Two Bungling Mobile Phone Companies

I have not been to business school but I think that there are keen lessons to be learned from focused case studies of leading businesses in order to understand how enterprises are managed and how they respond to the market conditions of their time.  The GSM Association's mobile briefing here addresses an instance in which two mobile phone corporations reversed certain business decisions that they made. The author uses the article to illustrate how poor consultation or testing of ideas prior to full-scale roll did leave the strategy managers of these firms with some egg on their faces. 

One must agree that the situation is ironical for a number of reasons. The first one is that mobile phone corporations would be expected to understand clearly the needs of their customers and the strategy teams are probably meant to watch closely trends to ensure that they are in touch with changing client needs. As Richard Handford states in the piece, the two corporations based in the UK seemed to have "failed to read their clients mood" and with disastrous consequences. 

Secondly, while humility in a fast changing industry is necessary, I am really surprised that these corporations which trade on the ability of people to exchange information seem not to have a method for testing and filtering views among their large client base. I would think that with such a large client base, it would occur to strategy managers to test such an initiative among a small but significant portion before its roll out throughout the network. The big lesson for me is that mistakes do happen in business environments but that even corporations that are data rich have not found ways to make sense of that data that they receive, store and transmit for their clients. Perhaps I should correct myself because if internal strategy teams could easily do this, then the high end business consultants would have to find other work.