GARY FORSEE, SPRINT

The drama is over. It ended in March, when Sprint got the man it wanted and Gary Forsee got the job of his dreams. Not that he couldn't have had a dream job where he was at BellSouth — he was the heir-apparent to retiree-in-waiting CEO Duane Ackerman. But Forsee, now chairman and CEO at Sprint after a very public legal battle over his exit from BellSouth, has come home to run the company he helped build.

Behind the scenes, little dramas will play out around the fates of deposed executives William Esrey and Ron LeMay, and around the myriad lawsuits filed by PCS affiliates. But Forsee will guide Sprint to its future with something less than a dramatic flair. “Certainly there will be changes,” he said. “But knowing as much as I do about the company and how we built it, I feel very comfortable following in that legacy.”

That legacy, Forsee said, is one of aggressiveness. “Sprint has always been viewed as the offensive player in the industry,” he said. “The brand has historically stood for innovation, and we have had our fair share of new products in the marketplace.”

The legacy also includes 26 million customers and a national IP data network coupled with national wireless capability. However, if new history is to be written for Sprint, the company must succeed in integrating these assets. Large enterprise customers may not have thought about Sprint as an integrated provider before, but Forsee said part of strengthening the Sprint brand is making sure it now stands for integrated communications so that “when customers think about doing business with one part of Sprint, they think about the opportunity to leverage our other capabilities,” he said.

SchlumbergerSema was thinking that way in April when it signed a three-year, multimillion-dollar contract with Sprint for both national frame relay services and Sprint PCS Vision data services. That is the kind of success Sprint will need to shore up waning revenues (down by an additional 4.5% last quarter to $6.3 billion). Despite that decline, Sprint's profits grew thanks in part to cost-cutting measures over the last two years, including nearly 18,000 jobs.

Still, while Forsee can operate with the turmoil of his hiring — and with his predecessor's clouded departure — increasingly “in the rearview mirror,” he can't escape the speculation by some analysts over whether he is guiding the company toward its own future or a future as part of a merged entity. For now, it's just something that is interesting for people to talk about, Forsee said.

And he has more immediate concerns.

“In this challenging environment, leadership is about ensuring that the individuals in [our] organization know what our priorities are,” Forsee said. “We are working hard to make sure our employees know how important they are. If we do that, the legacy of Sprint's winning culture will be reinforced.”