John Linton I am having trouble adjusting to the time shift with my aging body/mind insisting it's 3 am and why on Earth am I trying to make them move and think at this ridiculous hour. For some reason the 5 hour difference between Sri Lanka and Australia is more difficult to overcome than the nine or so hours between the EU and Australia or the 12 to 19 hours between the USA and Australia. So my limbs reluctantly allow me to move slowly from place to place and any 'thinking' I try to do is done even more slowly and perceptions are viewed through some sort of swirling mist.
We made virtually no progress yesterday in developing better/more attractive ADSL plans with the current road blocks of carrier pricing of ports and back hauls impossible to work around. Similarly Vodafone's 'infinity' mobile plans have set a new basis for people considering changing mobile phone plans and, despite any current negative perceptions about the Vodafone network, appear to be prominent in a significant percentage of buyer's thinking. In terms of finding a simple way of 'competing' with Telstra Retail and TPG the current thinking is that there appears to be no way of doing that without some sort of 'sleight of hand' approach that those companies take to 'marketing'. Maybe we will have to forsake a 'life time' of 'tell it as it actually is' and become 'more flexible' with our 'wording'? I think I'd rather not do that.
So what can be done? Perhaps it's just another reflection of the current confused marketplaces and after two and a half years of intense Telstra Retail 'win back' programs and the follow the leader actions of the companies affected by those programs ADSL services are no longer capable of being differentiated by anything except the parameters currently dominating the majority, if not all of the residential ADSL marketplaces. It certainly makes it very difficult to offer ADSL services that meet a 'real user's' needs and allow the provider to stay in business. However, it's obvious that current conditions will continue to prevail with the only likely change being that they may get tougher rather than the reverse and therefore we will have to make changes to what we currently offer to residential customers.
We have three days to find something sensible, preferably mind blowingly sensible, which after wasting the first of the then four days is a daunting challenge. But all commercial life is simply one 'challenge' after another and, looking back, all of those past 'challenges' seemed equally formidable at the time.....and, mostly, we managed to finds ways of meeting and overcoming each of those past issues - more or less effectively. We just haven't been able, for whatever reasons, to bring enough thinking power to bear on the current issues. It's not an option. We will try a 'new' approach today which I haven't been part of for a very long time - the meeting type where you start with the objectives and grind through to a solution to each one never allowing anyone to leave the room (except for meal breaks) until each answer has been found and the results are actually on the web site. It used to work.
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