He's a former Navy SEAL and looks the part, with a buzz cut, lean physique, and straight-back posture.
Neil Smit, the new president of Comcast Corp.'s giant cable division, has done tours of duty with America Online, Nabisco, Charter Communications, and a private firm that negotiated for the release of kidnapped executives in South America.
The 52-year-old, however, believes he learned his most important leadership lessons in his daunting and elite role in the military. In an interview last week in his 53d-floor office at the Comcast Center, he enumerated them:
Build your team.
Make decisions quickly.
Move fast.
Play to win - always.
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.
Smit added later, "I don't consider myself a techie, but I like technology . . . I push innovation. We should be first to the market with the best product every time."
Smit is making the rounds of the company's customer call centers. He was in Tennessee last week and Washington, D.C., the week before.
With about 100,000 employees, the cable division is the core profit-making division at Comcast, with about 23 million video subscribers and more than 15 million high-speed Internet customers.
Smit joined Comcast after several years as the top executive with Charter Communications Inc., the St. Louis cable company that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009, though everyone agrees Charter's deep financial woes couldn't be pinned on Smit.
"He's a good operator," said Bryan Kraft, an equity analyst with Evercore Partners Inc. who covers Charter Communications and Comcast. "Subscriber trends and margins improved after Neil got there," he said. "Charter just had too much debt from the late 1990s."
Steve Burke, Comcast's former top cable operating executive, now heads NBCUniversal Inc. Hired from Walt Disney Co. in the 1990s, Burke specialized in integrating large acquisitions into Comcast as it gobbled up cable operators.
Brian Roberts, Comcast chief executive officer and chairman, knew Smit for several years when they served together on industry boards. Said Roberts: "He's a straight shooter." He believes that Smit can improve customer service and that he has a "great sense of camaraderie."
"I know this sounds corny, but if we put the best people together, the business model will work itself out," Roberts said.
Smit's background is unusual, not only because of the SEALs. He studied oceanography and geology at Duke University. After leaving the SEALs as a lieutenant commander, he earned a master's degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
The absence of Wharton or the Harvard Business School on Smit's resumé didn't deter Roberts. "I knew Neil for years," Roberts said. "He's his own leader."