By Monica Alleven
Last month, Verizon announced that Sowmyanarayan Sampath would be taking on the role of CEO of Verizon Business, succeeding Tami Erwin. He starts his new role today, reporting directly to Verizon Chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg.
Sampath grew up in India and continued his education in the U.S., getting his MBA at Boston University. He worked at consulting firms KPMG and Boston Consulting Group before joining Verizon in 2014.
He most recently served as chief revenue officer for Verizon Business. His other roles at Verizon include president of Global Enterprise, where he spearheaded the commercial launch of Verizon’s 5G networks and multi-access edge computing (MEC) solutions.
He’s got big shoes to fill. Erwin spent 35 years at Verizon and served as Verizon Business CEO since 2019. Before that, she played a role in growing Verizon’s wireline and wireless business segments. For a while, she headed up operations for Verizon Wireless.
Leading with kindness, FWA momentum
In an interview with Fierce, Sampath said his management style includes leading with kindness and integrity. “I have never had a situation that could not have been taken care of with kindness,” he said.
For example, he recently held an operations review with a team that wasn’t doing that well. Instead of going into “command-and-control” mode and just chewing them out, he wanted to find out what was getting in their way.
“I think in conversation you uncover things that are just so useful and impactful in changing the course,” he explained. “How you handle these conversations is important… Understanding what is going on in people’s minds, giving them the space to share it and collaborating with them to find a solution.”
Business is doing “incredibly well,” he said of Verizon Business, which reported US$7.7 billion in total revenue in the first quarter of 2022. Verizon has a 44 per cent market share in the enterprise space and growing, he said.
