Sprint shuffles the management deck in wake of T-Mobile merger breakdown

Three Sprint executives are leaving and seven are losing their status as direct reports to CEO Marcelo Claure in a restructuring to better deal with life without a T-Mobile merger.

The moves include a literal move by Claure and his lead team of about 300 executives and other employees to a different location on the Sprint headquarters campus in Overland Park. They’re also testing new furnishings.

Claure outlined the changes in his weekly email to employees on Friday, about two weeks after Sprint ended merger talks with rival T-Mobile and vowed to spend more heavily on improving its network.

“We’re announcing a new, simpler organizational structure that will reduce management layers and bring leadership closer to the customer,” his emailed newsletter #GettingBetterEveryDay said.

Claure is reducing by seven the number of executives who report to him directly. These include chief marketing officer Roger Solé, senior vice president of sales Tracy Nolan, and area presidents Jamie Jones and Jerry Gallegos.

Nine executives now report directly to Claure, down from 16, the newsletter said.

Chief operating officer for technology Günther Ottendorfer is leaving the company, which he said in a Twitter post would come at the end of the year. He tweeted that he’s leaving “to be reunited with my family in Vienna,” Austria.

Ottendorfer is part of a team of international telecommunications executives, which included Solé and chief financial officer Tarek Robbiati, assembled by Claure to lead the company’s turnaround after he became CEO in August 2014.

Jeff Nelson, senior vice president of marketing growth, also is leaving Sprint. And Jim Hyde, president of affiliates and wholesale, is leaving.

Several executives received promotions.

The newsletter said chief technology officer John Saw, who had reported to Ottendorfer, now reports directly to Claure “with a dotted line to Nestor Cano,” Sprint’s chief operating officer.

Claure also announced that he and his lead team moved to a building in the north end of the Sprint campus and that they’ll be testing “new, more modern workspaces where high-performing teams can achieve their goals.”

The move comes about 2 1/2 years after Claure and crew abandoned their individual polished-wood offices with doors for an office cubicle setting. For Claure, it meant trading in 337 square feet of private office space that predecessors Dan Hesse, Gary Forsee and Bill Esrey each occupied for a 10-by-17 workstation with low panel walls.

Sprint spokesman David Tovar tweeted a photo of his team’s new “high energy workspace” that is “much more contemporary and collaborative.”

Claure wrote that the collaboration he expects in the new setting will boost innovation.

“You simply won’t find great companies with outdated, average workspaces. The best companies in the world — Apple, Google, Facebook — understand that the right working environment can unleash great talent to do amazing things,” he wrote.

If it works as planned, Sprint will redesign workspaces throughout the headquarters campus and its offices in other states to match.

This story was originally published November 20, 2017 at 3:46 PM with the headline "Sprint shuffles the management deck in wake of T-Mobile merger breakdown."