John Linton ....provides no basis at all for understanding the culture of another country let alone its business sub-cultures.
I managed to finish all the tasks I had to do by yesterday evening and will begin the trip to Sri Lanka this evening arriving in Bangkok in the early hours of their morning. I didn't manage to get any 'time off' over Christmas/New Year but I am actually going to take three days R and R in Bangkok (two on the way and one on the way back). Unfortunately Annette has had to cancel her trip as we have a terminally ill dog who may depart this life at any time and she would not contemplate that event occurring while at least one of us is not present. While, if anything, I am more concerned about this than she is the demands of running any business, particularly a remote business, make such aspects of a personal life a compromise.
I made a list of the things that I need to cover while in Colombo and we discussed the Colombo operation for longer than usual at the last board meeting to ensure that everything was agreed in terms of what we might do in the future. I am not sure whether we will be able to achieve all the things we have set out to achieve but we have learned a great deal over the past few years and, hopefully, we will continue to learn a great deal more over the future years. Our major problem, at least the major problem that we recognise, is our lack of knowledge and understanding of Sri Lankan 'culture' particularly as it relates to business activities. While we have made a great deal of progress over the time we have been involved in setting up the Sri Lankan business we have made almost no progress in understanding how best to manage the people we employ there.
We were intelligent enough to try and understand (from reading and observation) how other companies in Sri Lanka and India were operated by 'foreigners' and were astute enough to try and understand the sub text of everything that came our way but having zero experience the knowledge we have gained over the past few years remains very basic. It is now time to try and get much more out of the Sri Lankan company than we have managed to do to date - the progress to date has been more than acceptable but it has been heavily constrained by the 'controls' imposed - mainly by me but generally because of the way we set up the operation and our lack of understanding of how business, and therefore the people within business, act and to extend that to their career expectations is so from from my personal understanding it might as well be trying to understand 3rd millennium bce Egyptian hieroglyphics without the Rosetta stone.
I am also very aware that in some future 'NBN2' era where everything in providing residential communications becomes 'a dull shade of gray' Exetel will need to find a way of keeping the highly qualified employees we have in Colombo 'intellectually stimulated' by their work and ensure they are able to continue to grow their careers beyond the current major plus of earning more money than they can find from any other Colombo employer while not being required to do very much (in intellectual terms) to earn that money. As the future success of the Colombo company will rely, just as the Australian company does, on retaining the intellectual 'capital' locked up in the minds of its personnel the future development of career paths for our personnel remains one of the key aspects of Exetel's future development as a company.
A lot of 'food for thought' for the next few days.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46