The Sword of Damocles is a Greek myth with an important lesson, it’s lonely at the top. Damocles, a courtier of the king Dionysius trades places with the king for a day. After enjoying the wealth of Dionysius’ life, Damocles realises that the king has suspended a sword above his throne, hung by only a single horse hair. The story tells us that although power is tempting, it demands a heavy toll. One mistake, one slip up, one moment of inattention, and the sword threatens to impale any who sit upon the throne.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, the former CEO of Optus, has become a proverbial Damocles. The combination of the 2022 cyberattack and the nationwide shortage from last week were the nicks in the horse hair that sent the sword plummeting. Ms. Bayer Rosmarin resigned in the wake of the latter, after having defended Optus’ response to the shortage in front of a Senate Enquiry.
With the controversy online, what can Master’s in Business students learn from this? What can anyone in business learn from this?
The Optus Throne
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was a respected senior executive in Optus and joined as Deputy CEO on the 1st of March 2019. On the first of April 2020, she stepped up as CEO. Little did she know, that would be the same year that forced her to go up against her first major controversy.
In September 2022, a mere five months after Ms. Bayer Rosmarin was established as CEO, Optus suffered a major cyberattack, which resulted in anywhere between 2.5 and 9.5 million Optus customers having personal information at significant risk. This information included passport information, driver’s licence, and Medicare, rendering nearly 10 million innocent people at risk of having the information sold or their identities stolen.
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Although Optus maintained that they had done everything possible to prevent a breach of this nature, this claim was hotly denounced by Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil, who claimed the telco company left the “window open” for attacks.
It was a fiasco, and Singtel (Optus’ parent company) set aside $140 million for customer reparations. In her first 6 months as CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was in charge of one of the largest telco companies in the world, during one of the most tumultuous failings in the company’s history.
Fast Forward to last week, when Optus networks shorted out nationwide. Caused by complications with “changes to routing information” during a software update, there were 228 calls to triple 0 that couldn’t go through during that time, even though triple 0 calls should have still worked.
According to a Senate Inquiry on the 17th, $36,000 has already been paid in reparations, with talks concerning a further $430,000 underway.
In other words, in her first year as CEO, Optus lost almost $2 million due to a cyberattack the company was under-prepared for, and a network shortage that issues in their software caused.
Ignorance Or Misfortune?
So what is to be learned? The sword of Damocles shows that whoever sits in a position of leadership must always be aware of the imminent dangers that face the throne. Whether from external rivals, enemies, people looking to oust you from your position, or the troubles of running a kingdom - a position of leadership is always high-risk, high reward. You get the highest pay, the most prestige, and the most attractive benefits, but at the same time if anything goes wrong it’s your neck on the chopping block.
What was Ms. Bayer Rosmarin’s great sin? RMIT Associate Professor Mark Gregory, an expert in telecommunications believes that she was the wrong choice for CEO from the outset, saying:
"Unfortunately, Australia has a very bad habit of [having] CEOs and senior management teams [who] are running our technology companies, especially our essential services, and these individuals are not aware of the technology sides of their organisations."
It seems to answer all the requisite questions. After all, if she was the tech-head that someone like Gregory would have put on the Optus throne, would she have seen something she didn’t see this time? Would she have defended Optus’ security measures in the wake of the September 2022 attack?
However, further statements made by Prof. Gregory seem to add more weight to this perspective. In response to comments regarding the cause of the outage made by Ms. Bayer Rosmarin, Professor Gregory said:
“Optus has not explained what went wrong with the test process that should have occurred before the routing software upgrade occurred…Also, there is no explanation as to why there appears to have been a lack of redundancy of the key routers, so that if there was a problem the key routers would swap to the redundant routers, which you would expect to be running the previous iteration of software.”
Having two industry experts, one of them the minister of our nation’s cyber security, criticise the efforts or lack thereof, seems to cement Kelly Bayer Rosmarin’s role of Damocles in this story. She was given the position of power and approached it with carelessness and inexperience in her industry.
The lesson to learn here is that if you’re going to start a company, make sure you understand the industry practices you’re going into. Building a business cannot just be about the laws and money. Running or owning a business is much more than bringing in profits, it’s knowing how to handle your product, and what protocols and procedures are needed for smooth operation and effective management.
