After going AWOL on the morning of the outage, Bayer Rosmarin popped up in the afternoon to say the cause was so technical that “there is no soundbite that is going to do it justice”.
Five days later, Optus released a statement saying the cause was a routine systems upgrade. This was precisely what experts had immediately suggested, as reported by multiple news outlets at the time.
Earlier this year, while between crises, Bayer Rosmarin sought to re-set her corporate narrative, tempting the crisis gods by sitting down to discuss her “innovation mindset” with the in-house Qantas magazine. Of all the places!
“I’m an impatient perfectionist,” she claimed. “I just want to go faster and do more and fix everything at once.
“One of the first things I did at Optus was launch an enduring, timeless purpose for the company. Our purpose is to power optimism with options.”
Bayer Rosmarin has dosed herself up on so much corporate quackery, she’s even replaced the purpose of a telecommunications company – to keep customers online! – with her own banal aspirations.
This comes from the same executive who used the Optus payroll to name ex-tennis star Ash Barty the company’s Chief of Inspiration, and F1’s Daniel Ricciardo as Chief of Optimism. It’s never really been explained what they do in these roles. Until you look at LinkedIn.
As far as we can tell, the inspiration and optimism involves the sports stars attending some off-sites and leaving motivational LinkedIn comments for Optus executives.
“Awesome, well done” Ricciardo wrote under a Bayer Rosmarin post this month. “We’re back in pole position again!” he wrote on a post from MD Matt Williams. “Love the Optus TGIF!” the driver added to another Bayer Rosmarin update.
Bayer Rosmarin is so deep in LinkedIn’s confected cheerocracy she’s even been handed a “Top Voice” badge on the site. The Top Voice program – formerly its influencer scheme – is an “invitation-only group of experts across the professional world” who “meet high trust standards”. This means getting boosted into other feeds, alongside the likes of Anthony Albanese and ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott.
Sadly, these LinkedIn lemmings have gone deathly silent since the outage. It turns out that at the end of the day, Bayer Rosmarin is just a telco CEO, who has 10 million customers and thousands of employees and whose core services power businesses, hospitals, public transport networks and personal connections to LinkedIn.
Keeping up the lame corporate influencer schtick on the latter doesn’t power a thing.