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Rapid Response: Future-proofing Verizon, with CEO Hans Vestberg

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We decided keep America connected, meaning we don't disconnect any residential customers. I mean, if you would sit down and think about pure shareholders. You would not do that. I increase the Virtual volontar för mig employes so they can help in this kurs on kampanin tim. For us this is normalt. This is what you do for your responsible corporation. I think we will fast forward very important development like romot education, telemedicin and things like that that we never thought would be possible. And that's of kanss impact how we're gonna work in the futuren and what type of product we need to have out there.

Yeah, I can tell you, in two to three to four years from now, our shareholders gonna feel that those decisions that you made for the society there are so important today because you can take one bad decision today in a crisis, and that's gonna be remembered for years to come. If you're ever gonna lead, now is the time to lead. That's Hans Vesperg, CEO of Verizon. With one hundred and twenty million customers on its network, Verizon is among the most central businesses in helping all of us to stay productive, active, and connected during the great lockdown. This is Bob Safian.

Host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response. Hans is Swedish born. The former chief executive of Erickson. And he takes his leadership responsibility. Very seriously.

You need to rethink everything you've done before, Hans says. To help him find the right answers. He's talking daily. To other CEOs, to government leaders. And in a noontown hall meeting that he's held every day for the past two months.

to tens of thousands of his own employees. Hans has gotten the behemoth company to pivot quickly. retraining thousands of jobs, and he's opportunistically purchased a video conference business, Blue Jeans, after seeing booming use of such tools on his network. It's both business as usual. And a whole new world.

All at once. I'm Bob Safian and I'm here with Hans Vesberg, the CEO of Verizon. Network connectivity is the essential tool of the twenty first century, certainly reinforced by the coronavirus lockdown. Data traffic on Verizon's network is way up. So is phone calling, eight hundred million calls a day.

twice the pre crisis peak level. Yet uh booming times are not necessarily easy for Verizon. Like other providers, it's allowing many customers to suspend paying for service. There are many new Management challenges. Hans is coming to us today remotely from his home in New Jersey as I ask my questions from my home in New York. Hans, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, Bob. Great to be here.

At Verizon, you're used to dealing with disasters, hurricanes, floods. Tornados, those things all continue. But of course now you have to deal with coronavirus. What is different about this crisis? than dealing with Those kinds of

Disasters that you're more used to. I think first of all, w we are unfortunately very used to disasters, so many natural disaster the last couple of years. So of course we have a process for for handling crises, but It's totally different. We had our emergency operations center up in the beginning of February, which is the highest crisis alert. Very soon after that, we split our exektiv team. And so very few of us are working with the krisis, the rest is taking care of the business. That's very, very different from how we would do it. This is the longest running krisis we have had since we started to implement our crisis management. We've never been running so long as we've done so far. And we all know it's month left before this is over.

So a hundred and thirty five thousand employees you have now about Eighty percent are now virtual, right? And you had to move them over in a very short period of time. Was that Crazy? That was like crisis on the fly. That wasn't necessarily part of your existing crisis plan. We

Now we envision that we would have 115,000 people working from home, and that we need to transform 20,000 employees work from being in a står to be a customer care employees. We didn't envision that. We envisioned that in små portions. But to be honest, we made it in two weeks. In two weeks we transform hundred and fifteen thousand employees to work from home. And we have retrained twenty thousand members of our staff to work with different tasks than before. And we even open a job exchange internally. So if you actually had the job that you couldn't perform anymore, you can actually work for another unit that actually needs that work. So we have really pivoted how we do it. But we also need to remember, we have some fifteen to twenty thousand employees that are in the front lines. They are either having a store open because of the nature of Over infrastructure, or we have our engineers being out in the field and serving the most vulnerable hospitals, first responders. So it is a balance in every decision you take how to keep that up.

Did you have enough of the P PE, the personal protective equipment that's much talked about. for your folks in the field? We had in the beginning, then of course we had some sort of a shortage, but then we also withdraw our activities in the field, and then when we got PPE we increased it again. We would have today thirty percent of our Doors open, but only in certain hours and only by appointment. More important, we have found innovation. Historically, for example, installing a f uh fiber to the home. We need to go into the home, we need to be there for a day or most. Today we can do that remotely. So our innovation is now that we don't need to go in, so we can continue to install fiber to the home to our kusters without actually going into the homes and having the social distancing that is so important.

So it also comes a lot of innovation in times when you need to work differently. Things that you never thought you could do, you're actually doing. If I hear you right, there were sort of waves like you had enough equipment, then when you realize you didn't, you kind of had to throttle back. You're sort of staying on your toes as you go through this based on whatever the next day brings. Yeah, no we have been in extremely close contact with our employee base. And one thing that we decided some eight weeks ago was that every noon at twelve o'clock we have a live webcast. To all our employees. We usually have a viewership between some thirty to sixty seventy thousand that joins every day to listen to us because we talk about all the new principals. Where did this idea for doing this webcast come from? That it was in the beginning when we decided to say that we're gonna close some stores and remember we also have uh employees in Asia, so we need to start communicating with them very early on. We said, Hey, why don't we do a webcast? We did it day one and we had enormous feedback from our employees.

It has been a way for many of our employees that have a total new life working from home with children so they can come in at noon between twelve and twelve thirty and listen to the leadership, what we're doing. We don't have all the answers, but reassurance in times of uncertainty is one of the most important thing you have as a leader to actually talk about what's happening and just Talk about normal things. I mean what we're doing, what is happening in the company. That is a huge r our response is enormous. We do a pulse survey as well every second week with all our employees to ask how we're doing? How do you feel in your new work environment. We have a very good response from our employees in a crisis, which is a Usually the most complicated as a leader is to communicate in a crisis. We also open up this for external. So we have now investors, we have shareholders and uh public actually listening to our webcast because we do it on all the platforms like Twitter

Aure internä plattform, koska samier acesta intranetä, kun are in filet. We vojete on Twitter väl. Se on nuistä kuss om investtä on dailina nu. We are happy käim, koska detä no se. You're laughing about the questions you get. Are there any questions that are particularly memorable that you've gotten recently? I think that the most are of course concerning safe and healthy because that's number one priority. Uh I think you you get a lot of personal questions, how I dealing with it, how is my new normal? How's my days? So I usually talk about the what I've done during the day, which CEOs I've been speaking to. If I had a bord meeting, what was the subject of the bordmeeting. Make it more normal. What's happening in the kampan? What are I'm doing? Så everybody feels that everybody tried to do new normal, even though this is. Uh such a big crisis and such a

Big thing for the whole world. You are a very disciplined leader. I know, including with your time, you track all your time that you spend on tasks. I know you rate your effectiveness each day. You set out all of your years meetings in October for the year ahead so you can plan. But as you say, this is a crisis without a playbook.

And so I'm curious when this virus hit and you had to change your management. What did you consider? Yeah, it was. But on the other hand, I had my fundamental beliefs how you run a company and how you reallocate time very quickly. So very quickly earn, I reallocated my time and my leaderships time. And I see it in three phases. I would say 60-70% of the leadership team we spent on the crisis. That was the first two weeks. Then I pivoted team and I do that by governance because I just tell them what to work with and what type of meetings want to have. So now we have an emergency operation center. They run

Everything that is this crisis, answer our employees, how do we deal with different states, different countries, rules and regulations. And we only have 30 minutes every morning, the whole executive team. We get an update from the emergency operations center. Thereafter, we work normally with our normal 5D deployment, our strategy for the company, how we deal with customers. That has been our strategy in order for us to actually see that we run this company forward, because if you're gonna be taken by this crisis, and the only thing you think about is that, especially as we don't know how long it will go on. I mean if you have a natural disaster. We know more or less when the weather will improve and we're gonna get back to some normal and we can shut it down. We don't know how long this will go. So I need to pivot my team very early on.

So I think that I had the fundamentals, how I allocated my time, how I govern things, and that helped a lot when I came into this how to peev with my team and Now I would say that we spend fifteen percent on the crisis as an executive team, probably sixty-sixty five percent on running our business. And then the the remainder is what things can we now do for the future? What products do we need so we emerge even stronger coming out from this crisis? That's how I'm running my team right now. You mentioned the crisis, you mentioned business as usual or business today and the future. Is it two teams or three? It's two teams. So one is the crisis and one is business usual and new opportunities. But you're govern it differently. Uh you don't won't come into a meeting thinking about How will the workplace for the future look like? What type of new product we want to have. That's a certain meeting. Another meeting is when you run your business as usual. How we're rolling out 5G, what is our strategy execution, etc. So you pivot and make very clear the purpose and the governance of the meetings where you want to have the fokus, and that's what we've done.

Things like the blue jeans purchase. Does that come out of the crisis team too? Because that is uh opportunity that presented itself in some ways because of the crisis. That comes out where we see opportunities in the new normal. Uh now we had worked with Blue Jeans for a while, but there's a lot of other things we're working with there, but that would typically be a thing that would come up there when you start thinking, what are the new normal, what are the new societal behaviors, what products need to be fortified? What product do we need to down prioritize? That's all happening in that environment where we try to be as creative as possible. And here, of course, you need to rethink everything you have done before because

historically we have a process for everything, and as the societal behaviors is situation analysis, that's changing so dramatically and so quickly in a crisis that we need to rethink much quicker what type of new products, what type of new processes we need to implement. That dynamic is very new to us I think the team has adapted well, but of course it has the challenges. Like are the opportunities that you're seeing from those changes in behavior. That you have to react to. Absolutely, you mentioned there kollaboration tools in the network.

från den basan från den start från pandemingen upp twelvendig i nett. Så ofs you understating att det will never gå back till senar. Vi den nu normellen will så mycket more kollaboration tills. An oching is, of kurs remote learning or telemedin. I have talked for the last twenty years about the mobility broadband and cloud is a twenty first century's infrastructure. And if we're ever gonna have any sustainable solution, we need to use those three pillars. I think we've broken down some of those barriers that we never thought was possible, even in the Western world. That it's okay now to have telemedicine. It's okay to do e-learning. Even though it's better to go to a classroom, we're gonna see hybrids going on. And that's of course impacts how we're gonna work in the future, and what type of products we need to have out there. When the The crisis ends.

Are you gonna go back to having a hundred and fifteen thousand back in offices or are a lot more people going to continue to be working remotely? We spend a lot of time on the second fase of this pandemic, which is sort of the staggerd reopening. And we think that first of all it's gonna take. Time before everyone is back to the office. We're gonna prioritize the ones that really need to be in the office. Ultimately, we will reconsider certain function that might not come back to office because we have seen gain for the employee. And for our customers by working another way. And remember, everything we decide in our company, we we have the four stakeholders: employees, shareholders, customers, and society. And in time of crisis, you

Always need to balance those four when you take a decision. Because it's very easy, you superreact on one of them, and then you have negative impacts on the others, and all of them have to be long-term decisions. based on all four of them. We might come up that the process to have certain groups of employees being home because it's good for employees. Number two, it's good for our customers. Good for our customers, usually good for our shareholders. And then of course it might be good for the society. We travel less or we're given much more equal opportunity for our employees that they can be home. So You need to have that with you. And I think we all have that vivid every day we take decision. Every morning we take decision. We think about these four stakeholders. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

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There's so much um variety and things that are up in the air that you have to be fluid about. I'm curious When you think right now, what's been your most challenging decision so far? For you. I think the most difficult decision is sort of the balance between the number one priority, the safe and healthy of my employees, and then keeping up the second most important infrastructure in the country, which is the mobility broadband services. Because that balance you need to do every day. But remember, we serve

Almost all hospitals in the country, all this crisis operation centers that the governments are putting up for testing, etc. We serve all of them in order to have konnitivity. because without konnitivity, they are not operating. So that balance is difficult. But if you have the your right principles and the right team behind it with the right fact. And data, it's actually manageable. And that's what we have in our emergency operations center, which is running these twenty four by seven. They are good advice, they have good facts to take those decisions. But I think We have done it well so far. I'm proud of my team because they really have Rise in to this occasion. I'm curious when when you saw people blaming five G for Covid nineteen, was that uh

Unexpected? Yeah, it's unexpected and and of course There's no correlation between 5G and the coronavirus is. I don't even understand how anybody can even hang it together. But uh I think what we're working with, of course, to see that fake news is Taken away as much as possible, because there's no rule with 5D and that. And I think 5G is such a fantastic and powerful technology that's gonna bring so much to our society. That we haven't even understood yet. So I'm really excited about 5D, and especially in the world like we have right now, that konnnectivity in a

pace and uh performance like 5G will make a tremendous change for each and everyone on this uh earth. Yeah, there's so much uh uneasiness and panic about things that people latch onto things that I guess they don't really understand. I wanted to ask you about I know there's a an initiative between Apple and Google about sort of Tracing people using phones, tracing and tracking. I'm curious if you have any insights or perspective about what the potential impact of those kinds of initiatives might be. We're of course following this on a global basis and different countries are doing it in different ways.

What we learnt is that you need to have a Värgt högst av gäcers in order to make it efficient. Mining att signing up and it has to be en opt in, it has to be konsent från the individual, because It's a lot of privacy questions around it. Denffering countrys have different privacy ralls. US has very hätte av privacy rås, which I applaud. So it will be different from country to country. But of kurs tracing is one piece of the rekaring avenis pandemic. You have many employees. I'm sure you must have had plenty who have been afflicted in some way or their families afflicted with such a huge employee base. Do you track and trace

Those Who are positive in your own organization. Yeah, we have a system for that, so we can have uh an understanding in fact on how many of our employees have been exposed to COVID nineteen or tested positive. We have a team that is reaching out to each and every of them to see how they are. Progressing in it and whatever support we can give. So yes, that's part of my morning session to know how many of our employees has. COVID 19 and how many has been rekard. Be hanligt people rekaring as väl, så it's ekligt import att understända, och det tär sig också när vi har more exposer. Usually it korrelat that has higher level avid 19 exposure.

What do you think the global implications of this coronavirus are gonna be on the business and on all of us? The principle I believe in it has been firm the last ten years. I worked a lot with the United Nations through my career and I did that because I had the conviction that teknity is the only way to bring equality to this world. That everyone regardless where you're born and where you come from, should have the same chance. Technology is the only solution that can scale sustainably. I was born in a country, Sweden, where you had the hospital close by, you had a school close by, everything was built in brick and mortar.

Everyone in the world will not have that chance. The only chance is actually mobility, broadband, and cloud. And I think that Вот Діс Пандемік Вілбрин іс вю Of the förd technology will be so important. I think we will fast for very important development like remot education. Tel medicine and things like. We're gonna be taking away hörd that we thought would take us years. and years to actually take away. That will, I think put the whole teknologisn in even more importance för seeing that this gärlärden att develop sustainable. Så I think it's gonna be klar chans to our tvs om teknologien telekoms companies and all that.

should be more positive to for our society, for the people on this earth, because the more using technology, the better the pricing becomes, the kost efficiency increases, so more and more can access the technology. And this is technology that was available. This is really more habits that you're talking about changing as much as anything else, right? Yeah. Technology's already there, it's more habits and actually breaking down barriers for defferer constituencies or societies using technology to deliver the services. Because today they can deliver the service sort of analog, as the man are doing. In order to reach their konstites, there sit, etc. They need to break it down. So hopefully

Governments all across the world will understand that if I don't have an IT strategy based on this, I'm never gonna serve my citizens in in the way I should. When I think about your business, Verizon's business. It's sort of two sides. On on the one hand, you've seen A huge jump in demand. Not necessarily a jump in revenue, right?

How do you think about this time and where Verizon is and kind of what's at stake for Verizon? In this moment. Uh I mean in this time, first of all You take the right decision for society. That will ultimately make the right

impact for you as a company, a corporation, for your shareholders, for your employees and your customers. We decided to keep America connected, meaning we don't disconnect any residential customers, nor any small and medium customers because they cannot pay because they have impacted on Covid 19. I mean, if you would sit down and think about pure shareholders. You would not do that. But if you think about this company and what we are here and the size we have and the responsibility we have, it's naturally do it for society. It's ultimately your customers think that you're doing the right things, your site is doing the right thing, your employees rallying around how you show up as a company. I can tell you, in two to three, to four years from now, our shareholders gonna feel that.

Those decisions that you made for the society there are so m important today because you can take one bad decision today in a crisis, and that's gonna be remembered for years to come and I'm a huge consumer brand. I mean hundred twenty, hundred and thirty million consumers on my wireless network. So We have a responsibility and large corporation have a large, huge responsibility in crises like this. I don't look at straight down what's happening today. I think about how do I create this company being even stronger coming out from this crisis and doing the right for society. And that's why I'm not frustrated. I think we're doing right. We're Where we increased fifteen gig for all our consumers that that wasn't on unlimited on wireless. We are doing pay it forward in order to bring money for our small and medium businesses. I increased the

virtual voluntearism for my employees so they can help in this courses on company time. For us this is normal. This is what you do for your responsible corporation. You mentioned that you talk with other CEOs and government leaders regularly. How do you decide who to talk to? Verizon serves ninety eight percent of the Fortune five hundred companies. So that's pretty simple that I talk to the top CEOs in the world. I talk to all the big tech CEOs.

I think in times like this you need to talk to people. I need to learn from them what they're doing, and hopefully they learn from me what we're doing, and in in totality we're doing better as industrial companies. So that's what I'm doing. So I usually have one or two calls with the CEO every day. And uh that have done the last eight weeks. So uh and I learn from them and they learn from me, hopefully. When it comes to the roles and public sector and private sector, I think There's such a huge challenge with this pandemic. There's not one entity that can solve it by themselves. So collaboration becomes even more important. So private public partnerships, sharing in between, not that I should tell them what they should do, nor they should tell me what to do. But we need to know what each and every one of us are doing and educate each other. So my communication with the the public sector has also increased quite dramatically during this time, talking to governors, talking to the government, in order to understand what they are doing and what we are doing.

These are stressful times. Are you stressed? No, no, I'm not stressed. Um Of course I I'm vary attentive to the situation and the importan av the situation and the yew responsibility that I have. I have a huge responsibility, a juge company, and I have customers, shareholders, employees and en commitment to societies of course I feel that pressure.

It's not that I'm stressed over it. As long as I have my structure and I know I attack all of it, and my team is there, which is doing a great job. I feel that we are doing everything we can do to have a positive outcome of this. It sounds like you sort of go back to your process. Do you have advice for others who are feeling stressed about how they can think about making their way through a time where there's no playbook and things Can seem very unsettled. Yes and no. First of all, all

Leadership. tips that you have is all based on how you are as an individual. I'm in certain ways I have my strength and weaknesses. So for me, this is working perfectly to be very structured, and I already have my model. So I think What is working for me is very much a structure. I know what I'm gonna do the next thirty days. I have it structured up. Then I can always take calling between here and there if something comes up. But för mig it's important that I stare my team, my organisation to work with the things that we think are the most important in this crisis. Så we don't sit there and randomly target mitings and do things that we don't even think afterwards why did we spend time on that? The send is, of course.

This is a crisis. I was in the telecom crisis, I was in the bank crisis. You cannot even compare them. You need to rethink. And the only way to rethink is talk to as many people as possible and listen to what they think. And then you gather diverse set of facts, and from there you act. That's why I talk to so many CEOs, that's why I talk to all my employees, I talk to everyone constantly, because I formulate based on my fundamentals there how I gonna act in the time. So

I think those are some advice, but the last is if you're a leader leading an organisation, the reassurance to your team. Even though you don't have all the answers, be transparent. That's common sense. You should do that at any time. It's a little bit more accentuated right now. So I think a lot of the leadership things you should do, they're just accentuated in crisis. But if you're ever gonna lead, now is the time to lead a crisis, the leaders lead. And you seem uh Upbeat. The energy is up.

How important And how hard is that? for an organization in a time like this. You need to know what you're good at and what you're bad at. I have always said that couple of my strength is of course give energy, empowerment to my to my leaders and to my employees.

I think that's I continue with that in these times. I would sound the same three months ago as I do right now, but I think that you you need a certain Konfidens och en söter optimism för du att livs like this. Så jag just mig stränk. Jag har andra people in min andra stränkt that they are exercering right now, and totalet av deteret av mitt team är att bring out det består. That's how I think, and that's why I also believe that I stay true to my normal beliefs, my strength and weakness, even in a crisis.

Well, Hans, as always, thank you for sharing your perspective and your insights. Really appreciate your time. Thank you very much, Bob. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a wait what original. The show is recorded remotely, using sanitized audio gear. It's hosted by me, Bob Saphian, Masters of Scales editor at large, and Masters of Scale host, Reed Hoffman. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff.

Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producer is Jordan McLeod. Scripts by Christina Gonzalez. Original music and sound design by Ryan Holiday and Daniel Nissenbaum. Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson and Lena Sillicen.

Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh. Спеціанкс теми мкса санмен Adam Heiner, Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin. Charlie Menessis.

And Saida Sapia. Visit masters of scale dot com slash rapid response. To find the transcript for this episode. and be sure to subscribe. to our email newsletter.