Rita McGrath
speaker
126 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 8 Jun
Rita McGrath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I said, excuse me? They said, no, you know, R&D sends us the new phones with the new features to test out and we give them our feedback and we don't ever go to a phone store. And I was like, what?
And, you know, that's well-intentioned, but it's an example of the blind spots you can create when you create these special channels for your people that don't kind of put them in the position of the customer.
Well, what it tells you is there's – I'll use the language of Clay Christensen and Tony Ulwick here. There's a job to be done that whatever you're offering isn't doing. And the job to be done theory basically says don't think about customers buying your product or service. Think about them hiring your product or service to get a job done in their lives.
And if there's a missing job, it's not that you're – Employees don't admire and appreciate whatever you do, but whatever you're doing isn't covering something they need to get done. And so they're going to use an alternative. And that's valuable information.
Well, I think to really understand Seidenberg's story, you actually have to start a little bit earlier with the breakup of AT&T. And this was Ma Bell. I mean, talk about the ultimate monopoly. There was a show in the 70s called Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In where there was a character that laughed. pretended to be an operator for the phone company.
So you have to kind of go all the way back to that. So a lot of telecom inherited this monopoly... guaranteed revenue, very profitable business, which you didn't have to work very hard. I mean, you had to deliver on your service. The regulators would ding you if you didn't provide reliable service and you didn't offer service to rural areas.
But in exchange for doing that, you kind of had the market to yourself. So what Seidenberg did, and he had an interesting story. He was the ultimate insider, wasn't a super educated man, worked his way up through the ranks, and kind of thought about And what comes after copper wires and what could happen in the future.
And I think probably the major incitement was to say, hey, a lot of these baby bells, as they called them, really had no idea how to compete like a regular commercial company. And he didn't want to end up like that. And so one of the things he did was he organized a merger of Bell Atlantic with GTE, which at the time was this kind of cool technology provider of the time.
And he thought that that company could teach what was called Bell Atlantic about the new technologies, the new things. And he was kind of blown away by that. So they renamed the company Verizon. And prompted to get out, actually, of these pretty profitable legacy businesses and start exploring some of these new technologies. So he did really controversial things like sell off physical phone books.
Can you imagine that?
You know, he found ways of servicing them for less money. He eventually converted a lot of the sort of big pipes, not the copper pipes right to the home, but the big pipes to FIOSP.
Yeah, you could still have a copper line in your house, but it would be connected to a fiber optic network. And then the fiber optic network would allow you to have broadband. It would allow you to compete with the cable companies, which he saw as a huge opportunity. And it was, if you remember back in the day, and again, I feel like I'm retelling ancient history, but it's not that long ago.
Before we had cable TV, you know, we had network TV and cable TV was seen as this huge advance because in the early, early days of cable, you didn't even, you didn't have ads, right? You could have ad-free television on demand, 500 channels, you know, it was, and those cable companies, again, they were protected as local monopolies in the early stages. They were considered to be natural monopolies.
And governments to provide them with the capital to build out these networks basically said, OK, Comcast, you have New Jersey. Spectrum, you've got New York. And you could guarantee that the customers that were interested in that product could buy the service there. So Verizon said, hey, wait a minute. I don't have to be a cable company, but I could compete using fiber optic lines.
So he decided that revenue looked pretty good.
So disengagement is the process of recognizing when something is just not going to be carrying your future forward. So, you know, mailing DVDs in the mail was, you know, most of Netflix's customers, I doubt, even have a DVD player anymore. So that was clearly going to be a business which was ending.
So I think there's a way of disengaging, which is respectful, you know, which said, hey, you know, the people that built this business have a lot to be commended, but it's not going to be a business for the future.
And so we have to figure out how to get resources and people and assets out of them, hopefully in a way that's not too painful so that we can repurpose those things to what the future is going to hold.
They do have to work together. And I don't know about your workplace, but I think about my place. I mean, I work for a 250-year-old plus university. It's had a lot of time to collect cobwebs and stuff that's in the corners. And what's in those closets? Nobody's looked for 35 years. And so if you imagine a world where maybe every quarter you just announce a day or two of simplification.
We're just going to stop doing stupid stuff that everybody knows doesn't really contribute to value. but that we're doing anyway. And that's kind of a really mini version of disengagement, but I think it's valuable and it's not expensive and it's something you could do wherever you are in your organization.
Showing 81–100 of 126 · page 5 of 7
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