In certain businesses, the best strategy is to get in, do what you need to do and get out without doing any damage. In between, minimize the risks and try to make some money.
I have been told this is the best blueprint for building cellular networks in Africa because the political climate is so unstable.
Black & Veach, a huge, Kansas City-based engineering company with $1 billion in annual revenues, sees a five-year window for building the majority of personal communications services sites. After that, the company plans to take its expertise to the international market, where it sees telecom buildout as a lucrative business for another 10 years.
In both cases, the “get in, get out” strategy seems to make sense. In the African buildout example, the shorter the window, the better. In PCS buildout, the strategy may work for numerous years.
I am beginning to believe the “get in, get out” strategy also is holding true for some politicians (except they ignore the “Don’t do any damage” mantra).
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt is believed to be preparing to leave the FCC after completing major telecom act implementation tasks, and return to the private sector where he may begin early work on Vice President Gore’s presidential bid in 2000. (If that happens, the good news is Hundt believes all the major kinks can be worked out of the telecom act in a short time.)
Hundt will leave the FCC relatively unscathed, remembered as the regulator who brought $20 billion plus to the U.S. Treasury from the sale of spectrum.
It will be the next FCC chairman who will have to pick up the broken pieces of companies defaulting on license payments, reauctions that do not bring in suitcases full of money and PCS operators that do not build out their systems in the required time frame.
It will be the next chairman who forgoes all the glory, but is left with only the guts of the spectrum auctions.
One of my favorite things about the wireless industry has always been all the mavericks leading it. Omnipoint head George Schmitt reaffirmed that for me when he told RCR reporter Liz Mooney how former Bell employees are blossoming in Omnipoint’s environment.
Teddy Roosevelt would have been a wireless player.
But with all the alliances, mergers, joint ventures and marriages taking place, will this industry continue to be led by those independent visionaries or will conservative money crunchers start to head wireless’ hallowed halls?
