Sol Trujillo

Set World-Class Standards

It is essential to seek high performance at every level, in every team, and in every system. It is not enough to want to be good. You need to want to be the best. When you set goals that seem impossible to achieve, you will often achieve them. That’s what happened when President John F. Kennedy set the goal in 1961 that Americans would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. No one knew how we would do that, but everyone from the scientists and engineers to the program managers had a clear goal – and they reached it on July 20, 1969. If you set the bar too low, people are not motivated and not excited.

Some examples of our world-class goals include:

  • At Telstra, we set a goal of launching nationwide next generation network in one year when no one else had done it in less than three years. We achieved our goal in just ten months…and under budget.
  • At Telstra, Orange, and US West, we established a company-wide performance management system that set stretch targets, provided realistic and peer-reviewed performance ratings, and rewarded truly high-performing individuals and teams.
  • At Telstra we initiated a complete IT transformation so that the information systems used by all elements of our business – and especially our customer-facing staff and teams – could be more efficient in responding to customers and more effective in understanding and responding to their needs.