 years old (2.7 years average) and tend to be very large, successful, and profitable, which creates a culture of managers who feel that they know a lot. The only real historical legacy is borrowed from the incum- bent long distance carrier. Many executives and employees came from there. This means that many of the beliefs about customers (they are an inconvenience), customer service (customer service = a good billing system), and what the business is really about (engineering, not people) permeate the organization. For Internet service providers (ISP) and e-businesses, the legacy is even worse. Most employees come from either retail backgrounds or from technology companies. Rapid expansion and aggressive growth are the result of a highly motivated, highly skilled, and focused sales and channels organization that is geared towards creating daily high activation numbers. Combine all of these factors and you get a group of people that are not very interested in sophisticated, subtle, and unconventional ways of doing things. Business Model An obvious by-product of the typical culture is the business model. For most companies the business model, known as the activations- based /model, leaves no room for concepts like retention management in its scheme. Information and Intelligence Even if a company had no cultural or organizational challenges to face, there is still the problem that the customer management, at the level we are talking about, requires that the company gain access to much new additional and often hard-to-find information and customer intelligence. To manage churn effectively the company, overall, must develop new analytical capabilities and execution sophistication. Chapter 9 TYPICAL ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE To truly understand how to make your organization effective in the management of churn, we need to figure out what the current organizational structure is and why that structure will not support the churn management process. Telcos typically have similar organizational structures. Customer Operation