Telstra went down nationally last week. Trains stopped, payments failed, triple-zero calls were affected. The kind of outage that puts a company on the back foot for weeks.
Telstra’s CFO, Michael Ackland, fronted the cameras mid-crisis. Ackland didn’t perform calm. He was calm.
He said this:
“We let customers down today in their hour of need. There’s nothing that makes that untrue for many of those customers who are in traumatic situations, and we apologise for that deeply.”
No qualifiers. No blame-shifting to “the system.” No corporate hedge-speak. Just a direct acknowledgment of harm, delivered in real time, under maximum scrutiny.
AFR’s Anthony Macdonald picked up on the same thing I did watching the footage. He noted Ackland’s authority and calm, his refusal to speculate on a root cause before he actually knew it, and, critically, that nobody got thrown under the bus on national television. That last part is rarer than it should be.
Here’s the distinction that matters.
Composure isn’t the absence of pressure. It’s what’s left when pressure hits and nothing underneath it moves. Most people mistake calm delivery for composure. The two aren’t the same thing. Delivery can be trained into a script. Composure shows up when the script runs out and the moment keeps going anyway.
Contrast this with how another major telco’s leadership handled a similar outage: deflection, technical jargon as a shield, a conspicuous unwillingness to just say the plain thing. The difference wasn’t intelligence or media training. It was whether the composure was real or not.
Ackland’s press conference is worth watching in full, not for the crisis-comms lessons everyone will draw from it, but for the simpler thing: the remorse was genuine, and it was paired with action, not a talking head reciting lines written for the occasion.
Telstra CFO, Michael Ackland’s composure under pressure
