Dan Schulman’s plan to get Verizon back in the fight

When the Verizon board on which Dan Schulman sits asked him last year to replace Hans Vestberg as CEO, Schulman turned the job down. Twice.

When you’re at a boardroom table, he says in an interview for The CEO Signal show, you have to be “100% supportive of your CEO, until you’re not.” But the idea of making a change at the top did not come up overnight, he says, and as the company’s lead independent director he knew he could be asked to step in if that day came. “I dreaded it a little bit,” he admits.

Schulman had retired two years earlier as CEO of PayPal, where earnings had quadrupled over the nine years he was in charge. Having undergone emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix days before he left his last job, he had been planning a quieter life, branding cattle and roping horses on a ranch in Montana with his wife. But he felt a sense of obligation to Verizon, he says, and as a onetime head of AT&T’s consumer division and Virgin Mobile US, he ultimately concluded that he knew what the $200 billion US telecoms giant needed. So he signed a 27-month contract.

Schulman wears the same jeans and cowboy boots to meetings in Washington that he does on the ranch, but the casual appearance belies the urgency that defines his return to executive duties. “I’m a very laid-back, intense person,” he says. His team will never hear him raise his voice at work, “but people know we need to make every single day count.”

Verizon had been ceding market share for five years, its customer satisfaction scores had dropped as its subscriber churn rate rose, and its valuation had fallen behind rivals AT&T and T-Mobile US. Schulman found its culture bureaucratic, hierarchical, risk-averse, and more focused on processes than outcomes. For the deeply competitive Schulman, that was “unacceptable.”

He told his team: “We’re going to win in the marketplace. And we’re going to do that in a fiscally responsible manner. But we’re not going to be a punching bag anymore.”

Schulman is a practitioner of Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art in which fighters use their legs, arms, elbows, knees, and even teeth — “whatever it takes to win,” he says. “I don’t like going into the ring and just getting punched. If somebody is going to punch me, I’m going to punch back.”

Defining reality while inspiring hope

To get the company “playing to win” again and reclaim its “swagger,” Schulman has shifted employees’ focus from Verizon’s network to its customers, launched 10 transformation initiatives that he expects weekly progress reports on, and announced the largest layoff in the group’s history, affecting 13,000 of its roughly 100,000 employees.

This week, Verizon delivered the second Wall Street-pleasing earnings report of his tenure, raising its guidance for full-year earnings after signing up unexpected numbers of new wireless subscribers. Its stock, which had fallen 30% over the previous five years, has rallied 16% since October, outstripping its closest rivals and the wider market as investors buy into Schulman’s turnaround story.

The 10 new “work streams” which Schulman hopes will accelerate progress further were developed using AI to sift through 8,000 employee suggestions for what Verizon could be doing better. Such structured efforts matter in a turnaround, he says, but he describes the CEO’s task in much broader terms.

“The role of great leadership is to define reality,” Schulman says. When a company is under pressure, “your employees know what’s really going on; they’re all adults,” and they want to know that their CEO understands the facts. “But if you only define reality, that can be a real downer. You also have to inspire hope.” People need to hear what a CEO’s vision is, why they should believe that it’s within reach, and what the plan is for getting to that loftier goal.

Never stand still when the future is unclear

Schulman has worked with the same sensei for years, who has had a recurring criticism about his Krav Maga technique: that he is not constantly on the move. “If you stand still in a fight, there’s more tendency that you’ll get hit,” Schulman explains, adding that the same is true for businesses.

“When the pace of change external to a company is greater than the pace of change internally, you’re falling behind,” he warns. For big companies in particular, “the biggest impediment to their future success is their past success. They want to redo what got them to the dance,” but that doesn’t work when the world outside is changing.

The pace of that change is now so ferocious that it has made a mockery of the idea that a leader can know everything, Schulman says: “I want the company to know we don’t know everything that’s going to happen in the future. We want to prepare ourselves as best we can, but we can’t say absolute truths anymore, because you’ll be proven to be a liar in, like, a year.”

CEOs can’t be paralyzed by that uncertainty, he adds, and instead need to be ready to make decisions quickly. “A quick decision that is wrong and you self-correct is way better than spending months creating the perfect decision that’s going to be wrong anyway,” he reasons.

A “bias towards action,” coupled with humility, will define successful companies, he says, and it is a leader’s job to “unleash” their company’s culture so that it can accept that pace of change.

The capitalist case for AI reskilling

Schulman attracted positive headlines at PayPal for his efforts to help its lower-paid staff, after discovering that many of them had been struggling to make ends meet. When he stood down from the digital payments company in 2025, he hailed it as a model of good corporate citizenship where “profit and purpose are not at odds with each other.”

Setting Verizon on a path to higher profits required much tougher decisions about its employees. It needed to find about $5 billion in cost savings to improve its offering to customers, he concluded, and it could not do that by attrition. “What I opted to do is to make a significant cut as opposed to just bleed[ing] it out over multiple quarters of multiple years,” he says. “You need to be able to make the difficult calls, so that your company can thrive moving forward.”

Schulman did not tie Verizon’s layoffs to the efficiencies that AI and robots can bring to a company of its size. But he has warned that unemployment rates could reach 20% to 30% within two to five years as technology takes on more of the tasks that human workers currently perform.

“There’s been a lot of happy talk about it — we’ll all have our little AI assistants and it’ll all be good.” But the change that is coming will be disruptive, he says, and the people in its path will be better off if they understand AI and know how to use it effectively.

His response to that insight has been to set aside $20 million for a “reskilling and career transition fund” to prepare the employees Verizon was laying off for a job market that is getting harsher for those without AI skills. At Semafor World Economy earlier last month, he called on his fellow Fortune 100 CEOs to follow his lead.

“This is an obligation, I think, of every CEO,” he says, calling on the private and public sectors to work together on the skills challenge. “If we don’t, people will be left behind. And that is not good for our democracy. It’s not good for our economy. It’s not good for capitalism.”

Large numbers of unemployed people are not typically good for business, he notes, and “I feel, if you’re lucky enough to be in a position of responsibility, that you better act responsible.”

As for the tens of thousands of people Verizon still employs, Schulman says his goal is to build a “we’re all in this together” culture, where employees rally around a mission of reclaiming the brand’s market leadership.

“Year one is about getting people into this mode. Year two is solidifying it. And year three, we kind of have a different company in place,” he predicts. But the new urgency he is injecting needs to become a way of life in the new Verizon, he adds: “This cannot be just talking about it. This needs to be hard work.”