John Linton ..........is finding 'leaders'......this is an especially difficult situation is the 'technology industry' for start up companies that largely employ mainly very young engineers whose roles in new technology companies are very technology oriented and involve interaction mainly with lines of code on screens. This is better summed up in this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704548604575097531072898668.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RIGHTTopCarousel_1
Exetel is, of course, a tiny company but it has around 100 employees and is in its seventh year of operation. Over the time we have been in business we have built a 'platform' of processes and operations in two different countries that allow us to do far more than we do today and the imperatives for doing different things than we do today keep increasing as the government intervention in the Australian communications markets becomes more profound. There is little doubt that, because of our operational efficiency and flexibility (we have no real infrastructure investments that demand that we continue to pursue any particular 'paths') we could remain doing what we do today and that may prove to be the best scenario.
However, there is little attraction in operating in the sunset phases of any technology and even less in any upheaval in distribution of any product or service - too many changes occur as the 'dinosaurs' have to make changes to their own operations and their 'thrashings around' cause too much damage to all and sundry while they attempt to escape their fate. So now would be a perfect time for new initiatives and, in some ways, we have been putting those in place as we were not so stupid that we didn't see all this coming - almost from the moment of the 'announcement' of the previous, now discredited, Labor government's face saving announcement of the 'NBN2'.We will continue to move the emphasis of our operations from residential ADSL services to higher speed fibre based business data services and the associated VoIP and ancillary services associated with operating a business in the 21st century.....and that is a major change for a company of our size.
What would be really good is to use the network we have built and the capabilities that support it to grow Exetel more rapidly than we are doing at the moment - not to make more money or because there is anything intrinsically good about 'growth for growth's sake' but because it would be prudent to use the capabilities we have and the greater foresight we appear to have used to make improve the 'safety' of our future. To do that we need people of both 'vision' and the people management skills to bring such 'ventures' to reality - a difficult set of tasks when the average age of the people in the company is less than 26. Nevertheless it is a time and place when I think it's going to be essential to put more effort into building new businesses within Exetel's current businesses.
Which comes back to the start of this piece of writing - making the very subjective judgment calls on what should be pursued and by whom. Then there is the really difficult issue of ensuring that these immensely difficult tasks are made to happen and the people charged with them overcome the incredible number of problems, and the personal despair that almost always accompanies them. The issues we now need to address are those of more rapidly developing the 'raw talent' we have always set our hiring criteria to acquire into 'leaders' who can pursue their own paths to business success while continuing to develop Exetel's capabilities of delivering on our founding principles.
I doubt that we will find this key objective any easier to achieve than any previous objective.
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