Lumen will have a new CEO in place when election day rolls around 8 weeks from now. Current CEO Jeff Storey will be retiring, and the company is bringing in some outside talent to take his place. Kate Johnson has been named as Storey’s successor, and will take over on November 7 of this year.
Johnson most recently led Microsoft U.S. following stints at Oracle and GE. It’s interesting that Lumen has turned to someone with more experience on the software side than the communications side, which perhaps reflects the ever-rising importance of the IT and automation layer for service providers.
Storey will stay on through the end of 2022 to ensure a smooth transition. He first became CEO of Level 3 in 2013, taking over from the iconic James Crowe. He then oversaw the merger of Level 3 and CenturyLink three years later, becoming CEO of the combined company and the vast fiberoptic assets rolled up by both companies over the years.
Johnson will now target Lumen’s growth potential, which is the ever-present and unenviable challenge of every CEO of every large network operator in today’s marketplace.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Internet Backbones · Jobs
Anybody who has been paying attention should have seen this coming. It has been five years since the merger and it was becoming more and more clear that current leadership at Lumen does not have a viable long term business plan other than to sell assets to private equity.
My hunch is the new CEO will take over, new asset sales may be announced between now and then, then the company will shift focus away from “Quantum Fiber” and more towards corporate services. New CEO may build out the edge platform a bit more but likely will focus on a number of different technologies rather than just network and edge compute. Dividend will be cut in half. Resources will be “realigned.” Expect to see more Wharton MBAs at Lumen and fewer midwest college grads.
-former Lumenite, current Comcast employee.