Sprint isn't joking when it says it's heading in a new direction. The Kansas-based, third-largest carrier in the United States cut 452 jobs last Friday, including a number of high heads.

Among the layoffs were 80 vice presidents, directors and managers, according to the Kansas City Biz Journal. The layoffs, part of Sprint's new strategy, represent the carrier's strategy of catching up.

Although the No. 3 provider of cellular access to the United States, Sprint has fallen behind in recent times. Exacerbated by the humongous gap between Verizon (No. 1) and AT&T (No. 2) and the next two carriers in the country, T-Mobile, the No. 4 carrier, has responded with sharp teeth and results to prove. Sprint, on the other hand, has become an archaic brand, even in the minds of its executives.

Chief executive of Sprint's parent company, Japan-based SoftBank Corp., Masayoshi Son has been clamoring for a change of scenery, going so far as to call the Sprint board mentality "stupid."

"Sprint is a daimyo in Kansas," Son said. "That's not enough."

"We need to change Sprint's culture," Son told The Wall Street Journal after a news conference in February.

Son went so far as to spend most of the year lobbying U.S. policy makers and industry shakers to approve an acquisition of T-Mobile. The combined power of the two underdogs, Son stressed, could be the only thing to keep the U.S. wireless service industry from becoming a duopoly of Verizon and AT&T.

"Without industry consolidation, for Sprint alone to become No. 1 in the U.S. is literally just a dream. I'm not content for Sprint to remain No. 3 because if we could grow bigger, we will offer aggressive discounts and services, just like we did in Japan," Son said during the a Sprint quarterly earnings report earlier this year.

"There is a huge gap between the bigger two and the smaller two, thus the level of competition isn't sound or strong."

The result of the merger's failure to go through -- thanks to FCC and antitrust regulators who feared further consolidation -- ended up in the appointment of Sprint's new CEO, Marcelo Claure.

Claure, a Bolivian billionaire, has stressed from day one that he intends to shake things up. Among the sacrifices on the road to redemption, he told employees, will be the shedding of unnecessary weight.

"I have been very frank with employees from Day 1," Claure said. "We are looking at everything that we do. ... Businesses we shouldn't be in, we are in the process of eliminating."

Sprint's 452 job cut puts the company over the 900 mark for the year in the Overland area.

The reining in is part of Sprint's strategy to reduce its international workforce to 33,000 employees by the end of October, making it the smallest carrier-by-workforce of the major four in the United States.  

More layoffs are "expected to come."