A manager’s view of Dale…the perfect team leader
by Prof Stephen Temple CBE, FREng, C Eng, FIET
The late 90’s was a time when anything and everything was possible in telecommunications technology and the task of the Advanced Technology group was to demonstrate this potential for the ntl business. The first challenge was to find the right team. A very high job spec was given to HR to start the recruiting process. Out of the blue I got a telephone call from an American manager working at our Crawley Court office who explained that a job he was managing had just finished and he wanted ntl to be able to hold onto his very best staff. He had just the man for me. The young man had not only done well on the ntl task but had worked for him in the US Air Force. The caller assured me I would not be disappointed. That was to prove to be a massive understatement. It was one of the best recruiting decisions I have ever made. Dale was a Director’s dream manager…just set the vision and Dale delivered it. Such was the confidence he inspired that when the President of the company asked us to deliver a “fibre-to-the-apartment” Internet access solution from scratch with real customers within 12 weeks…a thumbs-up from Dale gave me the confidence to commit. The job was not only completed on time but it became the company’s technology show-piece for a number of years.
The very first job I gave Dale was to demonstrate how we could deliver multi-channel TV down a Welsh valley using microwaves. Our radio mast site group had a mast in the ideal location near an electricity sub-station where a fibre optic cable from our cable franchise would be routed over the high tension pylons. Dale arrived on site only to find the mast had disappeared. Just a few weeks earlier the ntl mast site team had decided not to renew the contract with the local farmer and the mast we were depending upon had been disposed of. I was on the point of pulling the plug on the project when Dale asked for a few days. He was an incredible fast networker of people. He was soon down the pub with the local franchise lads looking for solutions. He was tipped off about an old mast hidden at the back of the local franchise warehouse. The joy was short lived. The ntl structural engineer ruled it was too rusty to get a safety certificate. This was where Dale’s lateral thinking shone. He asked how much of the mast he would have to bury to get the safety certificate? This left just enough above ground to do the job. Within a week Dale had persuaded the local electricity company to allow the mast on their land, organised the JCB digger, a few tons of concrete and a new mast was in place and ready for the trials to go ahead. It taught me that what a company might expect to take 6-9 months over using the normal processes Dale could pull off in 6-9 days with charm, persistence and lateral thinking.
One of the greatest accolades a UK commercial company can aspire to is to supply Her Majesty the Queen with some product or service. Few people probably know this but ntl supplied the first broadband Internet connection to Buckingham Palace. It came about from a project Dale was working on to trial distributing our cable modem service over some 10 GHz spectrum ntl had acquired a few years earlier. Dale managed a contract with a small company to produce a very neat small pizza sized box that was the antenna. He came up with “Wham” as a marketing term for our new trial broadband Internet service. All we needed now were some trial customers. Goodness knows how Dale heard about this but BT had been asked to connect Buckingham Palace to their new DSL broadband service. But they were adamant that to get the wires to where they needed to be involved digging up the pristine parade ground in front of Buckingham Palace. The Queen was not amused. BT were shown the door. Dale was quickly through the door with the local ntl Business sales team and came back with an agreement to site our discrete Wham antenna directly on the wall of the room housing the main PC…and the Queen’s staff had their first experience of a broadband Internet connection. They were delighted. I don’t think the top brass of ntl ever quite appreciated the marketing coup that Dale had pulled off…so it is long overdue to tell the world about the man who first connected Buckingham Palace to the broadband high-speed superhighway…Dale Barnes.
It would not surprise me at all if St Peter had not already been won over by Dale on his way through the pearly gates to be getting heaven on-line.