John Linton
I have often wondered at what stage of Exetel's 'life' it would be possible for me, personally, to stop managing in micro detail the operations of the company and the ways it was performing in the marketplaces in which it operates and work less hours and remove myself entirely from any of the day to day management of the various aspects and activities in which Exetel is involved.
My 'guess' when we started Exetel in January 2004 was that it would take two, at the most three, years to establish the company solidly enough for me to play no part in the day to day decision making or indeed, depending how things developed, in any decision making at all and become merely a shareholder or, at worst, some sort of general 'consultant' to the business with an input into future direction and future planning.
Obviously things haven't worked out that way. I'm also not complaining about that - just regretful.
What is crossing my mind, more often than in the past, is at what time in a commercial 'career' (or in a long life generally for that matter) does experience and knowledge become too 'old' in itself to overcome the lessening of intellectual skills as copious amounts of fine wine, single malts and vermouthless martinis accelerate the brain's loss of essential reserves of "little grey cells" and consequently the ability to correctly analyse data and scenarios and then make the best decisions to the benefit of the business.
I just can't get any sort of understanding of what will happen in the Australian economy and therefore have no idea of how the uncertain future will affect Exetel and our various ambitions and endeavours. I have never been in this position before and I have no idea what to do in terms of working out a base/bases for actually formulating new plans - having been forced to effectively 'tear up' the plans on which we started this financial year. I feel quite lost and, beyond taking the 'text book' action prescribed for such times (increasing prices - by way of adding a $3.00 charge per customer which in theory doubles our theoretical wafer thin monthly profits and freezing hiring) I am uncertain about what to do.
I was, briefly, encouraged to read in yesterday's AFR (pages 16 -17) a series of 'interviews' with various CEOs of large/very large and well known Australian companies who all 'confessed' that they had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in 2009 and their planning beyond December 31st was "fluid". It gave me some comfort to know that people managing very large companies with many personnel resources available to them as well as copious amounts of expensive outside advice feel equally at a loss in terms of forming some basis for making decisions moving forward into the next calendar year. However the reality is that I still have no understanding as to what to do in any of the key aspects of our business - and that's not a good way to feel - even if a lot of other people in decision making positions feel the same.
Apart from Steve and me, the current 'managers' in Exetel are in their mid twenties and, for many of them, Exetel is their first 'real' job let alone their first management job. So we are very thin in terms of management experience generally and our managers have almost no operational experience (outside what is in place at Exetel) and absolutely no tactical let alone strategic planning knowledge or experience. As almost all decision making managers in this country, and perhaps many other countries, appear to be equally lacking in being able to forecast the future and therefore plan for it this may not be as bad a situation as it could be - but it is becoming a concern and I'm beginning to think it might be more of a concern than it has been for other companies in the past.
I've tried getting some advice from one 'specialist' - but I got absolutely no value from it. I've been offered advice from other "specialists" but I doubt we'll take up their offer. The problems with 'business advisers is that they can never have any real understanding of a particular business and their generic advice is usually something you can pick up by reading the daily business press. I'm not at all well informed in any detailed sense but I find myself, more often than not, with a better general knowledge, and often quite specific knowledge of a topic than an alleged 'expert'.
I've investigated, as far as the information is available to an 'outsider' permits, what our competitors are doing in terms of new initiatives, changes in direction or 'consolidation' and I have formed the view that, at least from what's on the public record or available through reasonably trustworthy 'inside' information, that none of them have any significant new ideas or directions and are pretty much locked in to 'defensive' modes of survival rather than anything else - I stress the information available to form such a view is relatively limited.
I guess we'll do what the CEOs reported in yesterday's AFR are doing - wait till the end of the year and see what can be seen then.
Not something I'm ever inclined to do but it appears that there is little choice.
(Perhaps I can take comfort from the fact that I currently fit the description of this quote from a GW Bush impersonator: "uncertain times call for uncertain leadership")