We divested our fiber-to-the-home business to AT&T. It served more than one million fiber customers and reached more than four million enabled locations. Letting it go wasn’t a rejection of that work. It was a recognition that the future of Lumen required a sharper enterprise focus, a stronger balance sheet, and more capacity to invest in our digital platform.
The easy story was, “We’re selling an asset.”
The truth was, “We’re choosing where we can win.”
We kept the fiber backbone and digital platform at the center of our enterprise strategy. We freed up capital and leadership attention for the work that needed us most. We said aloud that focus matters more than ownership. And we said goodbye to amazing colleagues and friends as they moved to a new company.
Our voice business is another example. Voice was a core part of our history. It helped define the company, and it served customers well for a long time.
It also became a crowded market where Lumen struggled to win.
We decided it was time to begin removing voice from the product portfolio so we can reallocate more time and attention to building our future.
Again, we’ll face the challenges and heartbreaks of letting go of a business. Because subtraction isn’t just a strategy. There’s grief in it, too.
Letting go isn’t an insult to what came before. It doesn’t diminish what that work meant, or what it accomplished. It simply means it’s no longer where our future lies.
That's a discipline every company will need – not just ones divesting a business, but any company trying to keep up.
