John Linton .........for the tenth time of visiting Colombo - must be some sort of record - roughly once per quarter for the past two and a half years.
Having lost a day to the flesh being too weak to allow the mind to face up to its responsibilities the remaining review topics were carried out in shorter time frames than had originally been planned - however we did manage to cover all them in at least some detail though not in the depth they really deserved and almost certainly needed. We eventually completed the end of year/start of year review of the Colombo operation before 6 pm this evening and had dinner with the Sri Lankan GM before getting a ride to the airport for our 2 am departure - ahh the joys of international travel.
I am very happy with the overwhelming majority of what I saw and what we discussed over the last few days and I believe that the Sri Lankan company now rivals the Australian company for competence and efficiency in almost every aspect of commercial life. There are some things that need much more attention before they fall in to that category but overall - it is a very well run and executed operation that would be better than most Australian commercial organisations.....at least in my limited experience. There remain many unknowns about the future operations and we have yet to face the test of losing key and valuable personnel as our original strategy for avoiding that costly and debilitating scenario has proven very successful in its first first two years and probably will continue to protect us for a good part of our third year - only time will tell.
We will continue to, more slowly, expand the number of personnel we employ in Sri Lanka as our business in Australia continues to grow but we will now begin the efforts required to legally begin to provide services within Sri Lanka itself which is a whole new, unknown, process that will involve a great deal of intricate and laborious work in changing the status of the company and the unbelievably difficult task of acquiring a SL carrier licence. I spent some time outlining what we should aim at doing to our SL GM (and to Annette whom I had not previously confided in) and we will now have to consider how we can make this happen. The challenges will be significant but 'faint heart never won fair lady' as my maternal grandmother assured me a long time ago.
I learned some significant things about how to deal with governments for 'big thinking projects' from an expert at that task back in the days I worked for Fujitsu and I've never forgotten the things I learned over that amazing few years. The most obvious lesson was not only never 'go small' - always paint the biggest, scariest and simply impossible picture possible and then offer a simple way to accomplish it - and always ask for nothing up front but insist on a long term pay back. Sort of like offering the current Federal government an 'NBN2' for free as long as you get to run it for 20 years.....but as that's already been done it has to be something a lot more believable (and actually deliverable).
So.....almost everything (except one deeply disturbing thing) is well in Sri Lanka and FY2011 promises to be the best year of the SL company's short life with modest growth in the current activities and new vista's of immense magnitude to dream about and possibly even bring about - perhaps a 'world first' for Exetel?
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