Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin bowed to the inevitable on Monday and resigned as chief executive of Australia’s second largest telecommunications company.
Why inevitable? Poor communication and a lacklustre response during a major system outage is bad enough. Then things got worse when Bayer Rosmarin and the director of Optus networks admitted at a Senate hearing on Friday they had no disaster management plan for the kind of national outage experienced two weeks earlier.
Someone was always going to have to take the blame. Now, two critical questions emerge. First, will the resignation of the chief executive be sufficient to stem the tide of bad publicity from Optus’ outage debacle? Second, is this yet another instance of a female chief at a prominent Australian company being pushed over the “glass cliff”?
