Final View

Feeling like a chicken with its head cut off? Paralyzed by an intangible blind panic? Haunted by the suspicion that you're deluding yourself about your potential for success in this competitive market?

Relax. You're not alone.

In their book The Lean Communications Provider (McGraw-Hill, New York), Elizabeth Adams and Keith Willetts outline the stages of development that service providers experience before reaching the nirvana of the "work smarter, not just faster" phase. The symptoms are familiar. In fact, we see the results of these phases in The Wall Street Journal nearly every day. Take a look at your organization, and then ask yourself where you fall on this evolutionary ladder:

*The Headless-Chicken Phase. This is that pre-competition period filled with uncertainty, false starts and misleading forecasts. Cellular service providers need only think back to 1992-1994 to recognize this more-innocent time. If your organization is still stuck here, it's time to start interviewing elsewhere.

*The Blind-Panic Phase. The good news is, this is probably as bad as it will ever get -- a frantic time characterized by the arrival of new competitors who surreptitiously slam into your market share before you realize exactly how they accomplished it.

"Some service providers have viewed this phase as the 'Phony War,' a period in which competition doesn't seem to spell disaster," Adams and Willetts say. "They think they know what a competitive market is all about and fail to make the changes required to compete with companies that have moved to the next level."

*The Self-Delusion Phase. Here's where your organization finally recognizes how the market has changed (that famous "paradigm shift" suddenly means something), but your responses to the change are reactionary and short-sighted.

"An explosion of 'really good ideas' for new services threatens to surpass the company's ability to ensure that each new undertaking is done well." This is the toughest phase to overcome, especially if different parts of your organization are trying to accomplish different goals. It's time to pull together, be realistic and refocus.

*The Work Smarter, Not Just Faster Phase. When AT&T Wireless announced a couple of months ago that it was restructuring its work force in order to better service the enterprise market, it epitomized a wireless carrier at last coming out of this ugly triumvirate. Although it might look like AT&T Wireless is merely conceding -- and prematurely, at that -- to the flashy consumer attack of PCS, it's actually protecting its dominant position (nearly 8 million subscribers, 20% of them digital) by taking care of the core business.

Dan Hesse, CEO of the wireless group, stated that the company would "pay a slight penalty in subscriber and revenue growth for a short period of time as we become more selective about the subscribers we bring on board."

Short-term thinking evolves into long-term strategy. Focus on quantity evolves into emphasis on quality. It sounds like a smart business decision to me.

What's surprising is not that AT&T Wireless is making this wise shift, but that it is being so open about it. What wireless carrier, trying to re-engineer its operations in order to segue into this final success phase, would ignore the trail AT&T is blazing?