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Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

And welcome to the two hundred and twenty third episode of The Week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Entner. How are doing, Roger?

Roger Entner 0m22s

Hey. I'm great.

Don Kellogg 0m24s

So Roger, this week we have a Christmas treat. We have Jim Jurais, the author of the Verizon credo and I think the longest tenured corporate communications officer in the telecom sector. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Guest Speaker 0m35s

Hey, good to see you guys.

Roger Entner 0m37s

Jim, so thank you for taking the time. We had the other week Nancy Clark on and she spontaneously talked about the Verizon credo. And I remembered you and me and Danny Strygall talking about how that all came about. And I think it's such a fascinating story. And it's such a great document that I think, at least in the telecom industry, is pretty unique, especially how the people at Verizon have adopted it.

Roger Entner 1m11s

And so I thought, you know, it would be awesome if you would come on the podcast. And you were earlier, you know, spending almost an hour with my team talking about this, you know, how to build culture as Verizon came together from four or five companies to one. And I thought it would be awesome if you could talk about it here on our podcast.

Guest Speaker 1m33s

Well, you, Roger. I I guess I have Nancy Clark to thank for this honor. I will I'll give her a call after this. Yeah. I I appreciate the opportunity, you know, to talk about this.

Guest Speaker 1m44s

It's two decades old now. The credo itself was important part of creating the Verizon that we have today. You know, I appreciate the time to talk to you about it. Yeah. A little bit of history for people who don't know.

Guest Speaker 1m58s

Last count, we think that there's about 19 separate smaller companies that make up Verizon. We were integrating more than four at the time that the credo was created. There was a lot of smaller companies underneath the big four that we brought together in that merger in 02/2001. So couple years of, you know, integrating companies and systems and networks. Three years after that, we came up with the credo.

Guest Speaker 2m27s

I was telling your team earlier, the credo is really some observed behaviors of the leaders in the business and just employees in the business. What I think attributed to some of our early success. And, you know, we kind of pulled them all together in one document, those behaviors that we thought were driving our early success.

Roger Entner 2m48s

Yeah. So how did this particularly take place? You mentioned you took notes. How was this ruled out?

Guest Speaker 2m56s

Well, you know, a little bit more history on that. So during the integration of all these companies that came together to form Verizon in the early 2000s, we were traveling the country basically, you know, and Denny Streagle, he was the CEO at the time in his words, inspecting what we expected. So we were traveling across the country and as we were pulling these companies together and I would ask, you know, one of the leaders in some far flung geography, you know, what's working? They would tell me a thing or two and, you know, I would always take some notes and did this for a number of years. In January 2004, Denny's patients had run out on integrating, and he wanted to get get on with running what was the world's largest wireless company and start performing to the business case basically.

Guest Speaker 3m55s

We were getting ready for kickoff meetings for the new year. In kickoff meetings, we did those to get all the employees aligned on the objectives of the new year. Denny looked at me as we were pulling together his material for the first kickoff meeting and said, this just feels like the same stuff we said last year. He goes, I need something more to pull this all together. And I said, hold that thought.

Guest Speaker 4m22s

And I ran back to my office, and I had this yellow pad that I was jotting all of my notes down on all these trips across the geography. There were a whole bunch of, like, phrases all pulled together on one piece of paper, and I handed it to him. I said, I've been thinking about this a lot and what behaviors are being modeled that's driving our success, and I handed it to him. He looked at me with this skeptical look. He that he always

Roger Entner 4m54s

And then he hits that. Right?

Guest Speaker 4m55s

You know, well, he he used to give me that a lot. He started reading it, and then he looked up from the paper and he looked at me and he goes, I'll get back to you. And he turned his back and he walked into his office. And I turned around and I walked back to my office. I expected to hear something from him that afternoon, never did.

Guest Speaker 5m15s

The next morning was the first kickoff meeting for the the New Year. I'm sitting there waiting through all of the presentations, and, you know, Denny would typically be the last one up and tell us what we really needed to accomplish this year. He did that, and then he said, well, one last thing, I wanna read you something that I think describes this new company that we created, Verizon. He read the notes that I gave him word for word, didn't change a thing. I was horrified because it wasn't a finished product as far as I was concerned.

Guest Speaker 5m52s

You know, I pride myself on my writing, and this was just a bunch of random thoughts on a piece of paper. He finished reading it, and the reaction from everybody in the room was, yeah, that's us. And they stood and cheered. I happened to be sitting next to Ivan Seidenberg who was the chairman of Verizon at the time, and he didn't know I wrote that. And he just looked at me and goes, that's pretty good.

Guest Speaker 6m17s

That sounds like so I felt good, but from that moment on, that was the Verizon credo. Whether it was finished or not, that was it.

Roger Entner 6m26s

Yeah. And Ivan was a tough cookie. Ivan was a shark. Yeah. So that's that's really high praise from Ivan and it's high praise from Denny that he took what you gave him, just shut it down and and repeated it verbatim.

Roger Entner 6m39s

What happened then? It's one thing when the company leader says something, you know, more often than not in many companies, that's like, you know, you throw a stone into a lake and makes a couple of ripples and then, you know, it's nothing.

Guest Speaker 6m57s

That's part of the story too. You know, the communications team, my team, didn't have a chance to even think about how do we roll this out or how do we make it a campaign and get all the employees behind it. So I hadn't even shared it with my team. My team didn't even know I was doing this. They were surprised.

Guest Speaker 7m17s

They they were not prepared. So what we did do, because it was a kickoff meeting, is we captured Denny reading it on video at the end of the kickoff meeting. We decided that we would play that piece of video at the end of each of the kickoff meetings that we were scheduled to do for the next thirty days or so, you know, because we traveled around and we did a bunch of these. So that was the extent of the campaign, if you will. Really, the employees took it from there.

Guest Speaker 7m50s

There were a lot of employees in kickoff meetings that sat there and got really inspired by it. Our frontline employees, particularly store and customer service employees, embraced it. I would say marketed it. Meaning, you know, they put it on posters. They put it on, you know, little pocket cards to remind them of the behaviors.

Guest Speaker 8m10s

They put it on screensavers on, you know, on the computers and stuff. It became a thing that way. In fact, the customer service centers first began using the as an award for an outstanding individual, somebody who has demonstrated behaviors in the credo and is deserving of recognition. So they made it a credo award and things like that. So it it really, um, caught hold and we didn't know what the word viral meant back in 02/2004, but it kinda went viral.

Roger Entner 8m42s

Yeah. So it hit a chord with the entire company and with with the rank and file. So it was not just like you and Danny say something and therefore do it, but it stirred something inside.

Guest Speaker 8m55s

Yeah. I think what a lot of and remember, we're a young company now. We're just integrated all these bigger companies into one giant company. They were starting to get our feet under us in operating as one. And what employees started to take away from the was this was our secret sauce.

Guest Speaker 9m15s

This is what made us different from the competition. We do what's said in the credo. They looked at it as unique to us and that's why they took such pride in it. It was our differentiator. Also best practices, right?

Guest Speaker 9m32s

Yeah. Well, we thought so.

Roger Entner 9m34s

Did the credo change over time?

Guest Speaker 9m36s

There was only one moment in its history that it changed. There was maybe three or four lines that came out when we introduced it to the rest of Verizon. I wanna say that was 02/2007, 02/2008. And that's because we felt that those lines were very wireless centric, which obviously the telephone company found, you know, kind of not talking to them. And what we wanted to do when we rolled it out to all of Verizon is make sure everybody knew we were talking to everybody.

Guest Speaker 10m11s

So those lines were changed. A couple lines were changed so it didn't exclude the telephone company people.

Roger Entner 10m19s

Oh, awesome. Right?

Guest Speaker 10m21s

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first line the first line that says we have worked because our customers value our high quality communication services, that line used to be high quality wireless communication services. It was that kind of thing. Just a little bit nipping and tucking so it was applicable to a telephone company.

Roger Entner 10m44s

There's another line that they took out. Right?

Guest Speaker 10m46s

Yeah. Yeah. It was my favorite line. You bring up the source subject, Roger. I still haven't gotten over it.

Guest Speaker 10m53s

The line was we value a clean store window more than a corner office. Of course, corner office has glass windows. Right? Yeah. What we were trying to communicate is what was really important, and it wasn't aspiring to a corner office as much as it was meeting the customer and showing up well for the customer.

Guest Speaker 11m17s

So the little details about, you know, making sure the window is clean and the light bulbs are lit and all that kind of stuff was what we were trying to drive as more important.

Roger Entner 11m27s

Did I ever tell you the first time I met Denny in his office in Bedminster? No. You know, we come in, this nondescript two story building, right, you probably remember it well. Yep. I'm like, this is the largest wireless carrier?

Roger Entner 11m46s

Very nondescript, very nothing. We and I had my boss with me, and we went into Denny's office, which was not a corner office, but it was like in the middle.

Guest Speaker 11m58s

Yep.

Roger Entner 11m59s

My boss at the time had a bigger office than Benny had. And he put us like over into his conference room. It was like, what? Not even 10 by 10 feet. I had to suck my stomach in to be able to see what happened.

Guest Speaker 12m15s

That's great.

Roger Entner 12m16s

I was so impressed that the company was not ostentatious. Whereas I remember very vividly going to a different wireless carrier with top to bottom ceiling panel mahogany for two floors. Yeah. Difference couldn't be stalker, right?

Guest Speaker 12m39s

Yeah, that's not us. So it's funny, Roger. I started working for Denny in 1995. On our first meeting, he said something to me like, it was almost it felt like a little bit like an interview. I had the job, but you know, I came from Ninex and he was a Bell Atlantic guy and we had just put those two companies together.

Guest Speaker 13m1s

Anyway, he said something to me about, like, what is your communications philosophy? I said, well, Denny, you know, I and I started giving him, you know, communications one on one. He goes, stop. He goes, it's not your job to communicate. And I looked at him like, well, isn't that the job you hired me for?

Guest Speaker 13m20s

But I didn't say anything and he said, it's your job to help the leaders communicate. And then I said, well, I think we'll get along just fine, Denny, because everything communicates. And so we talked about how everything communicates for like an hour. And that's why it kinda leads to your point about the building. Denny, as long as he worked there, he always maintained that the headquarters building cannot be the nicest building.

Guest Speaker 13m51s

The nicest buildings need to be the ones that are closest to the customer, and that was our operations headquarters out in the areas and our stores. Right? This is a story. You'll appreciate this. After we put Verizon together, so this is the early two thousands, there was this guy who ran building administration.

Guest Speaker 14m11s

And he was in the Bedminster Building, that building that you were in. He had a crew come in to rip up the hallway carpet because it had some stains on it, some coffee stains, and stuff like that. That guy didn't last the day because he was ripping up perfectly good carpeting as far as Denny was concerned. So what if it had some stains on it? So he fired the building administration guy because of that.

Guest Speaker 14m36s

Oh, wow. Oh, it was unbelievable.

Roger Entner 14m39s

Those were the times. And still today, the Verizon credo is part of the company culture. Yeah. It's a testament of what you guys put together. One of my colleagues, my team members, said like, you know, some of the employees that they had, they came out with a different mission statement and a different value statement every six months.

Roger Entner 15m2s

And this is largely unchanged for twenty years.

Guest Speaker 15m7s

Yeah. You know, it's funny you bring that up because, you know, from time to time, Verizon would hire someone that didn't grow up in the culture and was coming from an outside company. Let's say it's a leader coming in and they wanna make their mark and they'd look at the credo. And since they didn't grow up in the culture, they'd start to, you know, scratch their head. We had some people who would say to me, I think we ought to change the credo.

Guest Speaker 15m31s

I was like, okay, what do have in mind? And said, well, it's too long. People can't remember it. It's a lot. Okay, it is a lot.

Guest Speaker 15m41s

Tell me what in the credo is no longer relevant to our business. Conversation would end abruptly because when you look at it, and what's important to running the business the way we wanted to run the business, there's nothing in there that you could delete. Like, no, I think that's one of the reasons that lasted this long. You'd be hard pressed, particularly as a leader in the business to say this is no longer important. Like something in here is no longer important.

Guest Speaker 16m9s

It's the end of end of the conversation.

Roger Entner 16m12s

Yeah. And you mentioned that some employees were like reciting the credo, like the Pledge of Allegiance.

Guest Speaker 16m19s

Yeah, we had, like I said earlier, we'd go on these operations reviews around, uh, the geography, pretty much kicking the tires of the business. And we went into one call center where we had this meeting. I wanna say it was Salt Lake City. There's, you know, a group of 20 call center reps. We had a a town hall meeting, and one of them raises the hand and said, hey.

Guest Speaker 16m44s

They're talking to either Denny or Lowell. We'd we'd like to do something for you. And, you know, we're taken aback a little bit. And about 15 of them stood up, and they each took a turn reciting a line in the credo until they had recited the whole thing. That was probably one of the only times in my career at Verizon I almost cried.

Roger Entner 17m9s

Was so Touched.

Guest Speaker 17m11s

Taken back by that. It was an incredible moment, but it wasn't the only one. There were other moments like that, but that was the first one. It was amazing. Like, the employees ran with it.

Roger Entner 17m23s

Yeah, know. And, you know, we talked about earlier about one of the the lines about constructive dissent. Yeah. Which I think is so important to the success of a company.

Guest Speaker 17m34s

Yeah, Agreed. I often tell people that that was the one line in the credo that our leaders in the business, in Verizon's business, would use almost as a teaching moment. You know, when one leader would start complaining about a decision or arguing about a decision that was already made.

Roger Entner 17m55s

Wanna recite that line for us?

Guest Speaker 17m57s

Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. We voice our opinion and exercise constructive dissent and then rally around the agreed upon action with our full support. And, of course, that last piece is the hard piece. Because if you're on the losing end of the discussion and you still feel that it wasn't the right decision, you could leave the room or leave the building and start talking to your subordinates or others in the business continuing the argument, and that's not helpful.

Guest Speaker 18m30s

So more than any line, I've saw leaders call out other leaders for not rallying around the agreed upon action with their full support. It was great. That made the culture participatory, put it that way. It was like you had skin in the game and you were demonstrating the behaviors like there. Like I said, I saw that in action so much.

Roger Entner 18m55s

Yeah. And I I always loved that about Verizon, how they all rallied behind it. It was a less political animal than I've experienced in other places. Yeah. And I think a lot of it because of that.

Guest Speaker 19m9s

Yep. Well, it made us better, you know?

Roger Entner 19m13s

Yeah. Jim, thank you very much for spending the time with us and reminiscing and telling us about the Verizon credo. Really appreciate it. Thank you for our long friendship. Merry Christmas to you, Merry Christmas to all the listeners.

Roger Entner 19m30s

A happy, prosperous and especially healthy 2025.

Guest Speaker 19m35s

Best of luck to you and your organization. I appreciate the invitation and spending the time with you. It's been fun to reminisce about this stuff.

Don Kellogg 19m44s

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jim.

Guest Speaker 19m46s

Thanks, guys.

Don Kellogg 19m46s

Thank you.

Roger Entner 19m47s

Thank you. And we'll be back for New Year's episode too.

Guest Speaker 19m51s

Oh, can't wait.

Roger Entner 19m52s

Okay. Thanks.

Guest Speaker 19m53s

Talk to

Don Kellogg 19m54s

you soon.

Roger Entner 19m54s

Bye. Bye bye.