Optus blame game reveals deeper failures, with the outage the tip of the iceberg

Optus is not a broken company, despite it breaking former chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.

In good news for her successor, it was not this month’s massive outage nor last year’s cyber attack that sparked Bayer Rosmarin’s abrupt resignation on Monday.

This means, contrary to reports, the role of Optus chief executive is not the least enviable job in corporate Australia.

Unlike the former bosses of Qantas and Rio Tinto: Alan Joyce and Jean-Sebastien Jacques, the misfortune that befell Bayer Rosmarin was not due to a deliberate act.

In Joyce’s case, it was preceding over ‘ghost flights’ - selling tickets on planes that never took off - while for Jacques it was blowing up ancient Indigenous caves that had been a sacred site for millennia.

For Bayer Rosmarin, a first time chief executive - it was simply an act of bad management. The cruel irony is she knew it and was working hard to improve her shortcomings.

And her work was gaining traction. Staff engagement was at 77 per cent - a record high - while complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman had plummeted to a historic low as Bayer Rosmarin was steadily turning the company around from last year’s cyber attack.

But Optus and its parent Singtel were yet to solve the fundamental flaws that sparked widespread condemnation in the aftermath of the cyber attack, despite their best efforts. It was not the breach itself - Medibank boss David Koczkar still has his job after a similar assault - it was the response to the crisis.

Optus was too slow, too clunky, and let others - namely politicians - fill the communications void. Bayer Rosmarin had a narrow window to assert her authority and reassure customers but missed it.

Some business leaders have defended her, saying her time was better spent on overseeing the restoration of Optus’s network. That’s true.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady has taken lessons from Optus’s outage.

Bayer Rosmarin shouldn’t have fronted the media herself but had a capable executive to act as a public spokesperson. And the executive who manages comms, former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was missing from view until late the next afternoon following the outage.

Normally in crisis management plans, chief executives are kept away from the spotlight until it’s understood what is going on; have resolved the issue; or a scandal has blown up so big that the CEO needs to take control.

But the biggest bungle at Optus - aside from not having a plan for national meltdown - was blaming Singtel for triggering the outage. Singapore would have approved Optus’s statement that an upgrade on an international peering network sparked the outage. But not having a capable comms leader to walk through Singtel and Bayer Rosmarin on how that may be interpreted and the questions it created, was a costly mistake.

It created another week of negative headlines, adding to the personal toll the outage took on Bayer Rosmarin - who was battling the telco’s second reputational crisis in 13 months.

This wasn’t helped by a Senate inquiry and the political class bounding into attack.

The reality is Optus has more than 10 million customers that are still paying their monthly bills. Some will leave - as Asian bank Maybank forecast - but many will stay.

Optus has also made bigger rival Telstra a much better company. That’s what competition does. And Optus’s agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to cover 100 per cent of the country, has made it a more economically viable alternative in the bush.

Optus’s story in coming months and years is positive. It just needs someone who is capable of telling it.