Vodacom has lost its drive for excellence and its obsession with being the best mobile network in South Africa, which is hurting customers and shareholders.<\/p>\n
In his book \u201cSecond is nothing\u201d, Vodacom founder and former CEO Alan Knott-Craig described how they built South Africa\u2019s largest mobile operator.<\/p>\n
Under Knott-Craig leadership, Vodacom put tremendous focus on innovation and was behind many world firsts in the mobile industry.<\/p>\n
There was a firm focus on network quality. Knott-Craig was fanatical about having the best mobile network in South Africa and went to extreme lengths to achieve it.<\/p>\n
There are many stories about Knott-Craig experiencing a dropped call while driving and immediately raking the head of networks over the coals for the issue.<\/p>\n
Knott-Craig was never content with a sub-par network or not outperforming his biggest rival, MTN.<\/p>\n
The battle between Vodacom and MTN became so fierce that MTN resorted to dirty tricks to beat Vodacom in a network quality contest in the nineties.<\/p>\n
It reached a point where former President Nelson Mandela had to step in to resolve the dispute between the two mobile operators.<\/p>\n
The battle for network supremacy was excellent for South African consumers and the country as a whole.<\/p>\n
Vodacom and MTN rapidly expanded coverage across South Africa and rolled out the latest technologies as soon as they became available.<\/p>\n
Vodacom was the ultimate winner. It is partly thanks to Knott-Craig\u2019s excellent team, which included COO Pieter Uys and CTO Andries Delport.<\/p>\n
They were always one step ahead of MTN. They were the first to launch 3G, had the first mass rollout of HSPA, and achieved higher average speeds than their competitors.<\/p>\n
Knott-Craig refused to accept anything other than being the best. He truly lived by the words \u201cfirst is first and second is nothing\u201d.<\/p>\n
Pieter Uys, who took over as Vodacom CEO in 2008, continued Knott-Craig\u2019s passionate quest to have an exceptional mobile network.<\/p>\n
Vodacom launched the continent\u2019s first commercial LTE service and, with Delport as CTO, dominated network quality rankings in South Africa.<\/p>\n
Vodacom was seen as untouchable. Instead of trying to compete, companies like MTN, Telkom, and Cell C were happy to battle for second place.<\/p>\n
The drive for excellence was not isolated to the network team. The same was seen in the company\u2019s marketing, support, IT, and enterprise divisions.<\/p>\n
The work ethic under Knott-Craig and Uys was unmatched. We often emailed Vodacom executives for information at midnight, and most of them responded within 5 minutes.<\/p>\n
However, in time, the drive to be exceptional fizzled out. Vodacom became a follower rather than a leader.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, MTN\u2019s network team \u2014 with Giovanni Chiarelli and Zoltan Miklos at the top, and Godfrey Motsa as CEO \u2014 decided to take the fight to Vodacom.<\/p>\n
By 2018, MTN was on par with Vodacom, and a year later, it started to dominate the network rankings.<\/p>\n
In the years that followed, MTN developed such a lead over Vodacom that it was difficult to see how the latter could catch up.<\/p>\n
What was striking was how little resistance Vodacom put up in the network quality fight. They basically waved the white flag and let MTN take its crown.<\/p>\n
Knott-Craig\u2019s mantra of \u201cfirst is first and second is nothing\u201d became a distant memory of a bygone era at Vodacom.<\/p>\n
Instead of taking the fight to MTN, Vodacom seems proud to be second and beat Telkom, Cell C, and Rain.<\/p>\n
The mediocrity has permeated the whole of the company. If you email Vodacom executives today, you are lucky to get a response at all.<\/p>\n
Vodacom continues to benefit from the exceptional work done under Knott-Craig, Uys, Delport, and other top executives.<\/p>\n
However, the drive to be first and lead in network quality, marketing, support, and technology adoption is disappearing.<\/p>\n
At Vodacom, second is now good enough.<\/p>\n
Vodacom has lost its drive for excellence and its obsession with being the best mobile network in South Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[681,337,35,42,281,41],"class_list":["post-461020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","tag-alan-knott-craig","tag-andries-delport","tag-headline","tag-mtn","tag-pieter-uys","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":461058,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461020\/revisions\/461058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}