-coast coverage.
“I learned early on that customers want high-quality calls. They want to keep the calls and not get dropped. They want wide-area coverage, and if you did that for a fair price, even better.”
He said such a model thrived on economies of scale.
In 1992, Bell Atlantic merged with Metro Mobile CTS, which had its sway over areas such as North and South Carolina, Arizona, Texas and Connecticut. That was the beginning of the merging dynamics of the company, he said, a time he thought ripe for building distributions channels. With the acquisition of Nynex, the company became the biggest carrier on the East Coast, he said.
In 1996, Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile went into a partnership with AirTouch and U S West, an arrangement that facilitated the acquisition of GTE.
“Now, we had nationwide coverage,” he said, adding that “we continue to look for opportunities in much smaller scale.”
Looking back at his career, he identifies two major challenges. First, he had to get the service to work, which he faced in his teething days on the streets of Chicago.
The second challenge was to get customers to buy the services. At the bottom of all this has been the efforts to turn the company to profitability.
“The key to all of this was to bring the cost down,” he said.
His management style has also been part of his story, balancing the big picture of a chief executive and the details of a practical man. He refers to his days at New York Telephone, when he was asked to write a position paper by his general manager, Jack Clark, and he did a three-page paper.
“He looked at it and said, `Do you expect me to read this? If the idea can’t be said on one-half of one side of one sheet of paper, you’re wasting time.’ “
That was how he learned to combine the big picture and the detail.
Going forward, he said, consolidation is inescapable. Just as the industry has had shakeups in the past, it will have the same going forward.
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said, explaining that whichever carriers remain, there is plenty of opportunity to go round. “Competition is good for the business … the tougher the competition, the bigger the challenge.”
He also said the industry is on the verge of great services with data and dynamic services.
“Data is not just a funny four-letter word,” he remarked, “I think both business and consumers will be amazed at what we will be able to do in the near future.”
