Nextel

"largely disappeared from press coverage. More amazingly, McCaw largely disappeared from Nextel itself. Hardly anyone inside Nextel ever saw him. Tim Donahue, Nextel's number two, said, "I talk to him rarely." When they did talk, McCaw's advice was simple—the same message he had delivered at McCaw Cellular—move fast, but don't skimp on quality. Beyond that, he refused to talk about details. "Report- ing to him is like reporting to the wall," Donahue said. "You tell him you want to do something and he says, 'Well, okay.' " A little weird? Yes—and it worked."

"What lies ahead for Craig McCaw? Expect the unexpected. He could spend years staying on course, expanding his companies, and enjoying the result. But just as his face begins to appear again on the covers of magazines that celebrate his triumphs, look for a change. He hates routine. He gets restless when a venture begins to succeed and his presence is less essential. Having built and sold two national companies, McCaw could wake up one morning and decide to sell one or all of his present companies. One possible scenario would be a sale of Nextel to a bigger company that needs a wireless presence, or a sale of Teledesic to a huge global player such as AT&T. There could be important strategic reasons for such a sale, but he wouldn't sell his empire merely for strategy or money, but to move on to new challenges. Or he would find a way to make his routine more interesting. He could pull in new partners, raise his bets,"

"Branding is a personal passion of mine, dating back all the way to the Bravo venture in St Petersburg, and it felt exciting and invigorating to be essentially building a start-up again. But what should we call our new baby? After discarding an initial notion to use the Play brand, we looked for a similarly dynamic name behind which to build a challenger, customer-centric culture and asked half a dozen marketing agencies to pitch their best ideas. None of them came up with anything that we liked, but another firm which had not been invited to pitch came up with a left-of-field suggestion that resonated with us straight away. Its concept was to brand the challenger around the ‘word-of-mouth’, viral way that we wanted to grow through personal recommendations offering great value and customer-centred service. ‘Word of mouth’ was shortened to WOM and that became our brand. My idea was to build a new Latin American challenger mobile telecoms brand using the playbook of Play in Poland and Nova in Iceland. I could use the same management team and external consultants who worked on both. The partners at Novator responsible for telecoms, who had worked with me since 2010, focused on financing the new venture and acquiring the necessary spectrum and telecoms licences. Chris Bannister, a personable Brit who became Play’s first chief executive in 2005 and had already lived and worked in nine countries, was brought back into the fold as chief executive. And the Icelandic chief technology officer oversaw the technical build-out design, along with his Swedish colleague. Members of our trusted teams from both countries helped in the beginning to transform a failed old-school US telecoms operator into a state-of-the-art ‘kick-ass’ mobile challenger. None of us spoke Spanish and most had never set foot in Latin America before, let alone Chile. It didn’t seem to matter. When we launched, Chile was the most expensive country in the Latin American region in mobile telecommunication, so we saw a market that was fertile for a new approach. Conventional new entrants like Nextel and a venture headed by US telecoms billionaire John Malone had failed to crack the nation. We needed to do things very differently. To achieve the maximum impact and truly disrupt the market, we knew that a key differentiator had to be price. Indeed, we priced our services so aggressively that Chile immediately became the cheapest country in South America for consumer mobile telephony. Alongside this value offer, we promoted WOM as an independent challenger offering honesty and integrity. We set out to be brave, innovative, bold and passionate."