MGMT 12e, Ch 14 What Would You Do? T-Mobile Headquarters, Bellevue, Washington, USA. You earned your managerial stripes in telecom and technol- ogy industries over 18 years at AT&T and Dell Computers. As a finance executive, you successfully lead sales forces and technology businesses while consistently producing above-average financial results. That track record got you your first CEO job at Global Crossing, which maintained part of the backbone network on which the rest of the internet operated. Four months after being appointed CEO, with no other alternatives, you took Global Crossing through bankruptcy to reduce its oversized debt (which you inherited as the new CEO) and to reorganize the company. Ten years later, after a difficult but ultimately successful turnaround, you sold Global Crossing to Level 3 Communications, stepped down as CEO, got divorced, and for the first time in your adult life, found yourself without a job, all within a month's time. So when the headhunter called to discuss the CEO job at T-Mobile, then a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom that AT&T had tried but failed to acquire, you took the interview because you stunk at not working. At the time, T-Mobile was a drifting, fourth-place telecom also-ran, far behind Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. Industry analysts viewed it as existing on DT's financial "life support," but having turned around Global Crossing, you saw otherwise. You advised Deutsche Telekom's CEO that there were a half-dozen obvious steps for T-Mobile to take to improve, but it needed to compete aggressively to stop hemorrhaging customers who were leaving in mass to Verizon and AT&T. The job was yours. Beyond the many strategic challenges facing the company (no iPhones for sale, spotty cell coverage, and mimicking competitors' marketing and cellular plans), you found a demoralized workforce, average age of 27, that needed to be turned in the right direction and encouraged that everything would be OK; a command-and-control culture, emanat- ing from legal and human resources departments, strangling the life and energy out of the workforce; and an industry hated by customers frustrated with high prices, locked in by long-term contracts with exorbitant exit fees, and gouged by restrictive voice, data, and texting limits resulting in unpredictably high monthly bills well above the basic costs of their plans. Because of the financial conditions you inherited at Global Crossing, you became a demanding leader known for ruthless cost cutting and employee layoffs, but it required strict financial discipline to bring the company back from bankruptcy. You had to be the tough guy. But that's not what's needed with T-Mobile's demoralized workforce. Was it possible to change your leadership style after more than a decade at Global Crossing? Can leaders change the way they lead any more than tigers can change their stripes? If you can change, what kind of leader do you need to be? Let's start with the basics: What fundamental things do good leaders do? And is there a particular leadership style that suits the challenges at T-Mobile? Finally, employees are not committed to T-Mobile's long-term vision and strategic plans. Why should they be, since it copied them from competitors? You aren't yet sure what the vision and plans should be, but you suspect that widespread industry customer satisfaction is a good starting place. Do you need to be charismatic and inspirational to get commitment to a new vision, or will rewarding people for good performance and the right behaviors be enough to get you there? If you were the new CEO at T-Mobile, what would you do