Kansas City Star Considers History Of Another Doomed Company

Dead-Tree media basically takes a glimpse in the mirror with this history that they're attempting to sell to suckers subscribers.

Farewell to Sprint: Inside the rise and fall of one of Kansas City's great companies

At its height, Sprint offered stock options and bonuses so rich that some of its 20,000-plus local employees made the equivalent of a year's pay in a single check. At one point, the CEO's secretary had her own secretary. National ad campaigns were so omnipresent that the main character was known simply as The Sprint Guy.

Comments

  1. The company hired far too many smooth-talking, boot-licking executives with stupid ideas and no management abilities who worked their way up the corporate ladder, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of hard-working employees. It's a sad tale, but the remnants are now in better hands with T-Mobile.

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  2. Very poorly written and researched article by the Kansas City Star.

    Major omission by the Star:

    Sprint was formed in 1986 by the merger of GTE Sprint headquartered in San Francisco and United Telecom headquartered in Fairway.

    The new company was named GTE Sprint with their headquarters located at I-435 and Holmes in the flash cube building.

    The company was formed and given life as a result of the deregulation of the telephone industry and the breakup of AT&T - Bell Companies.

    The Feds wanted competition to AT&T so Sprint and MCI were allowed by AT&T to have a certain % of the market share.

    Sprint was the most mis-managed company in Kansas City history.

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  3. ^^ You're talking about the creation of the long distance arm only. The company's local telephone roots go back to 1899 in Abilene, Kansas. United Telecom changed its corporate name to Sprint in the 1990s to leverage the more widely known brand name of Sprint.

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  4. The biggest myth, perpetuated by local reporters who wanted a juicy story and former disgruntled employees, was about wireless coverage in and around the Sprint Campus. Many people I know worked on the Sprint Campus. They told me they never had any trouble making or receiving a wireless phone call. When I visited them there, I never had any trouble either.

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  5. I have a Sprint ION membership card on my desk, right next to a Sprint PCS Pinnacle club pen, the clicker lights up red, seconds before your cell phone rings with an incoming call.

    That said, Sprint has work from home staff NOW that do not even get dressed during the day and work from bed. They only get up to retrieve their Amazon packages from the front door. The ION project depended on AT&T letting Sprint borrow their copper lines - NO WAY, it was doomed before concept! Bill Esrey was not smart. Paul Henson was the founder of Sprint, and it was in Westwood, I met with him several times. Sprint overpaid its lazy staff and people didnt even know what their jobs were. Sprint common stock was $70 per share in late 1999 and everyone was feeling rich, it closed a few months ago at $3.00 per share and it is most of the retirement plan's holding -meaning NO RETIREMENT. Sprint layed off so many people its number has been hidden from the public. Sprint was going to merge with Worldcom, yes Bernie Ebbers fraud based Enron style firm. It didnt get FTC approval and it alowed Sprint to survive longer than Worldcom. The campus in OP Ks was designed by a woman who was responsible for the tunnels under downtown Chicago flooding due to no maintenance (she worked for the Mayor's office) which shut down Chicago for weeks in the late 1980's. Sprint should have been named Spent, which is all they did with money. Sprint employees used to watch movies at Town Center during work hours - nobody missed them.

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  6. United Telecom was at the corner of Rainbow and Shawnee Mission Parkway in Westwood Ks. They paid so much in tax, that residents didnt have to pay property tax at all.

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  7. There was a Sprint marketing supervisor who lived near 84th and Roe. She used to troll Town Center in the lunch hours and get men she didnt know to have sex with her in her car in the parking lot. I guess the Sprint job must have been really boring to drive her to do that. She even dared a few girls in her department to try that out on their lunch hours. Great Sprint hire!

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  8. ^^ I've never meant a woman like that. Something smells fishy in your story.

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  9. ^^ I've never met a woman like that. Something smells fishy in your story.

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  10. The Nextel merger was a farce. All the arrogant East Coast people thought we owned farms and cows while working at the Sprint Campus during the day.

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  11. Paul Henson was a kind, understated, humble man. If he had ANY idea of the misfits Sprint would hire - he would have been very deeply disturbed. The pride, ego, materialism, blame games at Sprint - and the huge red tape to get anything done. it would have killed him.

    The story about the car sex on lunch hour is true. A buddy of mine at Sprint did a girl who hit on him, only to find out they worked in closely related departments. Ops!

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  12. Paul Henson picked Esrey, who couldn't figure out the wireless industry very well. I don't really recall any Sprint CEO figuring it out very well or else they wouldn't have let T-Mobile overtake them in subscribers. Verizon and AT&T spent millions of dollars on lobbyists who helped them win new business, but they always had the millions of extra dollars to do that. Sprint never did.

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  13. What gets me is seeing so many people with Verizon and AT&T bitching about their high phone bills. They might have slightly better networks than Sprint and T-Mobile, but it's probably a .00001 difference and not worth paying extra for. It really comes down to if the phone gets good reception where you live, work and travel. For a lot of people, T-Mobile and Sprint now work very well about anywhere. The combination of their networks should make the merged network even better.

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  14. Sprint had a local, Bill Barloon, Rockhurst grad as the Washington DC lobby chief. He was brilliant. But the rest of Sprint screwed up its future...

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  15. Employees were so bored at Sprint that sex in conference rooms was rampant.

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  16. Sprint was a place for prima-donnas. As it shrank, it was like musical chairs. You posted your resume to the company's internal job board when your department closed. Then the good people in the dept got hired into other growing departments. The losers who got NO JOB OFFERS FOR TRANSFERS knew they should leave the company and were not welcome. It worked pretty well until everyone couldnt find a transfer. Then egos were hurt. Poor babies!

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  17. Cerner, take note.

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  18. Gary Foresee doomed Sprint when he combined them with Nextel vs. Altel.

    7:40, know a guy who boned a broad in what I believed was called the OP Convention center just across the street from the campus and Kohl's on 115th. Said he pulled out and splooged on the floor just for good measure.

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