If you don’t believe Madonna was a telecom person, click here.
Tomorow, we will find out what Disco Inferno has to do with telecom.
Posted by Dan Caruso
February 17, 2008
Archive for the 'Disconnect Inferno' Category
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Subscribe via RSSPosted by Dan Caruso
February 16, 2008
Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMSMViyCVNI to find out what The Trammps taught Tina Turner about telecom.
More tomorrow…
Posted by Dan Caruso
February 15, 2008
Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XndWhXtrRU to find out what Anna Mae Bullock (a.k.a. Tina Turner) knows about telecom.
More tomorrow!!!!
Posted by Dan Caruso
January 13, 2008
I stumbled across the following post in Investor Village on LVLT (http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=444&mn=45523&pt=msg&mid=3807967). This post was a response to a much more detailed post (http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=444&mn=45494&pt=msg&mid=3805671).
This initial post ascertained that the source of LVLT’s difficulties is their product-centric organizational approach. This post described how LVLT is segmented into three product units: transport, IP, and voice. This product-silo’d approach, according to the person who wrote the post, causes conflict within the organization.
The second post challenged this notion. As part of the challenge, it compared Zayo’s organizational approach to LVLT.
I would point toward Zayo where Dan Caruso who came from the LVLT culture you describe and supposedly learned what not to do. Zayo just recently organized itself into three independent groups – wholesale, managed services, and voice. Sounds sorta familiar…
I have not been at LVLT for years so I cannot opine on what is working and what isn’t in their organizational approach. I do want to clarify, however, what we are doing at Zayo.
Zayo is divided into three completely separate businesses. This earlier post of mine describes the approach. The closest thing in LVLT-land that is similar to this is when LVLT owned Software Spectrum and I-structure. LVLT truly had three distinct businesses at that juncture. Each had a president with true P&L responsibility. Each had a finance group; each had an IT organization; each did their own customer service and provisioning. I would hope that I-structure bought the bandwidth it needed from LVLT core. I’d also hope they’d get a screaming price, as they were a sister organization. Nonetheless, each was expected to invest money wisely and meet its revenue and profitability goals. Importantly, it was straight-forward to measure performance as it wasn’t masked by allocated costs and nebulous overhead.
Zayo is committed to three (or more over time) business units that are discreet and operate autonomously from their siblings. They might purchase services from one another–and might collaborate on certain customers–but their businesses are fundamentally different. I’ll trade off the perception of inefficiency (“holy cow, you mean you have three NOCs”) with the intense and measurable focus on profitability and value creation.
