Screwed by Sprint

Anthony Young stood on a patch of grass, unaware that he was breaking the rules.

He was waiting for a bus to take him from his Overland Park workplace to his Hyde Park home, from suburban day to urban night, Town Center to the Troost Corridor. He waited on the grass for good reason: To stand on the concrete meant getting in the way of hundreds of fellow Sprint employees as they walked to the parking garages.

Did he feel their eyes on him? Yes, he did. But Young, ever the critic of corporate culture, is the first to admit that the place gave him a complex, made him feel like a misfit. For his nonsuburban address. For the gourmet coffee he brought from home. For the ties he wore. For his admission that he didn't particularly care who'd been voted off Survivor the night before. In Young's department, these were the hallmarks of a weirdo, a role that from the start had distanced him from the other 10,000 workers who populated Sprint headquarters each weekday.

Weirdo, but also Business Systems Analyst.

And back then, in the spring of 2001, the upside for Young was considerable. Things were falling into place for the forty-year-old California native and his family. New car, comfortable midtown home, well-paying job with a Fortune 500 company that was a telecom-industry leader and the big corporate dog in town. Sprint was even bankrolling his pursuit of a master's degree in engineering at the company's own "university of excellence." For the first time in five years, he had a grip on the present and a sense that his future was bright. He had a nearly euphoric feeling of potential.

So Young, annoyed and contented, waited in the shadow of his corporate fortress for the bus, as he did just about every day. Behind him, the Sprint campus, vast enough to command its own zip code, stretched out across 200 acres of prime Johnson County land. In addition to thousands of employees in countless office buildings, his workplace was home to restaurants, dry cleaners, newsstands, two lakes, a fitness center, a wetland and an outdoor amphitheater for company festivities -- auto-racing legend Richard Petty delivered an inspirational speech there. Actually, the Petty party had been fun. The driver's flamboyant style had puzzled his coworkers, but Young had darted right up to the NASCAR star and shaken his hand.

Of course, when Petty left, so did the flowers. Early on, Young had noticed that Sprint would fill the flower beds with brand-new blooms whenever a dignitary was scheduled to grace the campus, with particular attention lavished outside the building that housed the office of CEO William Esrey. But when the visitors departed, the flowers vanished as well.

The voice of a groundskeeper interrupted Young's reverie.

"You can't stand on the grass," the man said.

Young, thinking the man was joking, merely stared at him.

"It presses it down," the gardener elaborated. "There are rules here about that."

"You've got to be kidding," Young said.

The groundskeeper gave him a look that said he would not joke about such things. "No, I'm not."

Young stepped onto the concrete. He glared as the groundskeeper performed a smug about-face and maneuvered off through the quitting-time crowd. The episode left Young feeling undressed. Like the time he'd complimented a superior for a job well done -- genuinely praised him without any self-interest -- and the guy snorted back, "What did you expect?" and stomped away.

But Young had pretty much learned to roll with stuff like that. If you looked for the openings, you could take a little back -- being extra nice in your "hello" next time around -- passive-aggressive acts that wouldn't get you in trouble but would signal at least some small victory in your own heart.

So Young watched as the groundskeeper shrank in the distance, presumably off to enforce another of the campus' landscaping laws. Then, in a small act of corporate disobedience, he moved back onto the grass to await his bus.

When Sprint opened its new campus in July 1999, the site was still a few years from completion. Nonetheless, the project was remarkably advanced for something that had begun only a few years before and demanded so many resources that Overland Park city officials had to hire five new planners just to keep things rolling.

For costs that would exceed $900 million, Sprint executives bought into the warm-and-fuzzy philosophy that eschewed soulless skyscrapers and instead provided employees with an expansive environment in which they could eat, shop and exercise without straying from the work site. Patterned after the corporate campuses of Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Compaq, the Sprint plan envisioned, for example, one tree for every two employees.

Though cookie-cutter in design, the campus' brick buildings created the illusion of an academic setting. Actual office spaces, however, weren't quite so lofty. "The campus has gorgeous facilities, but it's isolated," notes one former Sprint employee. "Look-alike cubicles. Just miles and miles of identical cubes."

Saying the 1990s were good for Sprint is like saying a telephone is something you talk into. By 1998, Sprint and CEO William Esrey had vaulted onto the leaderboard of the telecommunications industry, and in dramatic fashion. While competitors were benefiting from massive mergers -- exemplified by WorldCom's $37 billion purchase of MCI in 1998 -- Sprint kept its business deals relatively small and its reputation as a conservative Midwestern juggernaut strong.