It’s not a good sign when your name starts popping up in the press with the kind of foreboding and frequency otherwise reserved for Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, Kim Jong ll and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Well, OK, it’s not that bad. Still, Sprint Nextel Corp. President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee appears to be in a heap of trouble and is increasingly under the microscope. Sprint Nextel Chairman Tim Donahue last week announced his exit strategy less than two months after former chief operating officer Len Lauer departed the company, following sub-par second-quarter earnings and subscriber additions far below those of No. 1 Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and No. 2 Verizon Wireless.
How did Sprint Nextel get into this bind? Is it because of its failure to date to integrate Nextel Communications Inc. and its prized push-to-talk business into Sprint Corp.? Is it a corporate culture clash? Perhaps the $35 billion acquisition was not such a hot idea after all. For sure, the vision thing is still missing.
On the other hand, maybe all the panicky, hand-wringing about Sprint Nextel is overblown and premature, owing to pressure to satisfy the gods of Wall Street and investors’ incessant demand for immediate, unrealistic gratification. Sprint Nextel owns some darn good assets. It is neither a dog nor a pretender.
But it really doesn’t matter, does it? Perception is everything, every bit as real as missed earnings projections. It has been suggested Donahue’s year-end resignation could make things only worse for Sprint Nextel. Perhaps. Or, it could shake things up enough to entice Sprint Nextel’s board to take a bold, fresh look at the future.
It just so happens there’s an out-of-work executive who helped rehabilitate a top U.S. tech company that, like Sprint Nextel, had lost it way. At least, that’s how Penguin Books is spinning the new tome of former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina. Fiorina told “60 Minutes” she suspects a couple of male members on the HP board-one, Tom Perkins of venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers-might have had a hand in her demise. Perkins left the board in May in protest over HP’s pre-texting tactics to plug boardroom leaks.
Fiorina, who put in two decades at the old AT&T Corp. and Lucent Technologies Inc., has suggested gender may also have come into play in being heaved from HP. Of course, you could argue being thrown overboard was the ultimate complement, seeing that corporate board’s have been doing it to male executives since the beginning of time. It seems Wall Street wasn’t that upset when Fiorna was sacked. Who knows, who cares?
Maybe Sprint Nextel should. She may be your man.
