Optus CEO resigns effective immediately
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, CEO of Optus, has resigned effective immediately, just three days after deflecting questions about her position in a Senate committee hearing.
The news comes following Optus’ disaster outage earlier in the month, that left 10 million customers without the ability to make phone calls or access the internet.
In a statement sent by Singtel Group, Optus’ parent company, Bayer Rosmarin said it had been an honour serving as Optus CEO, but it was an appropriate time to step down.
Waiting for the obligatory “It’s because she was a woman” cry from the usual crowd.
This resignation shows that bad PR leadership can lead to a CEO’s head.
Had Optus’ corporate comms team learned lessons from the data leak, they could have been on the front foot with this outage and Kelly would have possibly survived.
Consistently bad approaches to crisis comms and terrible communication with the media, added fuel to the outage fire. Customers could forgive an accidental outage, but can’t forgive deliberately terrible comms and being left in the dark for half a day – only to be patronised by being ‘thanked for their patience and loyalty’. Looking at LinkedIn, there’s huge churn in Optus’ comms team too, which must add to the problem. I feel sorry for the rest of the people at Optus for how badly their Corporate Affairs team has let them down.
Although easy to point the finger of blame the comms team, it is more likely that they made the proper recommendations which were vetoed by an arrogant CEO. I don’t know one single comms person who thinks this was handled correctly. But, like all of us, comms teams are at the mercy of CEO sign off. So perhaps not bad advice but bad uptake of good advice.
Yes she was a woman, a woman who did not have what it takes to be a competent CEO and deal with her duties of a CEO in a crisis. Goodbye.