Disrupt Yourself or Be Disrupted- Telstra Vantage 2018

We had another exciting start to Day 3…

Eric Coffman - Cloud Collective Engagement & Alliance Manager, Craig Meiring - Modality Systems Business Development Manager and George Darwent - Telstra Global Product Marketing Specialist for Applications

which was also the first customer day with emcee Adam Spencer’s electric energy and a very moving welcome to the country performance by the indigenous Nyoongar people. Richard Walley led his dance team in Perth together with a dance team in Melbourne in the ceremonial welcome to country performance digitally enabled by the Telstra network. Their performance was extremely special and the entire broadcast from Perth to Melbourne was excellent with not a single drop or delay despite the distance between the locations. It was a great way to recognise the indigenous founders of this land whilst showcasing the strength of the Telstra network.

Andy Penn, CEO, and Daniel Pink, author and sales evangelist were, once again our keynote speakers for the first customer day.

Andy shared his great insights on times we are living in which he called the 4^th industrial revolution – the digitisation and automation of the world.

He sees 4 key trends happening right now:

1. A continued increase in compute power
2. Continued advancement in all forms of engineering, physical and software
3. Continued innovation in telecommunications – 5G in conjunction with IOT, AI, and Greater Compute Power all coming together to create transformation – and he noted that 5G will bring speeds faster than we can blink – 10 times the capacity of prior networks
4. An accelerating rate of adoption

Andy also highlighted some of Telstra’s world first products including some launching this year:

• TPN (Telstra Programmable Networks) and Liberate already launched
• Telstra Connect – a single application for managing networks and Connected Workplace to be launched this year. It integrates fixed mobile and messaging services for small to medium businesses

Andy also mentioned the need for Telstra to disrupt itself versus waiting to be disrupted, which is evident in all the changes being made to digitise old systems & processes and to make the company teams more agile in how they work plus support customers.

Daniel Pink then came to the stage to give his great talk on Timing

His insights gained through the hours and hours of research and data analysis about mood & performance were incredible and thought-provoking. It was very interesting to realise without data plus, the data analysis tools we have today, that findings he presented wouldn’t be available to us to learn and grow from.

Daniel presented what he called “The money shot – Your Daily When slide”, centred around the primary thing we think of when setting up a meeting; availability and timing – we don’t think about the purpose of the meeting nor the timing of it in relation to peaks and troughs – for example, Jeff Bezos from AWS doesn’t do a meeting that requires high IQ in the afternoon – he sets those up for around 10 am in the morning as that is a peak performance time for himself and others.

Daniel left us with 3 Key Takeaways about scheduling meetings in the future:

1. Be much more deliberate and intentional in scheduling individual and teamwork
2. Move analytic tasks to the peak, admin tasks to the trough, and insight tasks to the recovery
3. Take more and certain kinds of breaks: social, moving, outside and fully detached

In my opinion, though I left with one key insight ringing in my mind: “Do not go to the hospital in the afternoon” due to mood changes that most often occur at that time. For example, Daniel noted that doctors have been proven to find half as many polyps in afternoon colonoscopies as they do in the morning procedures – even handwashing is known to decrease in the hospital as the day progresses.

In a nutshell, the hidden pattern of the day profoundly affects our mood and performance and Big Data is revealing it.

FY19 and beyond

In addition to the wonderful keynotes and other sessions that were occurring around the Vantage Village we also had a chance to catch up with some key Telstra contacts that we will be working within FY19 and beyond.

We spent time with Gretchen Cooke, Telstra’s Director of Unified Comms & Digital Media as well as her direct report Paul Carpenter highlighting how we are doing with the newly launched Telstra Calling for O365, reinforcing our mutual commitment to continue driving sales and adoption of that great new service – which in turn drives adoption and usage of the O365 suite.

Also, we met up with George Darwent, Telstra’s Global Product Marketing Specialist for Applications to review more about what the Collective provides to Telstra customers overall.

In summary, it was another full on and fantastic first customer day and 3^rd overall day at Vantage with over 6000 people buzzing about the Village and auditoriums. If you’ve never been to Vantage, I highly recommend you to join us next year.