Who The @!#$&% is that this man? John Legere’s technique For Taking New buyers with the aid of Storm

“The fuckers hate you.”
“i will be able to’t wait to look at the peckers scream and cry.”
“I’m bombing their factories.”

motion-movie villains spit this sort of venom. Comedy writers hurl in a similar fashion foul tirades at one any other. and as the Sony e-mail hack printed, industry executives can discuss this way too. In private. but within the open, CEOs—specifically those operating multibillion-buck, publicly traded companies—present a calming circulate of bromides, buzzwords, and nonanswers. All with the exception of3040620″>John Legere, the person liable for those fees. At a downtown ny loft this past March, the membership track thumps as a crowd of telecom analysts and press wait confidently for the CEO of T-cellular to spew his gutter discuss. He does now not disappoint. Legere, fifty seven, takes the stage at “Un-carrier 9.zero,” the newest in a sequence of T-cell information occasions, sporting a black leather-based jacket over a black T-shirt emblazoned with a scorching red T on the chest. On his ft: sizzling purple skater sneakers. together with his wave of shoulder-length brown hair and delicate paunch protruding from what used to be as soon as an athletic physique, Legere looks as if he might had been a member of Kiss moderately than a lifelong telecom executive. as soon as he starts talking, he becomes the anthropomorphized embodiment of the tall can of red Bull in his left hand.

He launches his opening salvo: “It’s safe to assert that our chums within the cozy little duopoly were shitting themselves extra prior to now two years than in history.” Legere is going straight at T-mobile’s a lot higher rivals, AT&T and Verizon. “Dumb and dumber,” or “the pricks,” as Legere frequently refers to them, watched T-cell win eight.three million new consumers final 12 months on my own. A smile oozes from his asymmetrical mouth. “sure, that’s within the first minute that I swore,” he flirts with the group. He is aware of they’ll be tweeting his feistiest strains. in fact, he’s reckoning on it. “these of you with the f-bomb pool will have to wait a little bit longer,” he quips. (in the event you had guess that he’d drop one throughout the first 4 minutes, you received.)

This efficiency—to announce new terms for T-cell’s trade buyers—would get most CEOs fired or sued, particularly in the buttoned-up telecom trade. Legere, though, will get an ovation when he takes the stage and some other when he’s performed.

Amid the applause, questions hover: Who the @#$% is John Legere? Why is he imparting himself as an amalgam of faith healer, social media stuntman, skilled trash-talker, and drunken boardwalk pitchman? Is he a marketing genius? A bullshit artist? Or both? He has undoubtedly anointed himself the Dr. house of telecom, jamming a syringe stuffed with adrenaline into the center of the wi-fi trade. As one business journalist, Dan O’Shea, tells me, “This man is being handled like he simply popped out of a spaceship from nowhere, however everybody has a history.”

most likely crucial query is: Why have Legere’s antics labored? due to the fact that he first recast T-mobile as the underdog anti-service within the spring of 2013, it has come back from close to death. in addition to customer boom, revenues increased thirteen% year over year in the first quarter of 2015 (though the corporate continues to lose money), and it is now on par with the incumbent No. three, dash. just about every time T-cellular unleashes a new “un-carrier” transfer—abolishing contracts and world roaming fees; gifting away streaming song; handing out unlimited enhancements for brand new iPhones; offering to pay off shoppers’ AT&T contracts if they change—”the pricks” do their very best to match it. Legere is singlehandedly dragging the business into a brand new technology. Even Verizon’s acquisition of AOL will also be considered, in part, as a response to T-mobile’s rising profile.

Camouflaged beneath Legere’s profane shtick and age-inappropriate wardrobe is the germ of an alternative, thoroughly modern model for corporate management. A technology ago, if a purchaser knew of a CEO, it used to be because he projected an avuncular gravitas on tv that helped to sell Chrysler automobiles or chocolate Frostys. the public nowadays, inherently skeptical and weaned on social media bluntness, not trusts a canned speaking head. each shoppers and employees are expecting more, a CEO in the maelstrom just like them. Authenticity of the type Legere tasks is what strikes merchandise. although it’s simply an act.

Legere appears to exit of his way to persuade individuals he’s a lunatic. in the course of my interview with T-cell’s straightlaced COO and CTO collectively at the company’s Bellevue, Washington, headquarters, Legere—as if jacked up on jelly beans—pulls up to the convention room on his customized-designed Segway, which flaunts magenta-rimmed wheels (or “mangenta,” as T-mobile’s all-male executive team refers back to the model’s electric coloration of fuchsia). Later, whereas I speak with another firm govt, Legere pops his head into the place of work, and, with a mangenta-hued bullhorn, reenacts the roughly consideration-in quest of antics that acquired him thrown out of Catholic college in the small Massachusetts mill town the place he grew up, the center of 5 youngsters. “that is taking means too long!” he blasts, banging impatiently on the horn’s button.

after I ultimately attain his corner administrative center, Legere presentations off the paraphernalia that incorporates being a CEO-lower-efficiency artist. He props his ft on his desk, giving me a close-up take a look at his hot pink communicate excessive-tops embossed with T-mobile CEO on the facet. His ft leisure next to a Legere doll, a 10-inch reproduction of himself that’s been industrially produced and has its own smack-speaking Twitter feed. (@LegereDoll has 2,589 followers to @JohnLegere’s 1.three million.)

this isn’t what T-cell’s conservative German owner Deutsche Telekom was once shopping for when it hired Legere in September 2012. Legere used to be a swimsuit, a Brooks Brothers catalog version with a slicked-back Gordon Gekko ’do. He had been CEO of fiber-optic networking company global Crossing—an excellent bigger dog than T-cell when he took it over in 2001. Legere needed to declare chapter inside months of his appointment and submit to being grilled in congressional hearings. but he dug the company out of the mess he inherited, and it used to be got for $3 billion in 2011.

regardless of his chops as a turnaround professional, when Legere became CEO of T-cell the following year, he felt prone. Most of his occupation had been in telecom, however wireless was once a strong point that he now admits he didn’t take into account. His doubt evaporated only after he spent evenings all the way through his first few months on the job listening in on T-cellular’s customer support calls, a visceral window into the public’s angst. “not one of the [technology] mattered,” he tells me, his hand now anchored to a jumbo-size iced coffee, black. “There was this plethora of hatred for this industry and this unending list of issues individuals wished to vary. They didn’t wish to know what I don’t understand. They don’t care!”

Legere has spent his lifestyles defining himself against an opponent. a celeb runner in high school, he says he keeps tabs on his alma mater and nonetheless holds “many of the [running] information.” He rattles off the title of the fellow who was once the youngest officer in AT&T history except Legere took the crown. (yes, Legere labored for one in all “the pricks” for virtually 20 years.) When Legere talks about competition—certainly one of his favorite subject matters—a lot of the thrill seems to be in inflicting pain. “successful is fun,” he says, “but when any person else can lose, it’s even funner.”

The wireless industry, the place that you could only grow by using poaching consumers from your opponents, became out to be tailor-made for Legere. “Declare victory, designate an enemy. attack that enemy,” he grins. “the bigger the enemy, the easier.”

Legere’s authentic debut came four months into his tenure, on the annual client Electronics convey in Las Vegas in January 2013. He had already began to relax his cloth cabinet now that his shoppers have been millennials and not milquetoast CIOs. “Open coat, nice collared shirt” is how Legere’s longtime buddy David Carey, T-mobile’s EVP for company services and products, describes Legere’s first steps toward discovering the garments that might make the person. “It was very Silicon Valley–like,” he says.

however Legere commenced to fret he nonetheless gave the impression of an excessive amount of of a swimsuit. “We have been up in the suite,” Carey says, recalling the night sooner than T-mobile’s press experience at CES, “and he mentioned, ‘What will have to I wear?’ and that i stated, ‘I don’t know, look at me. What the hell are you asking me for?’ ” the 2 fiftysomething dudes bantered for a bit, until Carey instructed “this cool hipster more or less sport coat that he had just gotten.” Legere was once receptive however nonetheless flummoxed. “What shirt?” he asked. Carey informed him, “I’m no longer a way guy, however i believe you’re speculated to put on one of those T-shirt kinda issues to get that cool look going.”

Legere got here up with a twist. What if it was once a magenta T-shirt with an enormous T on it? Vegas, child, Vegas. they’d the T-shirt made overnight.

When he confirmed up at the Venetian hotel the next day to come for his first public introduction to the know-how business as T-cellular’s new CEO, Legere had accessorized the hip sport-coat-over-a-T-shirt seem with a dangling silver chain and a chunky white plastic watch. He donned a big apple Yankees cap in a nod to a partnership with major League Baseball.

Legere had a script, but one thing about his sartorial transformation encouraged him to scrap it. He had all those frustrations coursing thru him from paying attention to those customer service calls, so he channeled that. “My head exploded,” Legere says now, “and that i just went on a rant about the wireless trade and how I didn’t get it.” Like a preacher discovering his groove, Legere come across a habitual bit, what in a single dialog he calls his I-simply-landed-from-Mars methodology and in every other the 5-12 months-outdated kid questions: Why, why, why? “people hate contracts. Let’s not have them! ‘which you can’t,’ firms say. Why?”

earlier T-mobile executives had realized the worth in positioning the provider—a far off fourth in a 4-horse race—as the guideline-breaking upstart. but most effective Legere had the chutzpah to practice via with it. “Most of those signature moves, especially the early ones, are things we explored, that we had in our ‘in case of emergency file,'” says one former T-cellular government. This particular person remembers Legere’s predecessor saying, “We hate the principles of the trade, however we’re tied to them. nobody will probably be loopy enough to do the rest about it.”

Legere’s efficiency on the Venetian, which alternated between attacking his opponents and imparting himself as the customer’s simplest pal in the industry, was seen as a tour de drive because it was once happening. “T-mobile CEO John Legere is killing it,” tweeted one reporter from CNet. “Holy moley John Legere is the UnCarrierCEO,” said another from laptop magazine. To the outside world, Legere had just dropped in from Mars. however for longtime business observers who remembered Legere the suit, this irreverent channeling of client wrath was once much more shocking. “It was once obtrusive that he used to be going to be slightly totally different in this new function,” says analyst Jan Dawson, who covered Legere during his time at international Crossing. “This was John Legere 2.0.”

“am i able to get a selfie with you, John?”

Legere has shown up at T-mobile’s secluded innovation lab, situated in an place of job park not a ways from firm headquarters, and he is being swarmed by a cavalcade of engineers, all of whom need their picture desirous about him. “i feel like a mall Santa!” Legere squeals. He fist-bumps his staff at their desks, and he promises every picture request, hamming it up through placing rabbit ears over the engineers’ heads just before the shutter clicks.

this sort of paparazzi remedy appears absurd, but as with most issues Legere, it serves a objective. “i take advantage of this respectfully,” Legere starts offevolved, a prefatory remark designed to cushion the nonrespectful comment to come. “There’s a type of PTSD here.” When he first arrived at T-mobile, the employees he inherited had simply lived thru a failed acquisition bid by means of AT&T and morale was low. If Legere was going to show the company around and alter the emblem perception, he wanted swagger now not best onstage, but also in T-mobile’s innovation lab, its call centers, and its retail stores. Now, fueled via a cocktail of endorphin-pumping Flywheel spin courses and caffeine, he happy-hands and mosh-pit dives with any T-Mobiler he can in finding.

On his approach to the company cafeteria for a ham sandwich, he swings into the on-campus T-cell store, the place a young girl with a French beauty care nervously introduces herself as a salesperson from one of the most service’s local shops. Legere, who in college switched his main from phys ed to accounting for the only real objective of an even bigger paycheck, is blunt about what motivates most of his twentysomething clerks. “within the hierarchy of desires, it’s lovely clear,” he says. “The 2d they’re now not earning profits, you’re off the island!” In that spirit, Legere started a stock-possession software for the corporate’s full-time workers. Working his target market of 1, he begins to ask her if she’s making financial institution, but ahead of he can get the phrases out, he spies her Michael Kors purse, and with good comedian timing, winks at her and the purse to indicate that he already has the answer to his question. She blushes and smiles, and Legere is off to gab with the following worker.

probably the most Belieber-esque of the Legere employee interactions comes when he drops in on a T-cellular name center. He normally shows up unannounced, decked out in his T-mobile–branded cloth wardrobe. Birmingham, Alabama; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Mission, Texas, have all been contemporary stops on his perpetual tour. At every talk over with, actually a whole bunch of call middle employees line up to meet him, waving pink boas and Legere dolls, and Legere spends hours posing for selfie after selfie. negative worker engagement, specifically amongst millennials, plagues most of corporate america, in keeping with latest research. that’s evidently not the case here.

All of this in-person religion therapeutic doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Does a CEO selfie really occur if it’s not then shared on social media? Legere broadcasts his every make the most on social media for purchasers, lovers, analysts, and fellow workers to look. It provides T-mobile workers the sense that their fearless chief is within the trenches with them, even if they’re getting paid by means of the hour and Legere made $29 million in salary, bonuses, and stock in 2013. “John just isn’t the king in the back, standing in the back of his soldiers,” says Andrew Christou, chief inventive officer at T-mobile’s advert company, Publicis Seattle. “He’s the primary one running with a sword into struggle.”

Twitter is Legere’s Excalibur, and there is no different public-firm CEO who makes use of it relatively like he does. within the spring of 2013, one in all Legere’s two daughters persuaded her middle-aged dad to dip his toe in the platform. (His daughters are “the wizards behind the curtain for his coolness factor,” says Neil Barua, a former international Crossing worker, noting the two twentysomethings’ obsession with gaming and electronic dance track—each areas T-mobile has because poured a sizable amount of sponsorship money into.)

It didn’t take lengthy for Legere to realize that his potty mouth, willingness to pick out fights, and total lack of self-awareness made him a perfect tweeter. He spent months baiting sprint CEO Marcelo Claure until Legere’s trashing of dash’s 2015 super Bowl ad ultimately led Claure to reply (he known as Legere classless). Legere posted a ridiculous video the place he cuts through metal with a pink blowtorch. He replies to every tweet directed at him, and he claims that he has in my view written every one of his eleven,000-plus tweets, though he does have a social media individual trailing him together with her Canon—God forbid a moment passes that can’t be repurposed for Instagram. Legere does sprinkle in touches of humanity, corresponding to when he honored the passing of his mom ultimate December with a photograph of the two of them (in fact, Legere had put rabbit ears behind her head). Social media fills within the gaps when the indefatigable Legere can’t be in multiple place at one time; it helps him determine where to point his company next; and it helps create the influence that T-cellular is much better than it in fact is. in the past two years, Legere has tweeted, on average, almost 20 times a day. That’s roughly 4 times more than Twitter’s own creator, Jack Dorsey.

Legere’s act works perfect when he’s punching up, aiming for the likes of AT&T and Verizon. At CES in 2014, Legere made information (and a variety of social content) when he tried to crash the parties of his better opponents for the specific objective of chronicling him getting tossed out on his ear. That said, in the event you’re a social media famous person with a foul-boy persona, you’re sure to find your magenta Jimmy Choo sneakers (another in his collection) over the road occasionally. final summer season, Legere’s public dis of “dumb and dumber” as “duopolists which are raping you for every penny you’ve” created a Twitter firestorm. Legere apologized, however 5 outraged T-mobile name heart employees nonetheless wrote an open letter to their boss for going too far through “the use of repugnant, sexually violent language for affordable laughs.”

When Legere does go for a budget laughs, reminiscent of in his spat with Donald Trump this past spring, he can come off like a CEO with too much time on his palms, a man who can have had too much to drink, a D-record celeb like the ones he’s tussling with, or all the above. (for those who missed that Sunday Twitter fight, Legere complained about street musicians out of doors his Trump resort window; Trump answered through trashing T-mobile’s provider, and it devolved from there.) Says Legere’s pal George Lombardi of his chum’s full-throttle dedication: “It’s selflessness and recklessness at the related time.”

On Legere’s left hand is a silver ring. From a distance it seems like a marriage band, however upon nearer inspection, it’s a signet ring bearing Batman’s chest brand. Legere’s older daughter is doing her 2d grasp’s thesis on comic artwork, and he or she gave her dad the ring as a present.

He’s considering that co-opted the superhero as a part of his persona. Legere’s Twitter wallpaper depicts the dark Knight together with his head bowed by way of the awesome accountability of the Bat sign shining above Gotham metropolis. (The comedian panel has been doused with magenta.) in fact Legere would identify with Batman: He’s a normal guy who makes use of his wits and cool tools to outsmart the villains, a billionaire industrialist by means of day who’s a crusader at night time, equal parts outlaw and savior.

Legere, sadly, doesn’t have a Batmobile, but he does invite me for a drive in his nighttime-black Ferrari. “i’ve a wet-day one and a just right-day one,” says Legere, who lives bicoastally, with flats in ny and Bellevue. What’s the difference between the California edition and the 458 Spider? I ask. “$70,000,” he beams.

We discuss concerning the trade, and Legere eventually appears like a aggressive executive fairly than a goofball showman. He’s conceited of reworking T-mobile into an an increasing number of tense gnat for the industry, bending its practices towards consumer friendliness. His rivals are now seeking to out-un-service the Un-service. remaining December, his group obtained wind that AT&T was going to unveil a new information-rollover plan, in what would were a month earlier than T-cellular’s rollout of a close to-equivalent offering. That simply would no longer do, so within a frantic week, Legere pulled together “Un-carrier eight.zero: data Stash,” stealing his competitor’s thunder. “you are taking your foot off the fuel for a 2d, and so they come onerous,” says Legere, driving thru Bellevue’s drizzly again roads. “So we maintain the entrance foot on the pedal lovely sturdy.” in spite of everything, successful is extra fun when any person else is shedding.

I ask Legere in regards to the number-one critique of his techniques: what’s the long-time period viability? Poaching shoppers the best way Legere has can also be expensive. but he defends each contract buyout and knowledge provide as rigorously specced out to ship money-waft-sure outcomes for the business in a short time frame. As for the concept that he’s bankrupting the business, he falls again on one in all his favourite traces, telling me, “That’s what they need you to assume.”

Analysts speculate that sooner or later T-cell’s need for cash, in all probability to fortify its community, will necessitate an acquisition or partnership, probably with a rival. If that had been to happen, Legere—who simply signed some other two-12 months contract (ironic for a guy who mechanically says he hates contracts)—insists that he would put himself on the heart of that greater company. Of the failed strive by using dash’s proprietor to obtain T-mobile last 12 months, Legere says confidently, “If there had been a transaction, the corporate would were referred to as T-cellular and been run via me.”

Legere drops me off at my lodge and peels away, heading to an Oregon name heart, followed by using a travel to los angeles. i’m left to ponder what would happen to Legere if he had been someday not CEO of T-cell. “He turns into the organization that he is at,” says David Carey, who’s worked with Legere for 25 years at AT&T, global Crossing, and T-cellular. “He takes on that id. Deeply.” At AT&T, Legere wanted to be Michael Douglas in Wall street, so he regarded the phase. When world Crossing needed tricky love, he reportedly thumped through the firm’s place of work with a baseball bat, swinging at folks’s desks. As his turnaround took hold, Legere eventually took full good thing about 14 years of Dale car­negie lessons and used regular CNBC appearances—jocularly cage-fighting with some other irascible cartoon, Jim Cramer—to eschew world Crossing’s image because the Enron of networking. “i might use television so that my workers and clients would hear me saying the same things on tv that I advised them,” Legere explains. As Carey says of Legere’s range, “He can be probably the most charming, dependent, protocol-oriented date for the Queen of England, or he will also be that raucous Las Vegas nightclub act.”

The one instance when Legere didn’t have a job to play—after he sold international Crossing and made up our minds to retire—he nosedived into existential aimlessness. Two life modifications hit him simultaneously all through that length: He acquired divorced from his 2d wife, and he now had a lot cash that he never had to work once more. “I had the biggest ‘who’re you?’ second,” he tells me. He discovered himself lost in Eckhart Tolle’s the ability of Now, taking on dear hobbies, and buying his first Ferrari. “It wasn’t a lovely sight,” says his good friend Lombardi. “He grew his hair long, he was once unshaven, not fascinated with anything. His most essential resolution was once what to have for lunch.”

Lombardi remembers going to a cocktail birthday celebration with Legere during this time. “We started speaking to those two women who asked what we did,” he says. “I mentioned, ‘I’m a doctor,’ and so they became to him and he mentioned, ‘I’m retired. I take care of my very own money.’ They gave him this lengthy drawn smile, ‘loser’ registered on their faces, they usually walked away.”

past within the day, I had requested Legere if the T-mobile nightclub act used to be merely a role he was enjoying. He paused, confused through my query. “The question is, when’s the fitting time in your profession to flash your independence?” he said. “because this is a long way more me. I’m obviously at a self-actualized level in my profession.”

If authenticity is what enables leaders to cut throughout the noise, bringing everybody along with them, then it appears Legere has backdoored his way into changing into a real-existence corporate Caped Crusader. And, at least for now, the Bat signal beckons.