John Linton ....is not something that I find as easy to understand as I once did.
Is there any reason for there to be 8 billion human beings alive at any one time on planet Earth? Is there any reason for any human beings at all to exist on this planet? Clearly such questions are way beyond my limited intellect's ability to even begin to consider.......but in simplistic terms, once you dismiss the nonsenses of various religious explanations for humanity's existence, it's very difficult to see how humanity, as a species, has been of any use at all to the planet. It's obviously pretty easy to find reasons why humanity has only been a set of major geometrically growing negative influences on the planet. Nothing any of us can do about being born human so any time spent examining that situation is a waste.
Considering what the company you have a major influence over should do over the coming months which, if those months are successful enough, will turn into a year and then perhaps, again depending on the relative success of ensuing months, more years is another much more concrete set of problems - both immediate and ongoing. It's quite difficult to plan for a company of Exetel's size to remain financially viable month after month over the past almost 90 consecutive months. It's infinitely harder to plan to remain viable and to actually deliver something of value to your current and future customers over the coming months. If there is some adjective that goes beyond 'infinitely,'then it would apply to the level of difficulty that would describe how hard it would be to deliver uniquely different services to any sector of any marketplace.
Perhaps it was possible to do such things in the early days of 2004 but so many things have changed since then that I have to seriously question whether it's possible to do today. As I, and others, begin to put together the basics on which the FY2012 financial and operating plans will be built I, at least, am finding it difficult to retain a belief that what we should spend so much of our time trying to provide services of better real value to our residential customers.....or at least more value than they could get from another provider of the same/similar services. I therefore have to question whether the very large amounts of effort should continue to be put into those services which seem, at least to me, as increasingly "me tooish" where in past years we were able to believe we did some things very differently.
Despite now having a much better infrastructure (for all services) and a far better set of support services (for all services) than we have ever had at any past time we can't seem to make the progress we have managed to do in each of the past seven financial years. While it would be easy enough to 'blame' the various changes that have taken place over the past few years that have made the Australian telecommunications business harder in virtually every respect, the simple fact is that Exetel's growth has continued to slow which can only be seen as the services and pricing we are able to offer has become less appealing than it once was. That's an inevitability for any business and one that is dealt with by any company making constant changes to the ways it presents its products to its current marketplaces or by changing its products and marketplaces over time.
While we have recognised those simple facts of business life and for the past almost two and a half years have been changing Exetel to meet them it is time to reflect on just why we could remain running a viable and useful to its customers business in to the future. These are not easy questions to answer and the more I attempt to think through the issues the less clearly I see a 'path' through them. If the current rain continues then there will be more time on this miserable 'long week end' to find at least a starting point.
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