John Linton ...."I am very pleased to report to you on a superb year for your company - a year of record revenue, profit, cash flow and earnings per share." _ Samuel J. Palmisano Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM (Front Page 07/08 Annual Report).
....even if I ever got to say that it wouldn't be about a company that had increased its revenue from $US91 billion to almost $US99 billion and its profits from $US13.3 billion to $US14.5 billion!
As you may have gathered I have just finished reading the latest IBM annual report (I still have shares in IBM bought when I worked for that company). I needed a break from reading the doom and gloom Australian, US and Asian financial press as a way of starting the day and reading about the activities of one of the world's best companies is almost always highly stimulating. And so it was.
The upward 'stair case' bar charts are almost boring in their omnipresence throughout the financial and other summaries basically showing a doubling, in regular 'stair steps' of every key measurement over a five year period.
What is even more impressive is the confidence that radiates from every word written in describing the companies activities, objectives and achievements; particularly those about the future.
I particularly liked the penultimate paragraph of Palmisano's report introduction (Page 11) which said, in part:
"They [IBM's Employees] know the world is changing. They don't expect - or in many cases, even want - what business used to provide. What they do want is an opportunity and some help to learn and grow, so that they can effectively compete on a world stage."
Nice to be able to say that about a personnel of 386,558.
(Also nice as a shareholder to see the increased dividend - almost double that of five years ago).
Oh well....back to reality......
There is little doubt that, even in Exetel's minute areas of endeavour, more change is now taking place than at any time in the past and only by adapting everything that has been done and is currently being done will a small company like Exetel survive.
The greatest challenge we now face is, after two years of 'consolidation' (a very, very necessary thing to have done) in which we restricted the growth of the company while we fully implemented the required systems and processes we had developed at 'break neck' speed, is to now double the size of Exetel over the coming twelve months.
One of my fears is that we have become 'used' to being less innovative and 'daring' in both our decision making and our daily operations during the last 24 months as we have sought to move from the start up phase of company development to the second phase when business moves from growing exponentially (because of the low base) to the relatively unexciting 30 - 50% a year of the past two years.
We have started to put the new initiatives in place that are intended to double Exetel's revenues from 1/7/08 to 30/6/09 and they are looking like having some immediate effect while we 'practice' over the next three months what we must treble in doing over the succeeding 12 months - order volumes of ADSL and VoIP services are 30% higher since we put in place the first of the growth initiatives.
Whether we can fully understand what we have to do over the three months 'trial' we are now embarking on remains to be seen as does our ability to move completely away from what we have done in the past.
It's all very well to 'dictate' a massive change within even a very small business - it's quite something else to ensure that each person within the company feels that what they personally need to achieve is both possible and what they want to do.
Nice to see that IBM can feel confident about doing that though.