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Verizon Communications Inc. in 2000 undertook perhaps the most visible corporate rebranding effort of the past decade, when it shed its Bell Atlantic moniker.
As vice president of marketing for Verizon Wireless Inc.'s Northeast region, John Palmer got the rare opportunity to help craft the identity change of a company that today has the 11th highest revenues in the country.
Verizon Wireless, the Baby Bell's wireless unit, underwent the name change months in advance of the landline company.
That experience helped win Palmer a promotion to president of Verizon Wirless' Upstate New York region in October 2001. He oversees some 700 employees in Rochester, and 1,200 across Upstate New York.
Palmer, 41, replaced Tracy Nolan, who had managed the local operation's conversion from Frontier Cellular to Bell Atlantic Mobile to Verizon Wireless in roughly a four-month period.
Her performance won her a promotion to president of the company's Illinois and Wisconsin operations, including Chicago, one of its largest markets, and the site of the first commercial cell phone service in the United States.
Marketing and sales is the fast track to a regional presidency at Verizon Wireless. Of the company's 18 regional presidents, only one has a background rooted in technology and operations-Robert Stott, Palmer's old boss in New England.
Like Stott, Palmer got his start in telecommunications at New England Telephone, where his father and uncle were longtime employees.
The Palmers lived across the street from a small switch facility in Auburn, south of Worcester, in Central Massachusetts. Dinnertime talk was dominated by his father, who sold Yellow Pages advertising, and the young Palmer knew at an early age he wanted to work at the telephone company.
His uncle was a repair technician for New England Telephone. It was only after Palmer started a co-op assignment in his uncle's unit that he saw what a card the man could be, leading joke-swapping sessions during long days.
Palmer attended the College of the Holy Cross, and his 20hour work week at New England Telephone left him little time for extracurricular activities. But he did coach the first women's club soccer team at the Worcester school.
His first job with the telephone company was repossessing telephones from people who had not paid their bills. A...