Wireless Week 2012 Leadership Awards:The retired executive left his mark on the industry in a big way, and he continues to lead by example.

The recipient of Wireless Week’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement award, Denny Strigl is one of those individuals who exemplify leadership more than anything. And those achievements just keep coming. 

Strigl, 66, remembers what it was like back in the early, contentious days of telecom when the A side carriers sat on one side and the B side carriers were on another. Nobody understood the need to get these two sides working together for the greater good through an association like CTIA. But that is what happened back in 1984, when executives set aside their differences as much as they could to represent a broader, united industry.  

Although he retired from Verizon Communications in 2009, Strigl is not exactly retired in the sense of leaving the work life and spending every day on the ski slopes. A commercially licensed pilot who flies at least once a week, he’s still very much active in business, sharing his leadership advice at various group events and serving on the boards of several companies. He’s a frequent guest on FOX Business, CNBC and MSNBC and recently authored the book, aptly titled: “Managers, Can You Hear Me Now?” 

Here are a few words of advice that Strigl has offered for managers and those aspiring to be effective managers:  

Get away from the email, or at least don’t let it run your day. Managing by email is one of the least effective ways of managing and it’s too often used by managers in place of talking to co-workers in person or picking up the phone. Avoid “email jail” where managers can get trapped all day.  

Remember the term papers that you’re instructed to write in school, saying something in 500 words? Or the speech that needed to be a minimum 10 minutes long? Strigl harkens back to the words of a “wise old boss,” Jack Clark, who told him that if you can’t say something on one-half of one side of one sheet of paper, you haven’t thought it through enough to get anybody else to understand it. (In his book, Strigl says this advice came after a hard-earned lesson whereby he wrote a seven-page letter explaining an idea he had for improving telemarketing results.) To this day, Strigl advises managers to know their subject well enough and think it through so that it can be presented clearly and concisely, in as few words as possible.  

Those Were the Days

While a company like Verizon Wireless regularly records billions of dollars in quarterly revenues today, Strigl was there during the early days at Ameritech Mobile, which launched the first mobile phone network in Chicago. When he became president of that company in 1984, it employed about 30 people, and when it brought in $3,000 in revenues – what seems like peanuts today – it was a great achievement.  

Verizon Wireless built up its reputation for network excellence during the years Strigl was at the helm. He knew from the beginning that “you’re only as good as your last call,” and if customers got a fast-busy signal, that’s what they remembered you by. So he made it a point to insist on continued network investment, year after year, despite the broader economic situation. “The one thing that I would not allow to happen is for our capital budget to be cut,” he says, reasoning that even if cuts didn’t hurt this year, they would hurt two years down the line.  

Sure, he’s a Verizon veteran, but he has respect for his competitors, many of whom he considers to be great leaders – and they would be great in any industry. He also isn’t without strong political beliefs, and he was “very disappointed” that the government came down the way it did on AT&T’s proposal to acquire T-Mobile USA.  

It’s easy to say this now because he doesn’t deal with the FCC or the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act on a daily basis, he says, but he believes the deal should have been allowed to move forward – it’s a competitive industry, and if the combined entity did end up raising prices, which he doesn’t believe would have happened, that would have been to the benefit of all the other competitors that would have taken advantage of that. “The government made a serious mistake,” he says. 

Strigl’s candor is a big part of the reputation he’s earned. “It’s that straightforwardness that makes you really like and respect him,” says analyst and Recon Analytics founder Roger Entner, who links Strigl’s leadership very closely to Verizon’s current credo that emphasizes ethics. Listed first in the company’s code of conduct is this: “Integrity is at the heart of everything we do. We are honest, ethical and upfront because trust is at the foundation of our relationships with our customers, our communities, our stakeholders and each other.” 

Others have formed a similar impression of Strigl. Liz Maxfield, executive director of the Wireless History Foundation (WHF), met Strigl around the time CTIA was formed back in 1984. She was one of the first staff to be hired at CTIA, where she served as senior vice president until 1998. 

Strigl was inducted into the WHF’s Wireless Hall of Fame in 2004. What is it about him that strikes a chord? Maxfield says it’s integrity, straightforwardness, honesty and more. When it came to big decisions, “once he made his decision known, you knew he was going to see it through and it would be done with real professionalism and commitment to quality,” she says. “He would bring everyone on board.” 

Years ago, when his PR team suggested the company help victims of domestic violence, Strigl thought it was a great idea. His own sister was a victim, and he understood the devastating impact it has on people and their families. He became more interested after a golf outing one day in which the other guys in his group told him to stay away from the topic. It’s not the kind of thing you want to get involved in, especially at the corporate level, they told him. Well, after hearing three men tell him not to pursue it, Strigl quips, he knew it was the right thing to do. 

Certainly, it was a cause that needed attention, and he was in a position to do it. HopeLine was introduced in 1995 and has since given hope to countless numbers of people. 

iPhone, Katrina & All Those Acquisitions

Strigl was at Verizon when negotiations were going on with Apple for the first iPhone and he often spoke with the late Steve Jobs. It boiled down to Jobs’ desire for a product that he could sell to the widest possible audience, and GSM was the only way to do that. “I always thought he had a great idea,” Strigl says. “The reason Steve and Verizon could not do business is he was clearly focused on the biggest opportunity,” and when push came to shove, that meant going with a GSM version and Verizon’s big rival, AT&T. “I honestly do not believe … that there was any more that Verizon could have done to carry it initially.”  

The week of May 7, 2012, industry professionals will return to New Orleans for a CTIA convention, the first since 2005. Strigl says he’s very proud of the way Verizon Wireless reacted to Hurricane Katrina. When the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, the company advised employees not to put themselves in harm’s way, but despite the advice of some HR managers, some store managers returned to “their stores” to get emergency phones ready for people who needed them, and engineers risked injury to tend to the damaged network. 

Verizon is very much a product of acquisitions, and through the years, “we’ve always said, ‘we’re through acquiring,’” he recalls, and there would still be more to come. Strigl himself was involved in nine major corporate mergers and more than 100 acquisitions of RSA/BTA-sized markets.  

Nowadays, as an industry, “I’d never say we’re through with acquisitions,” he says. He also shares his philosophy on spectrum: There’s plenty of it in the United States, but it’s not in the right hands. Too much is wasted, and he holds out hope that a new administration will review the situation and make it right.  

He also believes the industry will continue elevating the technology to new heights, as it has done from 2G to 3G and so on with new generations. “It’s phenomenal what this industry has accomplished,” he says. “I don’t see that changing.”