Underscoring its pledge last week to cut 4,000 employees, Sprint Nextel began trimming from the top as the company announced Friday that three top executives are leaving.

Leaving the company are chief financial officer Paul Saleh, chief marketing officer Tim Kelly, and Mark Angelino, president of Sprint's sales and distribution unit.

Saleh, who had been temporarily running the company until Dan Hesse took over as the new CEO last month, had joined the company from Nextel where he also was chief financial officer. Angelino also had come from the Nextel side of the business, while Kelly was a long time Sprint employee.

Saleh had been an advocate of keeping the company's headquarters in Reston, Va., where Nextel had been located before Sprint acquired it for $35 billion in December 2004. Now, with Saleh history and Hesse currently working and living in Sprint's ancestral headquarters in Kansas, there will be increased speculation that the headquarters will be moved back to the midwestern state.

Hesse named three executives to fill the posts of the departing executives, but the positions will be "acting" and not permanent. William Arendt, senior VP and controller at Sprint Nextel, will be acting chief financial officer; John Garcia, senior VP of product development and management, will be acting chief marketing officer; and Paget Alves, regional president for sales and distribution, will be acting president of sales and distribution. All three will report to Hesse.

Sprint has been racked with challenges since the Nextel acquisition, which was billed as a merger of equals. Not long after Nextel's former CEO Tim Donahue left the merged company, he led a failed attempt by outside investors to take over the company.

Sprint still has enormous technology problems to face. It had earmarked $5 billion for a nationwide rollout of WiMax, a still largely untested in the field wide area technology. If deployed, WiMax is likely to compete with Sprint's CDMA2000 EV-DO 3G rollout. Also problematic is the challenge presented by attempting to merge Nextel's spectrum into Sprint's infrastructure.

Before his appointment last month as president and CEO of Sprint Nextel, Hesse had been serving as CEO of Embarq, Sprint's former landline operation. He quickly whipped Embarq in shape after the unit was spun out from Sprint in May 2006; Embarq's stock rose by a third under Hesse's leadership.