When Sprint chose Dan Hesse to be CEO in 2007, I was against it. He was a Bell-head who had huge opportunity at Embarq that he wasted. What do I mean? Sprint announced its intention to spin-off its wireline business into a separate company at the end of 2005. Dan Hesse was named CEO a full five months before Embarq was formed in May of 2006. Plus any new CEO has 4 to 6 months of a honeymoon period. Hesse had at least 9 months to come up with a plan to do something with Embarq, and did nothing. He cost cut, laid people off, and litigated with the pensioners. That's wonderful.

Then Sprint gets into trouble and brings Hesse  back as CEO of Sprint-Nextel. WHAT? So he lays off tons of folks. Maybe cuts some costs, but does NOTHING remarkable. In fact, since Hesse became Sprint's leader in late 2007, the company has gone on to lose 4.6M customers.

Did Sprint get the iPhone? No. The Android phone? No. Any new and exciting handset? No. WHy not? Handsets drive sales in mobility.

Do people realize that Sprint still has a fiber network? Not even the folks at Sprint can talk about their MPLS or IP offerings for more than 22 minutes without jumping back to the not-so-shiny gadgets.

Remember when Sprint used to try stuff? The pin-drop ads because they had the first all fiber network. The failed ION project. But still they tried.

Now we see that Hesse raked in $15.5M in compensation in 2008. Let's recap:

• stock lost 70% of its value in 2008
• company wrote off billions
• lost $2.8B
• people thought it would go into bankruptcy.
• CEO gets $2.6M bonus on top of his $1.2M salary

This is what's wrong with Corporate America and the Boards of Directors! You wonder why Main Street is fed up. Why consumers don't want to feed the beast any more. Why would I want to spend any more money with Sprint if its all going into the CEO's pocket? And I have to assume that the Directors and other Executives also pocketed some healthy bonus money as well. What a joke.