The Earth is Flat and a bit Cloudy
The good news about the earth being flat is the edge is surrounded by ice which prevents us falling off the edge when we sail too close to the edge of the world.
Conspiracy theory always builds on a grain of possible truth to create a separate reality for those to whom the real “spherical” world is too complicated.
I guess conspiracy theories like religion can both exciting and comforting and enable us to socialise with like minded people.
The effect is outlined by of my favourite authors Robert Cialdini in his latest book Pre-suasion added another category to his six principles of influence — namely “Unity”, where he details that a shared identity that both the influencer and influencee are part of. The more we perceive people are part of “us,” the more likely we are to be influenced by them.
My company Salamanca Solutions International is part TelcoDR Cloud City attending MWC virtually this year — and our collective challenge is persuading legacy regulated telecom operators to move to the cloud.
Unlike the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, there are real and measurable benefits — but it does require a change in the culture of an organisation, from a slow technocratic behemoth where customer comes last, to an agile flexible and dynamic business.
Helping organisations achieve this change is also the objective of the TMforum Digital Organisation Transformation Project that I am participating in. For Telecom Operators’ “digital transformation to be a success and not to fall into the 70% failure bucket, they urgently need to undergo not only technological and operational transformation but also address and align cultural, talent and organizational transformation”.
It feels like Groundhog Day as I drove the same cultural transformation in AT&T Network Systems exactly 30 years ago. In some industries technology is a barrier to change — but not forever.
Irresistible change is driven by competition and customer focussed organisations such as Apple are forcing change adoption — those who do not change will die.
Over twenty years ago one my company bought the telecom operators — Telering in Austria for €10 and sold it for €1.3Bn four years later. In becoming an agile flexible customer focussed organisation we changed the new product introduction process for tariff plans from taking 6 months and costing $250k per change to taking 2 weeks and costing $25k per change.
Today, with the opportunities to eliminate the majority of operations complexity, the cost introducing new products takes a few days at most and the communications and marketing of the customer offer is the limiting factor, rather than systems and technology.
So just as evolutionary forces, in this case a meteorite, killed off the dinosaurs, we have a choice — evolve our legacy businesses to leverage cloud technologies and capabilities or align with industry dinosaurs to flat earth oblivion.
