It appears Jeff has found the right pace of work/life balance and is now darned good at practicing 6 habits of business success.* After you read our interview with him, we think you’ll see how he enrolls these habits, and how you can move your career forward by doing the same.

Habit 1. Cultivate Inner Networks: Identify and build relationships with key peers, mentors, and advisors.

Habit 2. Customer Centric: Commit to an unwavering commitment to the customer.

Habit 3. Humble Honesty: Know your strengths and weaknesses. Be open and honest about yourself and you’ll see growth as an individual and as a company.

Habit 4. Adaptability: Adapt to changing situations. Nothing ever goes as planned. Be flexible.

Habit 5. Opportunity Focused: Problems are a regular part of business life. Every problem has an opportunity. Find it.

Habit 6. Balanced Lifestyle Management: It’s easy to allow business to take control of your life. Work to balance all aspects of your life. It’s not easy but this habit is critical.

*Source: www.entrepreneurs.about.com

Jeff Carr is a brilliant ball of business passion. I was fortunate to meet him one morning after a cup of coffee had seeped its magical caffeine into my veins. After shaking his hand, I realized I could have used another cup to catch up to him in the energy department.

Jeff exudes earnest enthusiasm as he shares how the management team at CBT is moving the traditional Cincinnati Bell into a business generating multiple revenue streams. You can feel his intensity and his ability to spread that enthusiasm across the organization.

Interestingly, he also admits that for many years, he ran too hard without stopping to breathe. Now he brings more to the table because he subscribes to the belief that life is a series of sprints. He comments: “People have always told me to slow down: ‘Life’s a marathon.’ But what I’ve found is that it really is not. People who treat life like a marathon tend to get into a pace and stagnate. In my opinion life is a series of well-timed sprints between different points. The key is knowing when to sprint and when to rest!”

OSP: To kick off our interview, tell me how you got here. You came to Cincinnati Bell at the start of your career. Then you were an entrepreneur. You also spent some time with Accenture. Given all of those experiences, why are you here and doing this now?

J. Carr: Working at Cincinnati Bell as a consultant was my first “real” job out of college. I joined a company called International Network Services, which at the time was a leading integrator for Cisco. All new hires typically spent 6-12 months working in Bloomington, Illinois, as entry level network center operations folks for State Farm. By some fortune, a senior level engineer, who was supposed to go to Cincinnati Bell to work on a brand-new technology called “ADSL”, was not able to get his visa renewed. Since I had done some work on cable modems earlier, I got the call up to fill in. I spent 4 years here, from ‘98 to ‘02, building Zoomtown (Cincinnati Bell’s High Speed Internet product) before I left to go do other things. This fall I decided to come back and work on our next big ideas.

Being one of the youngest Directors at Cincinnati Bell at the time, I learned trial-by-fire. I was a techie that was given a chance at a pretty early stage to be a manager. I did OK, but had a lot to learn.

I went on to GE to be the Chief Security Officer of the Aircraft Engines division, which is where I met Ted Torbeck, Cincinnati Bell Communications’ new President. After GE, I spent 4 years as a Partner at Accenture in Government and Telecom roles leading practice groups within Technology Consulting. I finally ended up running a startup in 2008 called Singlepipe Communications, a VoIP company selling managed services to cable companies. I think I started there the week that Lehman Brothers failed, so I was fortunate to spend 2 years getting that business to a point where it could be sold, and did so in August of 2010. After that, Ted joined CBT and I came in with him.

After all of these great experiences, it was good timing for me to come back full circle. Throughout the years, I had never moved from Cincinnati, so it worked out well.

There’s a real opportunity to do some things here that are different than you would get to do in any other kind of situation. Not just from a technology perspective, but in terms of where the business is and the strategy that we have as a company. We’ve been able to change the business via an entrepreneurial, long-term business model.

Where we are today is driven largely by the past. When I left CBT in 2002 the company had just begun to deal with the unwinding of the Broadwing acquisition. Still today, we have a long-term debt as a result of that.

The senior leadership at Cincinnati Bell has put together a strategy to leverage the strength of the balance sheet of the traditional phone company to invest in a related growth industry that we already participate in: data center colocation. We acquired a major industry player in that space -- CyrusOne -- and are quickly growing into a position as the premier data center co-location provider to the Fortune 1000.

We can do this kind of thing because we are entrepreneurial. And a good part of that entrepreneurial approach can be attributed to size and scale. I often have to explain that to people, especially vendors. Many folks want to benchmark us against larger carriers. In the ILEC side of the business, when they do, I say: “We’re more like a Sam Adams than we are a Budweiser (i.e., AT&T).”

We don’t have the same exact challenges -- especially in terms of scale. We’re trying to make our service perfect; the really big guys are focused on what city to build next.

Our size also allows us to get more hands-on, too. Consider my working relationship with Michelle Simpson, VP Field Operations. She and I can be on the phone for 3 hours a day problem-solving. You don’t see that in a big company. Instead, you have your monthly status meeting with the 2 VPs from field and technology, and that’s the only time you talk. Here, we’re able to look at the company’s overall roadmap but then also talk about the minute details that we need to work on together, planning how it’s going to play out. We’re able to do that because we’re more nimble.

In fact, to some extent that’s why I came back. It’s more fun, and yet we’re not so small that we don’t matter. We’re small in size but not in results, so it’s a good fit. As a result, we can create unique business models that work.

OSP: What technologies excite you most and why?

J. Carr: I mentioned earlier that I came from the network side, but I also have an applications background. I think what you’ve got to start with is an understanding of both. It’s data that’s driving the need for the network. If there wasn’t the data, you wouldn’t need the network.

What’s really interesting to me is sensors and data analytics. Sensors deliver large amounts of data. Picture the energy companies around the country putting smart meters out there; they are generating mounds and mounds of data. All of this information is crunched and used for many purposes, like predicting supply and demand for energy markets.

Of course, you’ve got to have a tremendous amount of computing cycles to do this. So, as an example, and this is just one example, we examine where our business comes together with the needs of certain customers -- such as energy companies and other Fortune 1000 customers. They need network connectivity and they need power-dense data center co-location -- we do both.

To create meaning from the volumes of information they are assembling, they need a network that allows them to move seamlessly between the various sources from which they receive their data. We have to be acutely aware of the big picture from the standpoint of all the technologies that support our customer’s needs. We have to watch and understand where all this data is coming from and going to, and then try to anticipate what our customer will need in 5 years or more.

We’ve got virtualization of software and virtual data centers, Cloud Computing, grid computing… the list goes on and on. Then, you’ve got the network side where the infrastructure facilitates the exchange of this data. Both sides of the business are driven by the fact that more sensors/systems are producing data.

OSP: Okay, so let’s talk about Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is now taking off and will launch a revolution. As we look to 2015 and beyond, it is impossible to guess what the new services will be. However, it is clear the bandwidth requirements will be massive and that user-generated content will play a major role. That means that ultra-fast downstream, ultra-fast upstream, and ultra-low delay will be critical. What is the solution for providers such as Cincinnati Bell? How do carrier Ethernet and other tactics enter into that equation?

J. Carr: Yes, that’s very interesting. I recently read about the Amazon web service outage that occurred across the east coast. There are many who argue such an outage would not have had such a major outage if the applications were built properly, designed for failure. Few people actually do it, however.

Even the biggest companies, except a Google or an Amazon, cannot get the greatest scale in power, cooling, and network connectivity that a CyrusOne can provide by building massive data center campuses. That’s why we are seeing companies make a major shift to outsourcing data center requirements to providers like CyrusOne.

These companies want to leverage the scale of a major data center, but they need to be able to access variable-usage third-party Cloud Computing in a secure manner. So, picture an environment like ours where a Fortune 1000 company may utilize 20,000 square feet of space. They need access to private and public virtual utility-type of computing. So, you’ve got to be able to dynamically mount network equipment so they can securely get between those 2 infrastructures on the fly. Because, let’s be honest, in the future, the machines are the ones that are making decisions about what they want to talk to, not people.

These applications require very high-quality connections, sensitive to 50ms delays or less. CBT and other network providers have to be able to provide companies with this type of carrier Ethernet service to be able to drive them to migrate to consolidated colocation solutions in the first place.

You can’t wait 3 weeks for a logical circuit to be built for a task that only needs to occur in the next 2 weeks.

OSP: It is forecasted that 72 million people are expected to watch full-length TV episodes online in 2011. How can providers like Cincinnati Bell evolve their network quickly enough to keep pace with that, especially given investment constraints? Specifically, tell me how your Fioptics network build will help with that.

J. Carr: We are very aggressive with fiber-to-the-home which can provide superior connectivity versus coax well into the 200MB+ range. We already pass about 80,000 homes in Cincinnati with fiber. That’s about 20% of the addressable market. In order to be a rational duopoly with the cable company, we need to eventually have a fiber network that provides superior connectivity vs. coax, in the 100MBs range. Luckily, the market isn’t quite there yet and we continue to remain competitive with our current products throughout our operating territory.

When you look at a 5-year time horizon, we know the capital that would be required to build fiber to every addressable home in our market. In fact, we could actually spend enough money to build to all of the subdivisions we want to reach with fiber. But that’s not an efficient use of capital given our continuing market strength with current products, our intention to invest in data centers, and most importantly, the availability of VDSL and IPTV. VDSL will meet the demands of most users for years to come, while linear television continues to give way to more on-demand models.

We can move very quickly, and the reason is we’re very efficient with the fiber-to-the-node strategy using VDSL.

We are in meetings every day where we determine the neighborhoods where we’re going to put the boxes so we can reach the most subscribers. We have to get into that kind of detail, which is something your readers will be able to sympathize with. We know our market VERY well.

In most cases we figured out that the worst copper is the aerial copper. It’s also the cheapest to replace with fiber, because it’s aerial. So, in those aerial brownfield situations we do deploy fiber.

That said, we have a lot of newer neighborhoods that are very desirable for an entertainment offering, but they are buried neighborhoods. In these places, we can do VDSL and get speeds in the 18-30MBs range. With the advent of pair bonding, we can provide service in the 50MB range to most users in those neighborhoods. It’s unlikely that the average user will notice a dramatic difference between a 50MBs service and 100MBs for some period of time.

We don’t have to build right now, so again, it’s about being very smart with the capital that you have, where you use it, and how you use it. And then it’s making sure our service is nearly perfect. Our techs are simply better, they really are.

The challenge is truly understanding what the consumer is going to demand and when.

The trick is to ask the right questions. When you step back, you have to ask what people really want to do when they watch TV. They want to get access to their content and they want to do it quickly. The only thing that the average residential users do online that requires more than maybe 10 megs of download is video. Hopefully our video entertainment offerings will be compelling enough that they watch it through us!

So right now, if you look at the offerings from an entertainment perspective that you can do over VDSL, they’re competitive. We’ve got some pretty creative ideas for how we can work with the Over-The-Top services that everyone is scared of -- like Netflix, as an example.

We would like to integrate Netflix into our Video-On-Demand search, so if you search for a video and we don’t have it, you go to Netflix. Why would we stop you from doing that? We want you to use our service but also get what you want.

OSP: What are the network priorities for Cincinnati Bell over the next 12 months?

J. Carr: IPTV via VDSL2. And in some cases we’ll still use ADSL2. We can do 2 lines and maybe get video in. Again, it has to do with the areas we are trying to reach. We have some areas where we don’t necessarily think that the entertainment play is that important for the subscriber.

And we’re looking at churn, of course. We take a very logical approach to our build decisions. We may say: “Churn is not a problem in this area currently, let’s use ADSL2 and possibly pair bonding to get higher speed Internet, but we don’t need the entertainment option yet.”

We may choose to do VDSL2 or VDSL with vectoring in other areas. We have to work with the gear that is deployed in those areas and are very selective about upgrading things that still have a usable life.

What we’re really spending a lot of time on is qualifying the copper plant. It’s really our Vice President of Field Operations, Michelle Simpson, and her folks doing the important work so we know what tactic to use in order to preserve our landline offering and deliver IPTV.

We use a three-step process to do that qualification: What are the neighborhoods we want to be in? Where do we have churn issues? Where do we have speed issues?

Once we make those decisions, we actually have Michelle’s folks go out and test the lines. That allows us to give an address-by-address list to the sales people so they can knock on the doors of those homes whose lines are ready for IPTV service. That extends the use of landline service.

OSP: So, what do you do about those people who are too far from the node? I always seem to live just far enough away to not be able to receive higher speeds via my landline.

J. Carr: We have that challenge here as well. The nicest neighborhood in Cincinnati is where every house sits on 2 acres. And every house is way too expensive to build fiber to. But, they all want it.

So, we went and knocked door-to-door on the street and asked those residents if they were willing to pay the $10,000 to have us construct fiber to their house. And shockingly (laughter), nobody wanted to do it.

Let’s be honest: We can’t be all things to all people. I come from the school of thought that says there are some times you can’t win at the current time. Don’t put the customer through something if you aren’t ready to do it right. If we can’t provide a service that is competitive with the service they already have, we shouldn’t put them through that. That’s why we start strong with the areas where we have a right to win, and then go to the areas that are harder once we have gotten good at it.

OSP: What’s the biggest challenge with fiber-to-the-node, fiber-to-the-curb technology? Have you made any changes to that strategy since you became CTO last fall?

J. Carr: The biggest challenge? Capital. Period. Otherwise, it’s a leap forward from an operational and technology perspective.

As an example, this is the wettest April on record in the history in Cincinnati. Michelle’s field group is literally drowning in copper repair. With fiber, you just don’t have those problems. Sure, fiber’s got a few drawbacks but the capital is the biggest one.

Since I’ve come here, I’ve not needed to make any changes in the deployment plan. Darrick Zucco, our VP & GM of Consumer Markets, has it covered very well. We’re following in the right footsteps with this stuff. I don’t think that there’s anything that we’re going to do any differently than anyone else would from a network-buildout perspective.

I will say that we’ve gotten creative with one piece of this puzzle: We bucked the trend and got creative on our new IPTV platform. We use ZTE, an emerging player from China that previously did not have a significant presence in the U.S. outside of mobile devices. In terms of how that happened, it was interesting.

I’d only been here for a month and I didn’t know Darrick that well. We went out and had a nice dinner and I basically said: “Well, nobody ever got fired for hiring The Big Guy.”

And then we both said: “Nobody ever got famous either.”

So we did something different in terms of our choice for how to build our platform. There are a lot of sensitivities over the platform you pick, but for us, we needed to know we would get the vendor support we need to build an experience that is different from cable.

Let’s be honest: There is an onslaught of options coming to us from emerging markets. And these companies are coming in with solutions that are state-of-the-art. Yet, they are more cost-effective than what we saw with other platforms, and we are also able to custom build them according to our own needs.

The point is, by using an emerging, hungry firm like ZTE who could provide state-of-the-art technology and could also be flexible with us, we’ve been able to customize the platform itself. We were able to do our own customized HD guide. That’s something no one else has. We will be able to do the Over-The-Top integration and video conferencing -- all kinds of unique stuff. So making a different choice than the current industry leaders looks to be a good fit for us.

OSP: What are some of the ways you are reducing costs to operate the copper network while evolving it to deliver higher bandwidths?

J. Carr: By proactively conditioning the lines where we’re going to deploy VDSL2 and VDSL2+, IPTV and the entertainment becomes the work horse that’s going to drive us to update the plant. That’s the bottom line, right? Instead of onesie-twosie fixing problems as they happen, you can do it cheaper if you do it more proactively.

OSP: It’s no secret that data traffic, especially video streaming, is skyrocketing on mobile phones. The growth of Web-friendly smartphones could cause problems for operators worldwide. How is Cincinnati Bell addressing these issues?

J. Carr: I don’t spend as much time in Wireless as I do in every other area, but recently, I was able to sit through a Wireless council meeting and saw the stats. We got our first Android smartphone at the beginning of 2010.

When that happened, you saw data traffic explode. The biggest challenge with wireless data explosion is the backhaul: fiber-to-the-tower. Fortunately, our on-net footprint for wireless is an overlay of our on-net footprint for landline where we own the plant.

We’re upgrading to HSPA+. And our initial tests show we’re currently faster than the LTE service in the downtown area.

It should be an interesting evolution. We have the unique capability of being able to bundle our wireless service with home and business landline services. While we have always struggled with handset availability, we are entering a stage where we have a very good supply of high-end handset options for our customers to be competitive with the national players.

With all that said, I contend that we can win with our strong network, the bundle, and our ability to provide people with a better customer service experience.

OSP: Speaking of, what’s the secret to your better customer service?

J. Carr: I think we know our market. We know our customers. We know what their problems are. We understand this even though we outsource our support. We’re very close with them.

Call a national provider and it’s very difficult to get anything done. I will say this: I’ve been a customer of several major wireless providers, and when it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, you’re in a black hole and you’re never getting out.

We’re different. That guy in the corner office down there is our CEO. Everybody in town knows his cell phone number. If they’ve got a problem, they call him. He deals with every single one of them. It can be really painful, but it works.

And that’s what is unique about Cincinnati Bell. If someone I know has a problem with a cell phone, I hear about it. You can’t do that when you get to the scale of the other ones.

OSP: How important are the technicians to that intimate customer experience?

J. Carr: Unbelievably important! When we look at any escalation, whether it’s good or bad, it’s all related to the customer’s experience with their tech.

OSP: They’re your customer’s last point of contact.

J. Carr: They are. And even if it’s a bad situation, a tech who is personable and customer-focused can really save the day. Believe it or not, we get those comments all the time. But it works the opposite way as well. If a tech promises a call back, and they don’t do it -- it impacts the customer’s perception of the experience, even if the problem was solved. The techs create the most personal relationship with our customers, so it is important that they have good follow-through and that we support them.

That’s what I like about our techs, and especially the way Michelle manages them. She has a human resources background. She focuses on the personality of the program.

You can’t manage this process just by the numbers. If you get on the techs about spending time doing things for the customer that are out of the ordinary, you lose that intangible benefit they bring. When the techs do something that is customer-focused, it never goes unrewarded.

If you’re going to spend an extra 15 or 20 minutes making a customer happy, you can’t measure the direct impact. I’m a numbers guy as much as the next person. Honestly, you can pretend to measure and control everything related to the customer experience, but you can’t. You can do it in manufacturing, but not with this kind of stuff. Sometimes the impact of going that extra mile is immeasurable.

My first boss at Zoomtown had a sign up in his office. It said: “Not everything that can be counted counts. And not everything that counts can be counted.”

You have to try to make people understand how they fit into things, and that’s not always easy to do. In fact, most of the time it doesn’t happen very well. But the one thing that everybody can generally understand is when customers say they are happy with the job. “You’ve done well” is a universal language.

OSP: Let’s talk vendor relationships. We shared a little bit that you have a broad group of vendors that you work with. What do you need from new vendors who haven’t worked for you before? And what is some advice you’d give them if they’re trying to work with you?

J. Carr: To understand my answer, you have to know what our new President did when he came here. Ted comes from a supply-chain-and-sourcing background. I would say that has been our single most successful initiative since I’ve been here.

We put new sourcing leads in place and told the vendors: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And while I don’t believe in trying to milk the cow until it’s dead, it is important to work to find a profitable median for us and our vendors. In addition, having a single sourcing group focused on finding the best value helps to avoid the trap that vendors get into with me: telling me that they do something no one else does. Because you don’t. No one does.

Vendors should not presume that just because they have the next best solution on the market that we have the time to do it right now -- even if we want to. That’s not what vendors like to hear. But that’s why you’ve got to walk the line of being persistent but also collaborative.

To the point I made earlier: Vendors have to understand that small providers are very different than a large national carrier. Our challenges are different, and you need to understand that in detail. My recommendation to vendors is to learn and understand my challenges and my business before you come in and sell to us.

My final advice to vendors is a pet peeve that I have, and it comes to the bidding process. Do not come in and bid your best price, and when you find out that the other guy was significantly lower, drop your price 60%. I’ve seen it happen, really -- and it kills credibility.

I loved my experience at Accenture because that company really understands how to sell. It’s a $30 billion company that seems to beat expectation year after year. That’s because the employees have deep relationships with their customers and understand their business first.

OSP: Speaking of knowing the business, what advice would you give technicians or young, first-time managers or anyone who wants to rise within your organization. What guidance would you give about how they should prepare for the future?

J. Carr: Our business still survives on the premise of skilled craft work. The trick is that it still needs to be done in a changing time when you’re not guaranteed that your next job is going to be skilled work in the same area. You’ve got to be flexible. So, I recommend that employees keep an open mind about their future.

My mom is a CWA retiree with 30 years of service who worked at Western Elective, Bell South, and Ohio Bell. She was the absolute best at what she did: customer service. She retired before it started to get really tough in the industry. She may not have necessarily been able to move on and do something dramatically different given that she was versed in only one area. In those days, there were not abundant opportunities provided for training outside of the skills you worked in. Now, we try to provide as much opportunity as possible for everyone, craft or management, to exploit and become better-versed in various skills.

The reality is that some of the most successful workers are the ones who are not going to be guaranteed a lifelong position. However, by expanding their portfolio of skills, they open the opportunity to move into another position because they’ve demonstrated competency for learning -- not just an ability in a specific skill area. You want to be someone who can learn things in a positive and collaborative manner -- and that goes for techs, managers, and CTOs alike.

When you are in a craft or entry-level management position, you’ve got to be good at what you do. But you’d better learn how to work collaboratively as well. If you are cynical, not flexible, or speak your mind on every topic -- you are probably in a bad situation. Learning today is not just about what you know, but how to get things done with others.

You’ve got to learn how to learn, and you MUST be positive about it right from the start.

OSP: Describe 3 traits that you would tell technicians they need to advance in CBT?

J. Carr: They should be customer-focused, solution-oriented, and have a positive attitude. In the 8 months I’ve been here, I’ve seen 3 or 4 techs who have been promoted into broader roles. Their focus on solutions and the customer were the reasons why they were promoted, not necessarily their specific skillsets. They are the ones that go above and beyond the call.

OSP: Tell me more about your data center strategy and how it fits with your sustainability efforts.

J. Carr: Our Data Center in Houston is LEED Certified. We are building these massive data center campuses where we can gain major efficiencies in power and cooling. With it, we are creating data center campuses that can expand as we add capacity, adding more consolidated power at a very efficient rate. We can then build our data centers alongside other providers and have access to the newest advances in power generation.

In the future, we’re looking for alternative ways to bring power to these centers. For instance, CyrusOne has been looking at ideas like building a data center next to a waste facility and burning the trash/waste for electricity.

Let me share another example of some ground-breaking strategies. CyrusOne handles a lot of really high-performance computing customers. It also hosts a lot of oil and gas companies, housing really dense, high-powered machines. This is very expensive to cool on a per-square-foot basis.

In order to cool the servers more efficiently, we are experimenting with new methods. In one case, they take the cases off of a rack of servers and dip them into a special type of oil that conducts heat, but not electricity. By circulating the oil, they can remove the heat from the server more efficiently than by just using air. Very cool stuff.

We’re working on very interesting technology -- and it’s all bricks and mortar stuff. We have to remember that the bricks and mortar (power, A/C, network) is at the bottom of this whole Cloud thing, but you can’t have Cloud Computing without it -- we like to say that we are the sky for the Clouds!

When I came to Cincinnati Bell, I brought a different idea with me to expand our relationship with our customers. On the telephone company side, we have recently partnered with a retail energy company to launch Cincinnati Bell Energy. This is a new approach to leverage our relationships with our customers to sell them a Green-E certified energy product at a very competitive rate with guaranteed annual savings, as opposed to a premium to the regulated utility rate for non-renewable energy.

Because of deregulation in the energy industry, Cincinnati Bell Energy is able to become a retailer of energy generation in southwestern Ohio, similar to the CLEC industry in telecom. While you are a customer of Cincinnati Bell Energy, you still receive the physical energy, service, and bill from your local utility. CBE buys 100% Green-E certified wind power credits to offset the use of your electricity. This means you are not only saving money compared to buying directly from your utility, but you are doing the right thing for the environment. We are very excited about this and expect to see other traditional LECs follow suit.

OSP: Let’s talk leadership. I’m intrigued by your background. You have such a mix of professional experiences. With all of your professional experiences, what wisdom have you gained over the years that you wish you had possessed early on in your career?

J. Carr: I was very fortunate to work on Zoomtown at CBT as my first job. I was given the opportunity to lead a pretty substantial group at a very early stage in my career. We needed a product, engineering, and operations lead, and I got to do it.

As a result of being in a very fast-paced environment, I learned that you’ve got to work to understand people, not just what’s on the cover or what their resume says. You’ve got to dig deeper to understand what’s important to them.

OSP: So what do you wish you knew then that you know now?

J. Carr: That question actually causes me to pause and reflect a bit. When I was younger, I was going down a path without knowing what I didn’t know. And now I can spot a questionable idea from a mile away.

That said, I’m also more cautious of things now. I always have an answer for why I shouldn’t do something. When I was young, nothing could stop me. But as I said earlier, nobody ever got famous by sittin’ around thinkin’ why you can’t do something.

My advice to my former self would be to slow down. You can run very fast and burn out quickly.

At the same time, I would never have gotten here if I didn’t. But you have to take breaks. People have always told me to slow down, “Life’s a marathon.” But what I’ve found is that it really is not. People who treat life like a marathon tend to get into a pace and stagnate. In my opinion life is a series of well-timed sprints between different points. The key is knowing when to sprint and when to rest!

OSP: And I have to ask, what do your teams not know about you that they should know?

J. Carr: I can see through the smoke screens. I think technical guys have a tendency to particularly not like to be wrong, including me.

When you try to build a complex argument with lots of techno-mumble, you can still get caught by someone with plain old logic. Believe me, it happened to me more than my fair share!

OSP: And what about in the field itself. What’s your biggest problem in the field?

J. Carr: It’s water, squirrels biting cable, spontaneously combusting lines! (laughter) In all seriousness, our team is trying to show the metrics that drive our issues in the field, and by and large they are the simple real-world issues like rain and other environmental issues. So, why are we having outages? Sometimes things just happen that you can’t control -- unless you hunt squirrel.

OSP: What are the most important decisions you make as a leader?

J. Carr: I don’t quote from books very often, but here is one I will: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. His theory is that you’ve got to have the right people in the right seat on the bus before you go. And that’s where I spend most of my time and effort.

We have to have good people in all of those roles because we’re running a full-scale phone company in a single-city market. We don’t have large teams with global backups. So you’ve got to have the right people -- and it is, without a doubt, the most important thing that we do.

I’d say the second thing would be that every important decision tends to be one that very likely could be wrong and you very likely don’t have all of the information. As a general rule, if you are going to run a business of any size, you have to be willing to make a decision and then beg for forgiveness later if you’re wrong.

And you’ve got to pick your battles. You cannot get whipped into a frenzy about every little thing. If you do, it’s like crying wolf: When you really need to get worked up about something, people won’t pay attention. You’ve just got to be calm in the decisions you make, and know when to pick your battles.

OSP: One last question. If you hadn’t become what you are today, what might you have done?

J. Carr: When I was graduating college, I had 2 friends who almost influenced where I was going to go next. One had just gone into the Navy to be a Seal. I was pretty competitive and thought: “If he can do this, I want to go do this.” I went down to the ROTC office at Ohio State to register to follow him into OCS as a flight school candidate. Obviously, I’m not flying today.

At the same time my other friend almost had me convinced to extend my water polo career and move to Australia to play pro polo in Sydney.

Unfortunately for my flying and swimming dreams, the job that got me where I am today popped up. It was pretty tough to pass up a sure thing to get into the telecom business in the booming ‘90s, so here I am. As a result, the 3 of us have completely different lives. It’s funny when you look back at the junctures in your life where your path could have changed completely.

So, my answer to your question is simple. I could have been a beach bum and played water polo in Sydney, or I could have been a pilot in the Navy. Instead, I went into this telecom stuff. I probably made a good choice.

What’s your take on this conversation? Leave a comment and get the conversation going.

Don’t Miss Jeff Carr Speak at OSP EXPO 2011 - September 13, 2011
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