Memo to T-Mobile’s future CEO: Don’t change a thing

Philipp Humm is out at T-Mobile, and we don’t know why.

Maybe he really was planning to leave all along, as he claimed in an internal memo. Maybe he’s being forced out by parent company Deutsche Telekom for the failure of the AT&T-Mobile merger. Or maybe he was brought on board in 2010 for the sole reason of selling the U.S. subsidiary, and now that a sale is longer feasible, he’s moving on to the next project. Whatever the reason, the move is sudden, and T-Mobile finds itself looking for a new chief executive. We have some unsolicited advice for whoever that replacement will be as well as acting CEO Jim Ailing: Don’t mess with Humm’s work. T-Mobile may be suffering at the hands of its much larger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T, but the last thing T-Mobile needs right now is the strategy ‘shake up’ a new CEO invariably brings. After the failed merger with AT&T, Humm and his team put together a solid plan to become a competitive force in the market.