USA TODAY International Edition
T- Mobile CEO John Legere stepping down
COO Sievert will take his place amid Sprint merger
T- Mobile CEO John Legere will step down at the end of April, and company President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Sievert will take his place. Legere will remain at the helm until then to help engineer a “smooth leadership transition” and the closing of the pending Sprint merger.
He will remain on the T- Mobile board for the foreseeable future.
“John Legere has had an enormously successful run as CEO. As the architect of the Un- carrier strategy and the company’s complete transformation, John has put T- Mobile US in an incredibly strong position. I have the highest respect for his performance as a manager and as a friend, I am very grateful to him for the time together,” Tim Höttges, Deutsche Telekom CEO and chairman of the board of T- Mobile US, said in a statement. “John taught everyone at T- Mobile that if you listen to customers and empower employees, you can change a culture – and by doing so – change a company and an entire industry.”
Last week Legere’s name surfaced as a possible candidate to replace WeWork co- founder Adam Neumann. CNBC reported Friday that was not going to happen.
Monday, Legere acknowledged that this has been an awkward couple of weeks but said, “I want to be clear. I was never having discussions to run WeWork.”
Legere said he is not retiring, and “I’m already getting a tremendous amount of input ( from) companies that could use cultural transformation and leadership and things similar to what we’ve demonstrated here.”
He joked that the only restriction on his future employment, beyond the norms of any noncompete agreement, is that “it can’t be companies I hate, which eliminates Verizon and AT& T.”
Legere recently told USA TODAY, “There’s always a lot of good strong speculation about succession and things.”
The outspoken CEO has never conformed to conventional CEO norms. He has more than 6.5 million followers on Twitter.
Appointed CEO in 2012, Legere hasn’t been shy about using salty language to attack industry rivals.
“When I joined the company, the wireless industry was ripe for real change, and we saw an opportunity to disrupt a stupid, broken and arrogant industry,” he said Monday.
The Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission has blessed the T- Mobile- Sprint deal but states’ attorneys general sued to block the merger. A trial is set to begin Dec. 9.