Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
In the summer of 2000, moviegoers flocked to see Gladiator and Mission: Impossible II, Finland’s Nokia was the leading maker of cellphones, and American telephone companies Bell Atlantic and GTE completed their $52 billion merger. They changed the entity’s name to Verizon Communications.
I’m not big on writing about company anniversaries—to me they seem like the corporate equivalent of Hallmark holidays. However, as a business journalist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a big part of my job was to chronicle the regulatory and technological changes that led to the formation of Verizon 25 years ago. I’ve interviewed all of Verizon’s chief executives, going back to its original co-CEOs, Chuck Lee and Ivan Seidenberg. And I wanted to speak to current CEO Hans Vestberg about the state of telecom today and how he’s positioning the company for its next 25 years.
Making a big request
For Vestberg, who became CEO in 2018 and led the company’s launch of its fast, low-latency 5G wireless technology, that means future-proofing the business by investing in its network. In 2021, Verizon pledged more than $52 billion to acquire wireless airwaves auctioned by the U.S. government. (For context, Verizon’s annual operating revenue last year was about $135 billion.) Vestberg says the purchase sets the company up to deliver products and services well into the next decades. “I promise you, 25 years from now, we are going to be the leading telecom company in this country,” he says. To do that, he says, “you need spectrum,” or radio frequencies for wireless communications.
Vestberg says the board of directors supported his massive spending request. “Our board is committed to think long-term,” he says. Investors have been less enthusiastic. The company’s stock price is about $42 a share, roughly where it was trading in early 2021, when it agreed to buy the spectrum—and the company underperformed the broader market in that time frame.
An investment in the future
Vestberg notes that today, phone calls and text messages—the main applications for wireless phones when Verizon was born 25 years ago—represent about 3% of the network’s total usage. Nearly half of the usage is for streaming movies, games, and other digital fare. He says he believes the capacity and design of Verizon’s network will allow the company to accommodate new technologies that will flow over its airwaves and fiber. “I’m here to manage the legacy of my predecessors and see that this company continues to be the number one in everything we’re doing in this market,” he says.
Future-proofing your business
How are you future-proofing your company for the next 25 years, and how do you get your board, investors, employees, and others to support your plans? Send me examples of your strategies—I’d love to share your stories in a future newsletter.
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