John Linton ....but then the combined technical skills of Lilianfels technical expertise were no better. So for the first time in my local and overseas travels I am forced to use the hotel's public facilities to check my email and write this blog. Fortunately Annette and I were out about and driving to and from Jenolan Caves while apparently the IT resources of the hotel failed to connect my laptop (no wifi) to the ethernet service eventually concluding, according to the nice girl at the front desk, that there was "some sort of problem". Oh well I shouldn't be planning to use it much anyway on this brief break. So it's early afternoon and for the first time in a very long time I have had no internet access - havng forgotten to bring my own wireless dongle with me as a guard against this situation.
It does serve to illustrate how much a growing percentage of the population is becoming, if not dependent, then heavily reliant on almost constant internet connectivity. While nothing serious will occur because I can't contact the Exetel intranet and have to use the clunky web mail service minus all my internet files for communications it does irk me. For many other people who have greater needs than mine it would be more than irksome. My most pressing need is to write this blog, purely for my own imperatives - not because anyone else will be inconvenienced, and that is possible via this,, and almost every other, hotel's public access internet. I suppose in the 'old days' I could have gone to a local internet cafe or even the local public library as I remember doing long ago but that proved to be unnecessary - and I must say it's very pleasant here with a very cold beer and the piano player going through his repertoire of old standards in the background.
Our working week' finished up quite well yesterday with no alarms and excursions in the first 8 days of the new financial year. Perhaps the various order intakes were not as good as I would have liked them to be but then it is the first week of the school holidays in NSW, and presumably school holidays in at least some other States, and early July is seldom/never a 'busy' week for business/corporate buyers. My main objective for this year is to ensure that our planning and forecasting processes and procedures are shared by more people and to ensure that they replace their current less than stellar guessing games with fact structured analysis leading via constant re-checking to something approaching sensible short/medium term predictions. I think the same re-introduction of rigour is essential in other areas of our company where too much carelessness has managed to creep in to too many of our key operating processes as the company has grown and too little creativity and stricture has been allowed to replace the goal of perfection in everything that the founders of Exetel aspired to and was inculcated into our initial employees - who continue to demonstrate those characteristics today.
Of course, such words are as meaningless as any manager's hankering for the old days as exemplified in Telstra's CEO saying he was going to ensure the customer was put first from now on. Easy to say (also surprising such statements have to be made) but essentially of themselves the are totally meaningless....and I fully understand that my silly words fall directly into the same category. Exetel's major problem, as I mentioned several times over the past few years is the fact that we do not have enough 'management' skills within our company having built it, with two very recent exceptions, on recent graduates who were very bright and indicated they possessed the basic characteristics and traits that define a likely capability for managing other people. Over the years this has certainly been the case in some key aspects of management and we have been able to continually grow because almost all of the people hired under these guidelines are now at supervision and management levels within our small company of less than 130 people. But what is missing using this scenario is becoming very obvious - and I know that I don't now how to address the two key aspects of really good management - the ability to look for perfection in every aspect of every function under their 'control' and the ability to put more time and effort in to the development of the people they are responsible for than they do in to their own career development and growth.
It seems to me that times are very different today than when I first learned, I was never taught, how to become an effective manager of people (which I am assured I was by enough other people for me to believe it was true - personally I never noticed either way). What I have begun to notice with our own personnel is what I first noticed, and intensely disliked at IBM - a great willingness to learn from people 'above' them and an almost total absence of cheerful willingness to teach and care for those 'below' them. How this is addressed is going to be Exetel's greatest challenge if it to progress as rapidly in the future as it has done in the past
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18 - The age I was when I fell in love for the first time.