Why Great Turnarounds Start with Culture, Not Strategy

When Hans Vestberg stepped down as CEO of Verizon in late 2024, the company was in a familiar rut for a legacy telecom giant: losing market share for five years, churn rising, customer satisfaction falling, and its P/E multiple the lowest in the industry. The board turned to its lead director, Dan Schulman, who had already led a successful turnaround at PayPal. Schulman initially said no—he was happily retired on a ranch in Montana. But he felt a "keen sense of loyalty" to the company and agreed to take the job. Nine months in, his approach offers a case study in how an outsider can lead a turnaround by starting with culture, not strategy.

The Diagnosis: Playing Not to Lose

Schulman’s first move was to tell the truth without sugarcoating it. At his first all-employee meeting—no slides, no notes, just a cup of coffee—he said plainly: "We are losing. And that just does not work for me." He described a company that had become willing to be prey, gently ceding market share to competitors. "We weren't playing to win," he says. The root cause was cultural. Verizon had long relied on its engineering prowess and put the network at the center of everything, rather than the customer. That proud history made the company resistant to change. Schulman offers a crisp diagnostic: "When the pace of change external to a company is faster than the change of pace internal, you're falling be