Dan Hesse has perhaps the hardest job in the wireless industry right now. In December, he replaced Gary Forsee as president and C.E.O. of Sprint Nextel at one of the lowest points in the company’s history. Sprint lost more than a million customers in 2007 and posted a $30 billion loss in the fourth quarter alone.

But Hesse might say that his job offers the most upside: The company is so troubled that he has license to take big chances. When he took over, he promised moves on the scale of “nukes” that would shake up the wireless business.

None of his ventures so far have been quite that ambitious, but in February he introduced a single-rate plan ($99.99 a month for unlimited calls, text, and data) that may help slow the mass customer defections plaguing Sprint. Hesse also pulled together an alliance with Google, Intel, Comcast, Bright House Networks, and Time Warner Cable to launch a startup called Clearwire, which will deploy WiMax technology, a kind of WiFi on steroids. WiMax is a high-speed data network that covers a larger area than WiFi—entire cities rather than individual coffee shops. And Sprint is one of only two major carriers so far to support Google’s coming Android operating system, which will make it easier for cell phones to download software or use Web-based services from other companies. Most cell phones today are far more restricted.

Hesse, 54, might look familiar from his appearance in Sprint’s television ads. (He offers his email address, which customers can use to register gripes.) He talked with Condé Nast Portfolio contributing editor Kevin Maney at Sprint’s Overland Park, Kansas, headquarters, a sprawling faux college campus that, in more ambitious days, was built for 15,000 employees but currently houses only 10,000. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

I’m a Sprint customer, and it’s no secret that the company has just about the worst customer service on earth. How are you addressing that? Let me put it this way: It’s definitely getting better every month. We measure the hell out of it. Every meeting starts with discussing the customer experience. That said, we have a long way to go, and people have long memories. That’s part of the urgency. We know it’s going to take a while to get customers to actually perceive that service has improved.

As a Sprint client, how will I notice what you’re doing? If you went into a Sprint store before and said, “I have this problem on my bill,” they’d tell you to call customer care. Not because they were being jerks—they didn’t have access to the systems to fix a problem like that. Now they do. So even the role of the stores has changed. They sell too, but their No. 1 job is to improve the customer experience.

Maybe that will stop so many people from abandoning Sprint. The company’s churn rate of ­consumer defections is roughly twice the industry average. Our bonuses—my bonus and every employee’s in the company—are based on exactly the same metric, and that’s reducing churn. We recognized that it was the biggest issue facing the company and that we had to fix it.

How did it get this bad? For years, the wireless industry was growing so fast you didn’t need to care about it. You could grow your way out of anything. As results started to decline, Sprint looked to reduce costs, and one of the ways was through big cuts in care and service. It cut the number of reps answering the phone calls, and average wait times went way up.

Can all that be fixed? A big reason people call customer care and tie up the service reps is because they have questions about their bill. The new flat-rate plan, Simply Every­thing, is all about reducing those. It’s the same amount every month, and customers know exactly what it’s going to be.

In your career, you’ve made a habit of creating single-price, all-you-can-eat plans. You did something similar at AT&T Wireless when you worked there in the 1990s. It’s very much like Digital One Rate, AT&T’s plan from 10 years ago. That was all about saying to customers, “Anything the wireless phone can do, just don’t worry about it. Just knock yourself out.” We found that customers will actually pay a premium for simplicity, and we’re finding it also on Simply Everything. It’s not about a discount. Customers who were spending less than $99 a month upgraded to the flat-rate plan because they think it’s a better deal. It’s like walking into Costco. I wasn’t going to buy 144 rolls of toilet paper, but God, it’s a good deal.

Did you have a clear picture before you took this job of how grim things were at Sprint? The problems were more significant and deeper than I had expected. I came right at the end of the fourth quarter. As soon as we announced our financial results, the stock went down to five dollars and change. It lost more than half of its value within a very short period of time.

How could you not know that was coming? To a certain extent, the board didn’t realize how significant the issues were. They didn’t dupe me. I don’t think they knew either.

Let’s talk about WiMax. So far, it’s getting mixed reviews about whether it’s going to work well or be a good business. One tech executive called it “WiMin” on his blog. It’s going to change the industry completely in terms of the capabilities and the applications possible in the mobile world. And it’s not just about phones anymore. It’s about embedded chips that can receive WiMax in your car, in your camera, in your video camera, and everything else. You’ll be able to download movies into the backseat while you’re driving. You can see real-time traffic. We think we have roughly a two-year head start over our competition.

This is through the ­Clearwire venture? Yes. Sprint owns 51 percent of that company. The other investors are Intel and Google and the big cable companies. I think we’ll have a terrific board of directors.

With all those owners, who’s actually going to end up running it? Craig McCaw, the telecom pioneer, will be a non­executive chairman. Ben Wolff, who has worked with McCaw, will be the C.E.O., and Barry West from Sprint will be the president. It won’t be a joint venture. It’ll be a separate public company once that’s approved, probably near the end of the year.

Sprint is one of the first major U.S. carriers to say that it will use Google’s Android ­operating system, which is currently in the works. What’s your relationship like with the company? Actually, we’re doing a lot with them. We’re working on Android. We’re part of the Open Handset Alliance [an industry group that is working to develop applications for Android]. We believe we’re by far the most open, if you will, of the wireless carriers. We make it very open for applications developers to write software for Sprint wireless products. The relationship with companies like Google will only help that.

Since Sprint has to do something radical to reverse its fortunes, opening your network entirely could be an interesting move. Will you go all the way to that point? If we can. The more open we can be, the more we’re going to attract more applications to our platforms, which means we’ll attract more users. It’s a way of differentiating.

Does that mean you’ll be like the open internet? Users could ­download anything? Customize their phones in any way? I think we’re going to be ahead of Android.

You are? I’m not the expert, but there have been some delays in terms of Android. I don’t know when you’re really going to see that product released. But in this Sprint environment today you can have a variety of operating systems. You’ve got Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM’s BlackBerry. Our customers are going to have just about as much openness as they want.

After you bought Nextel, its customers began fleeing. Nextel’s phones use a separate push-to-talk network called iDEN, and critics have said that Sprint should sell Nextel or spin it off. What’s your current thinking? We’re committed to making iDEN very successful, but we’re not wed to a particular business model or structure for any of our divisions. We have a bunch of new handsets on our iDEN network. We’re reinvigorating the brand, but we’re always going to keep all of our options open.

How much time do you think you have to turn things around? I don’t know. All I can do is show consistent improvement, and I really can’t predict what’s going to happen.

Are you committed to keeping Sprint Nextel in Kansas? Yes.

Is that a handicap? Can you get a brilliant engineer out of Stanford University to come here? We’ve had absolutely no problem recruiting. Kansas City is the most difficult city in the United States to get people to leave. It’s true. You can’t get anybody to leave once they’re here because of the quality of life and affordability.
 
This office is pretty grand. You came from a startup, and your ­office was a lot like this, wasn’t it? Oh yeah. [Rolls his eyes.] I had an unfinished door, and my desk was a slab of wood on poles. One of the advantages of running a startup is you realize how inexpensively you can do things.

You put yourself in a Sprint ­commercial. Do you think you can change people’s perceptions of this brand? A lot of people forget that the cur­­rent AT&T brand was created in 1984. It was the Bell System until the break-up, and AT&T had never been associated with any product. So we really created that from scratch. We had to describe every action in terms of either making deposits or withdrawals in the brand bank. And it became a tremendous brand. I believe we can create that at Sprint.

Will we see you in any more commercials? The agency and our marketing team are suggesting I do another, so it’s quite possible.