Interim Sprint CEO Sets Out To Restore Company's Focus

Sprint Nextel's interim chief executive acknowledged yesterday that the company had lost focus, and he vowed to rally its beleaguered workforce.

Paul N. Saleh said in an interview that he was trying to quell rumors and direct workers to address customer-service issues. He said the company was not planning to move its headquarters from Reston back to Sprint's original home, Overland Park, Kan. He also said Sprint would not cancel some of its plans to build a new network, or sell it.

One of Saleh's first orders of business was to start an internal company blog to communicate all this. He also launched a webcast to reach the nearly 60,000 employees who, he said, "have had a lot of distractions."

Saleh took over last week when chief executive Gary D. Forsee stepped down under pressure from the board of directors. Saleh spent the past 10 days shuttling between the company's Northern Virginia headquarters and its operational center in Kansas to "refocus" the company's strategy. Sprint's board has said it is looking outside the company to fill the position permanently.

Saleh said he is trying to rally Sprint employees around the basics of running a cellphone company.

"Even though I'm not part of the Facebook generation, I want to provide them the opportunity to have access to me," Saleh said yesterday in one of his first interviews since assuming the role. "At the end of the day we want the employees to be focused on the customer, and to make sure they're not distracted or confused or concerned."

Since Sprint merged with Nextel in 2005, the third-largest wireless carrier has had difficulty blending the companies' brands and technologies, leading to significant loss of customers and financial disappointments.

Saleh said the company has tried to tackle too many big changes in the past year.

The decision to commit $5 billion to build a new high-speed wireless network using an unproved technology called WiMax has been criticized on Wall Street, and analysts were not impressed by Sprint's most recent advertising campaign. Irked by customer-service problems and dropped calls on the Nextel network, millions of subscribers have left for Sprint's competitors.

Sprint also tried rolling out cellphones that combined Nextel and Sprint's different technologies, to a lukewarm reception.

Saleh's solution: Improve customer service and simplify the business.

"We had too many things on our plate before. . . . We were doing too many things to reach too many customers too quickly," he said. "We have to do fewer things, but do them very well."