{"id":1529,"date":"2025-09-25T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T22:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanmccullen.com\/?p=1529"},"modified":"2025-09-25T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T22:15:00","slug":"backwards-into-the-future-what-leaders-can-learn-from-telcos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanmccullen.com\/?p=1529","title":{"rendered":"Backwards Into The Future: What Leaders Can Learn from Telcos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.\u201d Marshall\u00a0McLuhan<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Twain is often credited with saying, \u201cHistory doesn\u2019t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.\u201d<\/em> The rhyme is persistent across time. Faces change, leaders wax and wane, technologies evolve, yet the dilemmas leaders confront are strangely familiar. The difference today is tempo. In earlier eras, organisations could afford years\u200a\u2014\u200asometimes decades\u200a\u2014\u200ato adjust. Now, technological shifts allow far less breathing room. To compound matters, leaders are confronted with more legs of the lion tamer\u2019s chair than ever: AI, geopolitics, transient advantage, and much more\u00a0besides.<\/p>\n

Looking back, the rhyme is easy to hear. Looking forward, the notes are faint, muffled by the noise of the present. McLuhan\u2019s rear-view mirror should remind us how easily we fix our gaze on what has worked before, even as the road ahead is bending or leads off a\u00a0cliff.<\/p>\n

And here lies the paradox. Those best positioned to act on the future are often too busy managing the present to notice it. When they do pause, they tend to define tomorrow using yesterday\u2019s logic. Study the past long enough and the rhymes become clear\u200a\u2014\u200abut, as the saying goes, it is hard to read the label when you are inside the\u00a0jar<\/em><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Telecoms of the 1990s: Driving in\u00a0Fog<\/h3>\n

In our latest conversation on The Innovation Show<\/strong> with Michael Raynor<\/strong><\/a>, he revisited his research on Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) and the upheaval of the 1990s telecoms industry. Back then, the categories were clear with local companies for households, long-distance carriers for cross-border calls, cable for television, mobile as a luxury. Each kept to its\u00a0lane.<\/p>\n

Then fibre optics collapsed the cost of transmission. Wireless became a genuine substitute for fixed lines. Internet Protocol made it possible for cable companies to promise voice calls. The walls were demolished, only regulation remained as a protective mortar holding up distinctions that no longer mattered.<\/p>\n

Michael described incumbents as caught between Scylla and Charybdis<\/strong><\/a>\u200a\u2014\u200atechnological uncertainty on one side, regulatory inertia on the other. They could sense that convergence was coming, but no one knew when or in what form. Many predicted it would arrive by 2003; in truth, it took far longer. The danger was to overestimate how fast change would bite, and underestimate how deeply it would eventually reshape the landscape.<\/p>\n

Those who survived treated their investments as options. This meant investing partial stakes in mobile or satellite TV, which gave them the right, but not the obligation, to scale up as the industry evolved. This way, they could keep the doors open while the fog lifted and they knew what they were dealing\u00a0with.<\/p>\n

The Courage to\u00a0Exit<\/h3>\n

\u201cFor the corporation to live, it must be willing to see business units die. If the corporation doesn\u2019t kill them off itself, competitors will.\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aClayton Christensen and Joseph Bower in Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave (Harvard Business Review,\u00a01995)<\/p>\n

That same rhyme reappeared at Verizon under Ivan Seidenberg. The company\u2019s Yellow Pages directories were still printing money, attractive enough to draw private equity bids. But Seidenberg called it a route to \u201ccommodity hell.\u201d However comfortable it looked in the rear-view mirror, the windscreen spelled\u00a0decline.<\/p>\n

He chose to shed directories and other stalling units, funnelling capital instead into wireless and fibre. The markets misunderstood and punished him. The stock sagged as billions went into broadband and FiOS (Verizon\u2019s fibre-optic communications service). But by the late 2000s, the verdict shifted. When the fog had cleared, the headlines praised Verizon\u2019s bold bets. While others clung to fading businesses, Verizon had already shifted toward the\u00a0future.<\/p>\n

This is what friend of the show, Rita McGrath<\/a> calls healthy disengagement<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200athe ability to walk away from yesterday\u2019s fortress before it becomes tomorrow\u2019s prison. And it reflected the principle Raynor distilled in his book (and forthcoming episode) The Three Rules<\/em>, \u201cBetter before cheaper, revenue before cost\u200a\u2014\u200aand there are no other\u00a0rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rita McGrath\u2019s work on inflection points reminds us that seismic shifts rarely arrive as surprises. The signals are always there, but faint, ambiguous, unpalatable and easy to dismiss in the din of day-to-day management. By the time the rear-view mirror confirms them, the chance to act has\u00a0passed.<\/p>\n

This is why Raynor spoke of searching for the signal hidden in the noise<\/strong>. Leaders cannot afford to wait for certainty; they must act while the evidence is still partial, the outlines still\u00a0blurred.<\/p>\n

As our former guest Stan Deetz<\/strong><\/a> put it, \u201cUsually people only feel the need for a change when there is a clear and undeniable evidence that survival and people\u2019s chances for success, are at\u00a0stake.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Protagonist\u2019s Trap<\/h3>\n

To run a business is to be the protagonist of a relentless drama: quarterly numbers, customer demands, shareholder expectations. Few protagonists have the luxury to step outside their own plot and ask whether the story itself has\u00a0changed.<\/p>\n

And when managers do hesitate, they often behave rationally\u200a\u2014\u200aprotecting their own units, responding to incentives. Raynor observed that bottom-up processes alone would have strangled cross-divisional bets, there would be too much protecting one\u2019s turf. It took top-down (leadership) insistence, overriding parochial logic, to give true transformation a\u00a0chance.<\/p>\n

This is why the Droste effect feels so apt as a visual metaphor: the infinite picture-in-picture, each frame containing the last. Without perspective, leaders get trapped repeating the image of yesterday when what is needed is the courage to sketch a new\u00a0scene.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Fog<\/h3>\n

Fast forward to today. Artificial intelligence is rewriting rules across industries, yet no one can say precisely where value will settle. Climate imperatives redraw entire energy and industrial systems, but the timetable is uncertain. Web3 blurs categories of finance, ownership, and identity.<\/p>\n

The temptation is always to wait for clarity. But the lesson from history\u2019s rhyme is clear: clarity usually arrives too late. The challenge is not to predict the future with precision\u200a\u2014\u200athat is impossible. The challenge is to prepare for multiple possible futures, to create space for optionality, and to disengage from what is fading before it is obvious to everyone\u00a0else.<\/p>\n

The conversation with Michael Raynor was a reminder that the dilemmas leaders face today are not new. The faces change, the technologies change, but the rhymes persist. Those who thrived after the telecom upheaval were not clairvoyants. They were simply willing to notice the rhymes early, to create options rather than seek certainties, and to step outside the jar long enough to read the\u00a0label.<\/p>\n

[The second winner of Manu Kapur\u2019s Productive Failure is Yelena C. congrats\u00a0Yelena]<\/p>\n

https:\/\/medium.com\/media\/83fbdc546eacb01dfac0b99668ef0f51\/href<\/a><\/p>\n

Backwards Into The Future: What Leaders Can Learn from Telcos<\/a> was originally published in The Thursday Thought<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>\n

The post Backwards Into The Future: What Leaders Can Learn from Telcos<\/a> appeared first on The Innovation Show<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.\u201d Marshall\u00a0McLuhan Mark Twain is often credited with saying, \u201cHistory doesn\u2019t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.\u201d The rhyme is persistent across time. Faces change, leaders wax and wane, technologies evolve, yet the dilemmas leaders confront are strangely familiar. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBackwards Into The Future: What Leaders Can Learn from Telcos - Aidan McCullen \u2013 Keynote Speaker Ireland | Innovation & Leadership Expert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/aidanmccullen.com\/?p=1529\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Backwards Into The Future: What Leaders Can Learn from Telcos - Aidan McCullen \u2013 Keynote Speaker Ireland | Innovation & Leadership Expert\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cWe look at the present through a rear view mirror. 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We march backwards into the future.\u201d Marshall\u00a0McLuhan Mark Twain is often credited with saying, \u201cHistory doesn\u2019t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.\u201d The rhyme is persistent across time. Faces change, leaders wax and wane, technologies evolve, yet the dilemmas leaders confront are strangely familiar. 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We march backwards into the future.\u201d Marshall\u00a0McLuhan Mark Twain is often credited with saying, \u201cHistory doesn\u2019t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.\u201d The rhyme is persistent across time. Faces change, leaders wax and wane, technologies evolve, yet the dilemmas leaders confront are strangely familiar. 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