Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure says Kansas City’s charms are helping him recruit top managers

Most Kansas Citians haven’t seen Sprint chief executive Marcelo Claure yet, up close and personal. But about 1,400 did Friday in his first major public remarks in Kansas City, and they saw a man who professed great attraction to the city and its people.

Kansas City “is building one of the greatest cities in the world,” he said, and its assets are helping him attract top management talent from Europe and the West Coast to join him at the company’s Overland Park headquarters.

Speaking as a special guest at the Kansas City Area Development Council’s annual meeting, Claure acknowledged “turbulent” times at Sprint, which has announced 3,700 job cuts companywide.

“Yes, we are reducing our workforce, and that’s a difficult decision, but essential to the future of Sprint,” he said.

Most of his remarks, though, were focused on why he thinks the Kansas City area is a good place for the carrier to succeed and why he has felt welcomed.

Effusive in praise for the metro area, Claure said the quality of its workforce will help return key customer service jobs to the headquarters instead of having them in the Philippines, a major goal as he seeks to improve Sprint’s customer service.

Claure said that when he was tapped by Masayoshi Son, CEO of Tokyo-based SoftBank, Sprint’s majority owner, he was offered the opportunity to maintain his Miami Beach residence and commute to Sprint headquarters. But, he said, it took only two weekends for him to “realize that I had to get entrenched in the community and that I needed to become one of you.”

“Within just a few short days, I feel like I’m one of you,” he said.

Claure told of renting a home in the Kansas City area and quickly finding boxes of homemade cookies and other goodies delivered by his new neighbors — “each with a Hallmark card.”

He said he had been humbled by his new role at Sprint and the task of gaining consumer faith in its phone service. He said much work needs to be done to change Sprint’s advertising and billing to make both more understandable to customers.

Meanwhile, Claure said he has been happy to learn about the company’s involvement in the community, citing $7 million in annual Sprint Foundation philanthropy and the company’s support of entrepreneurship through the Sprint Accelerator.

Claure said he intends to fuel the local economy by requiring that major business partners of Sprint, including an unnamed United Kingdom-based bank, put U.S. headquarters in the Kansas City area as a condition of doing business with Sprint.

“We are going to bring employees here, directly or indirectly,” he pledged.

In recruiting managers to Sprint, Claure said, he first meets with skepticism about moving to the Midwest. But after a weekend visit, he said, recruits have no doubt they want to live and raise their families in Kansas City.

He said he is working to gather the best talent internationally to “get back to the basics” and “make sure our network works when and how you use it.” That will include simplifying Sprint’s pricing plans and “redoing bills so our customers can understand them.”

Claure said his goal is to lead “the one carrier people actually like to do business with.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2014 at 3:53 PM with the headline "Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure says Kansas City’s charms are helping him recruit top managers."