John Linton .........but only after you've crossed endless ridges only to be confronted by - yet another ridge. Exetel is certainly not confronted by the unknown difficulties of Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson in 1813 though the past three tears have certainly presented a minor mirror image of constant disappointment in that our equivalent crossing successive 'ridges' has only revealed yet another 'ridge'.
Some two and a half years ago we formed the view that the residential ADSL markets had ended their growth phase and were set to decline under the twin 'assaults' of mobile data services and the egotistical fool's 'NBN2' adventurism. For a company of Exetel's size the difficulties of dealing with the problems these 'sea changes' would bring about plus the saturation of the ADSL market itself we determined that we had to transform Exetel into a company quite different to the one that existed at the end of 2008. Since that time we have pursued a set of policies to bring that about while maintaining our abilities to acquire and better serve old and new residential ADSL customers. Looking back I am amazed at how naive we were, in thinking we could accomplish those objectives within our casually framed time lines but then I have always been an indifferent long term planner....my strengths, should I have any, have always been short term execution and immediate problem solving.
Prior to embarking on the changes we had already set up an operation in Sri Lanka that, at that time had ten employees as we knew that for Exetel to become successful in some future markets we would need to achieve several inherent advantages that had to provide long term, and ongoing, benefits. Any MBA course or 'business text book' spells out the five key advantages any long term business success requires though each tends to switch the priorities around and blur the lines between those characteristics. If you ignore the only real requirement of long term success (monopolies in their different forms recently exemplified by Microsoft courtesy of IBM) you are left with your selection from book/MBA course of your choice definitions of the key requirements. My understanding of those requirements are:
product difficult for others to copy, constant product improvement, lowest cost of sales, lowest operational cost, highest level of top quality personnel retention.
My 'choice' of characteristics is simplistic but, at least in my opinion, I have not seen any significantly different 'options' over the time I have been looking at these sorts of issues. If you conjure up your short list of the most successful commercial enterprises since 1945 what would your list consist of? IBM, Sony, Honda, Toyota, Microsoft, Apple, Coca Cola, Chanel?....or whatever you would choose. If you make your own list and then think about it for a few minutes (look up their company history on the net) you may find some surprising similarities in what they did over the decades.
As I referenced in a relatively recent rambling I have started to give some thought to Exetel's longer term future, assuming it has one - beyond residential ADSL or its fibre/mobile replacement. It has been a interesting exercise but quite daunting. However, I have stayed with the discipline of apply the five simple criteria I listed above and sketched out a 'super product' that could be created and provided against those criteria. It wasn't very difficult to make those sorts of decisions but, of course, it would be infinitely more difficult to actually bring about those aspirations - but no more difficult than the last two plus years of being a residential ADSL provider. So it's been an interesting 'academic' exercise and, with some much more careful thought, it could be approached as a base template for future planning if we could ever find someone good enough to do that.
In the mean time we will continue with our far more prosaic changes to Exetel along the lines we have been pursuing for the past two plus years with their much more modest aspirations - those changes are quite difficult enough for the present time.
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