Verizon CEO - Recent Interview / Insight to his thinking - post regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

Anonymous · 2025-11-17T17:16:30Z

Want to know what’s coming (for those left after the RIF)..a little insight; https://youtu.be/97kXYnL2PWc?si=6HeilcF-BTmQoHsm

Full Transcript and Summary:

Summary

AI, quantum computing, and humanoid robotics will transform industries within a few years.
AI may reach AGI soon, quantum breakthroughs and advanced robots are close behind.
Companies must drop bureaucracy and move faster and more innovatively.
Verizon needs a full cultural and strategic reboot toward customers and innovation.
Strong leadership requires humility, transparency, and rapid adaptation.

Full Transcript

Culturally, the organization needs to become less bureaucratic. It needs to be more nimble, it needs to be more agile, it needs to be way more scrappy. It needs to think of itself as a startup with a ton of great assets to leverage.

[Music]

I want to start talking about technology, because you have spent a lot of time getting your arms around it. You have seen multiple waves of technology changing your career. How does this compare to previous waves?

I think this is a time for all of us that is unprecedented. I have never seen technology change as fast as it is right now. I think there are basically three concurrent waves that are about to crash down.

You talk about AI, that is one of them obviously, but unless you are really in the AI community, it is hard to imagine how fast that is happening. The models are basically doing a step function improvement every two months. So, the models that we are using today are the worst models that we will ever use. Six months from now, they will be massively different.

And we are right on this cusp right now where you mention it, you know, the models are still hallucinating but less so, but six months from now, a year from now, they will be 300 percent to 600 percent better than they are and they will start to transform everything.

It is my informed view that we hit AGI in the next two to four years and I think it is more towards the sooner side than later.

Wow.

I find it hard to imagine actually that we do not.

Define in your terms, what is AGI?

Machines being able to do everything we do better than we do. That is basically how I define it. So I think it is just hard to imagine, the models are just getting better and better and better and better, faster and faster, and so I think you hit AGI in the next two to four years, and I think most people in the AI community would admit that if you talk to them offstage.

The second wave that is going to hit, that will compound what is happening with AI, is quantum. Quantum is maybe less in the news, but I think it is possible by 2030 that we get to data centers that have a million fault resisting qubits.

If that happens then you basically redefine everything in the compute model, and if you are not using quantum as your underlying basis for your algorithms, you lose, it is as simple as that. And there will not be that many of these firms that will be offering that kind of capacity on a quantum level. You better know who they are and you better be positioned with them, because it will be a rare commodity to be able to do runtime on those quantum computers.

Those quantum computers will start to power AI models that really are compute hogs. They want the more compute they can get, the better. So you will see AI and quantum intersect and take off. Not that many people talk about quantum.

And the third one is humanoid robotics. Humanoid robotics are happening as rapidly as anything else right now. There are some more clumsy prototypes out there, but the amount of money going into that is phenomenal.

So I think, as we think about, well, certain jobs are safe because AI cannot do the manual labor of it, when humanoid robotics occur, and I think again that is in the next five maybe seven years or so.

By which you mean robots that can basically do whatever humans do on the job, physical labor.

Yes, but again stronger and never retire and all that kind of thing.

So those are the three big things that I see happening. And again, it is the future, so you can always reserve the right to be wrong about the future because it is the future, but I would say that is the most likely scenario.

But Dan, I feel like one of the things we have discovered in the last year, we have not discovered it, we have known this for a long time, is you have human level AI in two years potentially, you have quantum in five years potentially, you have human level, better than human level robots within five years, but organizations, human organizations, just do not move that fast.

Getting human organizations to adapt to change at this speed turns out to be really hard.

Yes, I think that is the biggest issue actually, culturally, how do we in organizations adapt to the change and can we adapt to the change. I think that is our job as directors and CEOs to really push hard on that.

I see some CEOs embracing it, I see others not. I think you need to have metrics around it. I think if you do not embrace AI, and AI is really going to be two things, it will be an efficiency tool and it will be a value prop tool. So it will be both.

A lot of people focus on the efficiency part. I think AI can redefine product offerings and how you show up in front of customers. But culturally this is the biggest issue, also because nobody wants to really embrace AI if they think their job is going to go away as a result of that. So it is very hard to do inside a company.

You were mentioning something with the previous speaker that I have to say is probably wrong going forward, which is the way we think about boardrooms now and companies. We used to, in companies, the most successful ones, pride ourselves on collegiality in the boardroom as one of the most important things, how we get along in the boardroom.

I think the most successful companies these days are more argumentative. They are challenging, and that is hard for all of us because we are all human beings, we have amygdalas, we go into a fight or flight mechanism easily, and we need to actually tone that down.

We need to basically not have the hair on the back of our neck stand up when somebody challenges you. We just need to actually listen intently, think about it, debate it, be willing to make mistakes. We cannot be bureaucratic. We cannot steer the boat by the wake of the boat anymore, because that is probably the biggest impediment to future success.

So I think all forms of the culture within a boardroom and within a company absolutely need to change in these next five years, because these next five years are going to be like nothing we have seen before.

I want to come back to that in a minute, because I do think that is the core of the conversations we are having here today. But I would like to talk a little bit about Verizon. That is your job. You have a great long history in telecom companies. As an outside observer, in my experience the telecom companies have not been the most innovative. They were traditionally monopolies, so in some ways they are among the hardest types of organizations to get moving at the speed of technology.

Why did you do this?

Well, I was extremely happily retired, I will say. I felt like I was a role model for retirement. We will talk about the ranch later. I have been a cowboy for the last two years on a ranch, literally, riding horses every day, roping. I am the worst roper in all of Montana, by the way, moving cattle, thinking about beef prices, and it is pretty different right now.

But my view was, and I was lead director at Verizon and I have been on the board for seven years, so I am not unaware of the issues at Verizon as well as the opportunities ahead. I felt like we were at a real inflection point, and I also felt that the company had the ability to make that pivot. If I did not feel that, I would not have taken the job.

But it is going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of hard decisions, a lot of cultural realignment, from being really predominantly a network engineering company to being a company that has to be obsessed with what customers want, has to be obsessed with innovation, needs to redefine the value proposition fundamentally, and do all of that in a fiscally responsible manner.

So, yes, there is a lot to get done.

On your earnings call you said it needed a full reboot. I am going to ask you to define that, but let me just ask, I promise you I am not taking names, I am just curious. How many of you are directors of a company that you think needs a full reboot? Raise your hand.

There is a fair number of hands.

You think it is more than that?

All need reboots.

So, what does a full reboot look like in this crazy technological time we are living in?

Well, I truly do believe all of our companies need full reboots, because we are going into a world of change right now. We are going to have new competition coming who are not afraid to utilize the technologies. It costs a fraction of what it used to to start companies. You will have companies with a hundred people that will be doing multiple billions of dollars of revenues easily.

So I think, from my perspective, what I meant by that is culturally the organization needs to become less bureaucratic. It needs to be more nimble, it needs to be more agile, it needs to be way more scrappy, it needs to think of itself as a startup with a ton of great assets to leverage.

The thing about big companies is, first of all, there tends to be a lot of pride in a big company because you are a big company because you were successful. But that pride gets in the way, because most big companies think about how you become like 10 percent more successful next year. How do we drive EPS up 10 percent or something like that, and that is a combination of "let us grow our revenues by 6 percent and cut our cost structure by 4 percent" or whatever it may be.

Not that we can not do this, but I think instead of 10 percent, you have to think about 10x. How do we improve things by 10x? How do we do things 10x faster? How do we do things for one tenth the cost of what we were doing? Not that you will get there, but you have to bust out of that mindset of incremental improvement in a time where it is not incremental improvement around you.

I always say, if the pace of change external to a company is greater than the pace of change internal, you are in big trouble. Think about how fast things are moving right now and how fast the companies that you are either running or on the board of are moving. That is why you need to redefine yourselves culturally, product wise, value proposition. You need to look at skill sets and you need to be somewhat ruthless about it.

How much time do you have to do that? A lot of companies, a lot of people in this room are on the boards of publicly traded companies. Verizon has had what, three quarters of declining revenues. How much patience do the markets have for you to do your reboot?

First of all, it has not had three quarters of declining revenue.

Subscriber, then. You know what I meant.

Subscriber numbers, I think, is what you meant.

But regardless, a certain level of humility is required for this job.

Look, I think every company is under pressure to redefine itself and prove to its shareholders and to its customers and to its employees that they have a vision of where they want to go. I think if you have a good vision, I mean, look, I think the role of leadership is three things.

It is define reality, and that was part of what I was trying to define up front. These technological changes are going to happen. They are going to have profound impact on every function in the business, every business. They are going to have profound effects on our economy and on our democracy. It is going to happen, or at least it is most likely that it is going to happen, and that is a scary reality for a lot of people. But that is the age we live in. We live in the age of technological change. It is just the age that we are in.

As Shakespeare said, nothing is or is not, but thinking makes it so. So it is now how you think about it that will define your attitude around it.

Then you have to figure out what your vision is. What does the mountaintop look like? What is the inspiring vision that you are trying to create?

And then the third job, which is quite hard, is what is the path between reality and that vision. That is the three things that I think a good leader needs to do.

I think if you can define all those well, you have time to go do that. You probably have several years to go do it. If you do not, people can get frustrated quite quickly in today’s environment if there is no real path that they believe in. Everything is not about this quarter’s results. It is what does the future look like, and do your employees and your shareholders believe in that future.

You were, as you said earlier, lead director at Verizon and good friends with your predecessor. We had a long talk about succession earlier this morning, at least a group of these folks did. How does that work? How did that feel to be in the position of being lead director and becoming the successor?

Well, I have gone through a lot of succession in my tenure as a board director. I think, as you mentioned, it is the most important and the most difficult part of being a board director because it is full of emotion. It does not even matter if it is perfect, it is still full of emotion.

I have seen a ton of CEOs ki-l off their princes in their organization because they want to make sure that they are the person. I have seen all sorts of things.

I remember when I was the lead director at Symantec, which is a cyber security software company for those of you who do not know, and we had to go through four CEO successions. I remember being at a small dinner with the CEO of Symantec, myself as the lead director, a couple of others, and Jamie Dimon was leading the thing. He said to the CEO, "You cannot feel comfortable with Dan next to you, he has let go of the last three CEOs." And I was like, "Do not feel comfortable."

I think sometimes it is good to bring in outside people, and we all know who the outside people are and the inside people, and there is the "hit by the bus" scenario that you have.

I think for us at Verizon, we felt like Hans had done an amazing job at a certain chapter for us with Verizon. I think he had really done a super job in getting our network to where it needed to be. The next phase was about really being customer centric, how do we leverage that in new ways, how do we leverage AI.

That ticked a lot of the boxes that I had. As you mentioned, I know the industry inside and out. Some of you in the audience know the industry inside and out. I feel very comfortable in the seat. I am not afraid at this point in my life to make really hard decisions and drive the company forward.

I think I have been massively transparent about it. These are things that inside most big companies are unspoken, but I have been quite clear about it. We have not performed for our shareholders. We have lost market share consistently, and that cannot continue going forward.

I want to get you to talk a little bit about leadership. You were CEO for two decades basically. What are you proudest of during your time as CEO?

I think it is probably the relationship and the reputation I have with employees there. I try to be very authentic, very transparent. My daughter once asked me, "Are you the same at work as you are at home?" And I said, "I am, except I do not tickle anybody at work." That is a good thing, I would not have made it this far.

She said the same thing to me.

I think the number one trait that I would look for in a leader is humility, because here is the thing, you either are humble or you will be forced to be humble. You have no choice.

That is a tricky thing. We talked about this this morning. As CEO, you need to be humble because you need to be able to take in information, but you also have to know when the time comes to say, "This is what we are doing, get with the program."

Of course. That is not an easy thing to do, is it?

This is not a hard thing, really. You know when you have heard enough, you have been humble for long enough. You show respect, you listen, and then you lead with quiet confidence.

I have done martial arts my entire life. For 50 years I have been practicing mixed martial arts.

Will you give us a demonstration?

I will gladly do that on you.

We will put that off.

The thing about martial arts, I wish everybody in the world did martial arts, because you think about it as fighting and yes, you clearly know how to take care of yourself in various situations, but it is really about learning. It is about quiet confidence. It is about checking your ego. The best way to win a fight is to not get into a fight.

That is not easy. When somebody is in front of you, insulting you, pushing you, insulting your wife or whatever it may be, everything inside me is like, I am going to kick you right now, and that is everything wrong about reacting that way.

So I think being a leader involves being humble. In martial arts you never stop learning, because you never know. But you are ready for the moment, and you have a quiet confidence about you and people want to follow that and they respect that.

So I do not think being humble and having quiet confidence are in conflict. I think they go hand in hand.

We have very little time left, but you are dealing with a group of people for whom the relationship between the board and the CEO is critical. You have been on both sides of that relationship for a long time now. You have seen a lot of different relationships. What is your advice to them on how to make it work well?

First thing I would say to the CEOs, and I have been in the job for a month at present, I have already written three pretty lengthy memos to the board on what I am seeing. I do not want them to be surprised about things that are going on. I want them to be fully in line with what I am doing, and I think that communication back and forth is essential.

The second a CEO starts getting defensive, that is a red flag, immediately a red flag, because the thing about a board, a good board, is that it should be really engaged. That is why you have a board. You have a board not to say "let me show you my perfect presentation" because there is no perfect presentation. We may present it perfectly, but there were debates around every single page in there.

My view is the CEO should be telling the board, "Here are my fears, here are the debates we had over this issue, what do you think based on all of your experience?" I think that real collaboration means challenge, but nobody should be getting upset about being challenged.

I always tell, when I mentor CEOs, embrace your board and have your board embrace you back, because that is the power of a great board.

Dan, fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time from your incredibly busy life to share that with us.

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Verizon CEO - Recent Interview / Insight to his thinking

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