Using lessons from the deep

Matt Crockett is keen to

The man charged with running Telecom's newly invigorated wholesale team cut his management teeth in a very different environment - West Australia's underground mines.

Australian-born Matt Crockett learned a great deal about managing people and operations as a shift boss overseeing about 20 miners when he was in his early 20s.

The 36-year-old has built up an impressive CV since then, taking up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University in 1994, where he completed a master's degree in philosophy in management.

He was then recruited by McKinsey & Co and spent four years working for the firm in Sydney before shifting to New Zealand.

When the "McKinsey lifestyle became incompatible with a young family", he joined Telecom as head of its New Zealand market strategy team and was promoted to general manager of the wired division (fixed network and online business) before being appointed wholesale GM last month.

Crockett has stepped into the new role at a pivotal time for Telecom, with the telecommunications industry fixated on whether the company can fulfil its promise to deliver an equitable wholesale service to competitors in the newly regulated telco environment.

"I wouldn't have taken the job if I didn't think it was going to be different, that we weren't going to be changing, that we weren't going to be more independent and that we weren't going to be more in control of our own freedom," Crockett says.

Telecom's self-imposed move to "operational separation" has prompted a cynical response from some competitors and industry observers who want a more complete split between the telco's retail and wholesale divisions.

As he works his way through a series of meetings with wholesale customers in his first few weeks in the job, an upbeat Crockett says he is "enjoying the industry interaction".

A major gripe from rivals has been that although the company is claiming to embrace the new competitive environment that will result from the Government's decision to regulate to unbundle the local loop, Telecom has been telling them it does not have the capacity at key points in its network to allow them access.

"The approach we're taking now is to be more open and transparent with the information upfront and then try and work out the solutions in conjunction with the industry, rather than keeping it to ourselves until we think we've got an answer and saying 'Here's what the answer is'," says Crockett.

"That's a double-edged sword from the perspective that on the one hand, if you hold back all the information until you've got the answer, everyone feels you're doing something Machiavellian. If you share the information before you've got all the answers people say: 'Well, we don't want to hear that there's a problem, we want to hear what the answer is.' So there's a little bit of a tension there ...

"We've got to get in the right working relationship with the industry on that."

A criticism of Telecom's new operational separation model has been that Crockett reports to technology and enterprise chief operating officer Mark Ratcliffe rather than directly to chief executive Theresa Gattung.

"I couldn't think of a better place for wholesale to sit from the perspective of the ability to actually get priority on the resources you need to deploy all of these different challenges.

"I think there's a real strength to being together with the group that can provide that," he says.

"I don't think it's necessary to have me reporting to Theresa to have that independence. I've got completely separate performance bonus incentives, as does everyone in my organisation and I think it can be managed. I think we've got a better chance of pulling off what we need to in wholesale, being part of that group, than we have as something that could end up a bit of an orphan to the side."

While Telecom is in talks with other telcos over wholesale mobile phone deals and may even look to on-sell other services such as its billing system, Crockett says he has plenty to keep him busy.

"It's really a period of getting on with it, engaging with the industry, delivering what we say we're going to deliver and earning more trust and better relationships.

"I have every confidence that we can do that. My job really is just to work with my customers to help them succeed and help us succeed."

Matt Crockett

Who: Telecom's general manager, wholesale.

Favourite gadget: "My laptop: it becomes your mobile nerve centre."

Next big thing: "Technologies that will be spawned from a deeper understanding of quantum physics."

Alternative career: A management role in cutting-edge science.

Spare time: Family (children aged 1, 3 and 5), boating, free-diving and spear fishing.

Favourite sci-fi movie: The Matrix.