The Verizon board didn't just fire the CEO. It fired the strategy.
In October 2025, after seven years in the role, Hans Vestberg was removed. His replacement: Dan Schulman, the former CEO of PayPal and Verizon's Lead Independent Director — a sitting board member who took the chief-executive chair and immediately began publicly criticizing the strategy the company had been running.
Within weeks, Schulman cut 13,000 employees, killed the free-line and free-handset promotions that had defined Verizon's customer-acquisition playbook, and described his predecessor's approach as one that was "actively making customer satisfaction worse while spending $1,000 per customer to do it." A sitting CEO publicly disowning the inherited playbook is rare. That candor is the story.
Between 2022 and 2025, Verizon lost approximately 2.25 million net customers. Postpaid phone churn climbed from 0.88% in 2024 to 0.98% in 2025. Network investment did not stop the exit. Promotional escalation did not stop the exit. The exit only began to slow when a board director became CEO and admitted, in public, that the strategy was wrong.
A decade in dates
2017 — Vestberg, the former CEO of Ericsson, joined Verizon as chief technology officer to build out 5G. The company was viewed as the gold standard of U.S. wireless reliability.
August 2018 — Vestberg succeeded Lowell McAdam as CEO. His tenure became defined by aggressive 5G investment, the divestiture of the Oath/Yahoo digital-media unit, and a deepening reliance on promotional pricing against T-Mobile and AT&T.
2022–2025 — 2.25 million net customer losses across four years. Postpaid phone churn climbed steadily. T-Mobile became the U.S. growth leader. AT&T stabilized. Verizon kept spending on free-line offers and handset subsidies that competitors matched immediately — eroding margin without slowing the customer exit.
October 2025 — The board appointed Schulman effective immediately. Mark Bertolini, the former Aetna CEO, was named Chairman. Vestberg was reassigned to a Special Advisor role through October 2026.
November 2025 — Schulman announced layoffs of more than 13,000 employees — the largest workforce reduction in Verizon's history.
January 14, 2026 — A major network outage, attributed to a "software issue," generated more than 2.3 million user reports. The FCC opened an investigation. Verizon offered affected customers a $20 credit.
Q1 2026 — The Frontier Communications acquisition closed, expanding the fiber footprint. Schulman framed it as foundational to the bundled-services strategy.
Spring 2026 — Schulman ended the free-line and free-handset offers that had been industry-standard promotional tools for years.
The three phases
| Phase | CEO | Communications posture | Operational outcome | Reputation lesson |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018–2022 | Vestberg (5G era) | 5G leadership messaging. Network reliability narrative. | Network built. Customer satisfaction declining. | Network investment alone doesn't defend market share. |
| 2022–2025 | Vestberg (defense era) | Promotional escalation. Free lines, free handsets, churn-defense ads. | 2.25M net customer losses. Churn rose from 0.88% to 0.98%. | Promotional churn defense is a treadmill, not a turnaround. |
| Oct 2025–present | Schulman (board director to CEO) | Open self-critique. End of promotional era. Cost reset. | 13,000 layoffs. Free-line offers killed. Frontier closed. | Brutal honesty from a sitting CEO can reset a brand faster than ad campaigns. |
How a board fires a CEO and admits the strategy was wrong
Most board-led CEO transitions involve a controlled handoff: the outgoing CEO gets a graceful exit, the new CEO defends the existing strategy while quietly pivoting, the messaging stays measured. Verizon ran the opposite playbook.
The board promoted a sitting board member into the CEO chair. Schulman, as Lead Independent Director, already knew the strategic situation and owed no loyalty to the people who built the existing strategy. The board allowed the new CEO to publicly criticize the predecessor's playbook — a sentence a successor CEO usually does not utter about a sitting board member's tenure. And the board authorized 13,000 layoffs within weeks, the credibility signal that told employees, investors, and competitors this was a real reset, not a marketing repositioning.
The combined effect: the strategy reset was credible because the board demonstrated authority and willingness to actually change course. Most boards do not.
The cost of refusing to admit failure
The Vestberg era ran the standard big-company playbook for declining market share — maintain the strategy publicly, match competitor promotions, spend more on customer acquisition, wait for the cycle to turn. This playbook is the default because it is personally protective. Admitting a strategy is failing is a career-limiting move for the executive who built it. Defending the strategy preserves the executive's options. Shareholders, customers, and employees absorb the cost of the delay.
Verizon's 2.25 million customer losses across four years are the cost of that delay. Roughly half a million customers per year exited a brand that had been the U.S. wireless gold standard. Every quarter the strategy was defended was a quarter the exit continued. Refusing to admit failure does not preserve the strategy. It preserves the executive's standing while the strategy fails anyway. The math is brutal, and it is always paid by someone other than the executive who refuses to acknowledge it.
Four lessons for turnaround leadership
Board directors as CEOs
Board directors brought into the chief-executive role can move faster than internal successors. Schulman knew Verizon's strategic situation from his board seat and had no loyalty to the people who built the existing strategy. The 13,000-layoff move within weeks of taking the role would have been impossible for an internal successor. The right CEO for a turnaround is sometimes the one already at the board table.
Self-critique at the top
Honest self-critique from the sitting CEO is a faster reset than any campaign. Schulman has been unusually direct about what was broken. That candor from a sitting CEO is rare — and it works as a credibility-establishing move with employees, investors, and customers. The standard playbook is to defend the predecessor's choices while quietly pivoting. Schulman did the opposite.
Cost cuts as the credibility signal
13,000 layoffs in November 2025 said more than any strategy memo could. The market reads a cost cut of that scale as confirmation that the new strategy is real, not aspirational. Words can describe a strategic reset. Cost cuts prove it.
The promotional trap
Promotional warfare is a margin trap, not a strategy. Free lines and free handsets become competitive table stakes the moment one carrier introduces them. The cost of acquiring a customer at $1,000+ in promotional value cannot be recovered through average revenue per user. Schulman's decision to end the offers will create short-term churn pressure — but the alternative is paying for customers who will leave anyway.
The lesson
This is what happens when a board refuses to let a CEO defend a failing strategy any longer. The customer hemorrhage was not stopped by ad spend or by network investment. It stopped — to the extent it is stopping — when a board director took the CEO chair and made the decisions the previous regime couldn't. A sitting CEO publicly disowning the inherited playbook is the fastest reset a big-cap board can authorize.
