John Linton
.....Perfection remains illusory.
This is the last day of another very interesting year of being part of Exetel and I have to say that I'm physically and mentally exhausted - way past the point where a few days off will 'recharge the batteries'. Notwithstanding that pathetic bit of moaning the last twelve months have been a 'watershed' year in which Exetel, finally (or perhaps just for the time being) changed from being a struggling start up operation facing continual threats of financial and operational oblivion to a maturing company that was beginning to benefit from the huge efforts of time and will and, although it sounds smug, relatively clever thinking and planning that have been put in to the company over a sustained period of time.
When we started Exetel our desire and ambition was to create and operate a "perfect" communications company based on our relatively long and varied experiences in working in and for much less than perfect communications companies over the previous 10 or so years. Clearly we have totally failed to achieve that ambition - at least in the first five years of Exetel's 'life' to date. So we have put five years of unremittingly hard work in to failing - a disappointing result in almost every way you look at it.
It would be 'normal' having written those words to continue with a "But - on the other hand......" Unfortunately when you set out to achieve one very clearly measurable objective and you fail to achieve that objective there can be no "buts' or "howevers".
All that a sensible person can do is to review the causes of the failure(s) and decide what to do next.
I'm not sure if I have another five years left available to me of being able to work as hard and as constantly as I have done over the past five years. Dispassionately - I'm pretty sure I haven't - too many single malts, straight up gin Martinis and rivers of fine wine coupled with increasingly less physical exercise will have made irreversible inroads into my physical being and quite probably my mental capacities as well. So whatever Exetel is to become (at least with my input) will have to be achieved over some lesser period than a Stalinesque 'five year plan' - three years would appear to be a maximum at this time.
One of the few pluses we have been able to put in place over the past five years has been a culture and actuality of efficiency via automation that has created the key 'platform' of the lowest possible cost of operation of any entity with which we currently 'compete' or may likely compete with in the future. That is a very real and quite massive ongoing advantage. The other very significant achievement in operating capability we have put in place has been the creation of the Sri Lankan company over the past almost three years that is set up and operated completely differently to the outsourced or quasi outsourced operations of any of the entities with whom we compete. This added to the operating and cost advantages of the automation we have ceaselessly invested in over the past five years, does put in place an ongoing, and increasing, operating cost advantage over every entity with whom we may compete over the coming three years.
This advantage is something we certainly didn't have five years ago.
So.......one more time for the people who never learn....I would like to be part of creating the 'perfect' communications company over the next three years and, hopefully having learned from the past five years of failures, we are in a better position today than we were in January 2004 to complete that objective successfully this time.
So tomorrow is the start of the new three year plan for Exetel in which we will aim to achieve a whole lot of things that we haven't managed to achieve so far. This time, and I've lost count of how many times I have started a new year with soaring ambitions that somehow never seem to get achieved, we will take a more 'graduated' approach to reaching, and then maintaining, 'perfection'. As always, I can see no reason why we can't put in place a series of benchmarks and then put in place the processes that will allow us to reach and continue to operate at those benchmark levels. At the end of the day it's only a question of planning and execution and, of course, people.
I have spent much of the last 5 - 6 weeks reducing the complexity of meanings and implications of the word "perfect" in relation to a communications company to a set of numbers which isn't quite as easy as it sounds. However, give or take several hundreds of adjustments along the way, I think that we can define "perfect" in ways that we can discretely implement and measure that will allow us to have a realistic chance of reaching that objective within the estimated three year period. Given the relative simplicity of what communications services actually entail in delivering and maintaining it isn't particularly difficult to determine what the measurements of "perfection" should be. The majority are blindingly obvious and are easy to determine and set the measurements for:
Up time under your control - 100%
Speed under your control - maximum
Voice quality - 1 for mobile, 2 for VoIP
Price - lowest of any provider
Service quality - no TIO complaints
Customer satisfaction - referrals equal number of users in any 'period'
Profit - enough to donate $A1 million per annum to key projects
Personnel - no unplanned losses/no hiring outside the company for key personnel
etc, etc
Anyone in their second year of business planning could list the requirements for "perfection" for any specific commercial entity pretty accurately so there is no difficulty in doing that - the only potential difficulty is in measuring them. Given the 5+ weeks I have spent on it then it is very easy not only to determine a very comprehensive list but to do the more interesting work of devising the detailed processes/steps to meet the "perfection" target for each nominated area of operation. The automated task and personnel management system we have developed over the past two years will be a major plus in the measurement of the levels of achievement and we couldn't embark on this new three year plan without it and, more to the point, what it will become.
Currently I can define "perfection" as completely meeting several hundred 'goals' each day or some lesser part of each day scaling down to fractions of a second. We don't have the ability, currently, to measure all of those elements of "perfection" but we could and will put the effort in to developing the code to do that over time as we have the base 'platform' in place to do that. Being able to measure "perfection" is of course very different to achieving "perfection". However it is the only thing that really interests me enough to keep working beyond the end of today.
Having said that I think the next three years aren't going to be very easy but i think they are going to be immensely rewarding in non-financial ways.