Go disrupt yourself

In quiet moments I often amuse myself by trying to imagine just what sort of shouting matches and fisticuffs are likely to be breaking out in telco boardrooms around the world as the industry confronts various discontinuities and a lower standard of living. Financial Times coverage of BT Group today asserts that Retail division head Pierre Danon is pushing internally for Retail to move to an unbundling model, in order to compete more effectively with the wave of unbundling which is coming (remember France has gone from 65k lines to over 1m [20% of the total DSL market] in the space of a year following proactive regulation of the kind which is just coming through in the UK). However, it reports that CEO Ben Verwaayen is hesitant to raise capex and erode Wholesale revenues. An extraordinary article in the Observer claims that Danon and CFO Ian Livingston had an outright confrontation with Verwaayen and Chairman Christopher Bland, which resulted in Danon's departure. Livingston was reportedly placated with the newly created role of deputy CEO. Strange and tense times for telcos.