Leading from Below

The wireless industry's inexorable march toward 3G is fraught with monumental change and technology conundrums. Real leaders must move decisively, but carefully.

The problem is that monumental change is born of minutiae years before it even becomes a gleam in a CEO's eyes. It starts in the standards bodies and forums where technologists gather to fuss over the verbiage in revision 1.8.1.6 of protocol X, or the consequences of putting the “BECN” before the “FECN” in Process HH, Step 5, of some obscure protocol draft. Fast-tracking executives don't have the patience to follow such detail. They have shareholders to schmooze.

It takes a different sort of visionary to see the wireless app at the end of the protocol process rainbow. And it's a different sort of leader who picks his or her horse so early, with either the guts or audacity to advise the company on a course of action.

“People say there are only 2000 top programmers in the world,” said Henry Seinnrich, WorldCom's distinguished member of engineering. “Well, there are only 2000 top networkers in the world, and they all meet at the IETF.”

Not all are in the IETF, or Internet Engineering Task Force, but the network gurus Seinnrich refers to are more responsible for developing tomorrow's technology than their flashy CEOs.

“They don't have high titles and so forth, but I have seen that what they discuss in the corridors appears in the market big time about three years later,” Seinnrich said.

From their mouths to God's ears, and then to the market's dinner table. For example, Seinnrich and other network prophets have spent years roaming the IETF's corridors preaching the gospel according to session initiation protocol, or SIP. From their pulpits, they and their peers have moved technologies like SIP from concept to concrete. As the preferred call control protocol selected by the IETF's 3G Partnership Project, SIP is now finally spilling from the lips of wireless CEOs.

Granted, some new technologies espoused from these fertile minds wind up on the auction block or never see the light of day. But the slow, competitive and exacting process of developing standards and new technologies is what feeds the machine that delivers the service that drives the business that cash built. Thank goodness there are others to manage the cash.