IT strategy - Looking for stuff, not just fluff.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Tom Berry.

My first big interview as a journalist was for a telecoms magazine in September 2000. The interviewee was Barclay Knapp, the bombastic CEO of cable giant NTL. I was swayed by Knapp's youthful charm, his informal approach to interview, and his enthusiasm for NTL. I enjoyed listening to one of the oracles of next-generation business.

All pretty sick-making stuff, especially since NTL was already heavily indebted and overexpansion led the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2002. But Knapp's charisma was one of the reasons why he and other tech-sector 'personalities' managed to raise billions of dollars. It's also a major reason why such businesses failed, according to a book by journalists-cum-consultants Keith Brody and Sacha Dunstan.

In The Great Telecoms Swindle, the authors argue that Knapp was right to expand NTL's operations, but his overenthusiasm and lack of experience brought the company to its knees. "The irony now is that NTL should have been a can't-miss proposition," it reads. "Britain, for one, was a sitting duck for a canny cable operator. But in his desire to sprint before he could crawl ... Just doing well, in the face of Knapp's business plans, would never be doing well enough."

The authors blame the telco sector's problems on an approach to business that was driven by image and marketing rather than sound business practice.

"The business leaders in those glory days - between 1998 and 2000 - turned the focus away from fundamentals and created a cult of personality instead ... When we think of Orange we think of innovative branding and the enigmatic Hans Snook ... Bernie Ebbers' (CEO of WorldCom) penchant for cowboy boots and his past vocation as a basketball coach were considered newsworthy at the time."