Invest in your troops.
The SEALs, who have one of the military's most rigorous training programs - just the thing for special operations in some of the world's most uninviting places - aren't the typical corporate breeding ground. But Smit could be exactly what Philadelphia's Comcast needs: a tough-minded executive who can bring laserlike focus to a customer-service reputation that needs remedying.
The company has lost more than one million cable subscribers in the last two years and pulls dismal, though improving, customer-satisfaction ratings in surveys.
Smit twice called the fight for cable subscribers "a battleground," once in a recent investors conference and again in the interview. "It's an aspiration of mine to stop the video losses," he said.
He thinks it can be done and has launched initiatives since joining the company in March 2010, such as a "retention" team to mine customer data and learn the causes of what makes cable customers stay with Comcast and what makes them cancel.
Another Smit-launched project is OneComcast, which seeks to find the areas of the company with the best, or most efficient, operations and replicate them in other parts of the company.
Some of the efforts could be paying off. Comcast reported that it lost only 135,000 video customers in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with a loss of 275,000 in the third quarter and 199,000 in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Though the military was a life-shaping part of his background and personality, Smit doesn't come off as a hup-two-three guy.
He's soft-spoken and says things like, "What I like more than anything is to build teams." His team includes the cable division's chief operating officer, Dave Watson, and chief financial officer, Dave Scott.
