Telstra's management culture is so bad, a consultants report on it had to be suppressed.
Many many years ago, I did a few consulting jobs for Telecom, telstra's predeccessor and a small thesis on its directions in a competitive environment for my MBA.
The consulting job was about Telecom's response to privatisation, was it competitive? My answer, by all available measures (and there are a lot) it was a basket case. Standard Telstra response when I pointed out they were overmanned, over equipped, over everything was; "Oh Australia is dfferent fromt he rest of the world, the benchmarks don't apply to us."
Sunfish wrote a one page summary for his report which just said basically "believe your own ideas if you want, but every International benchmark says you are performing poorly. Guess you are going to have to find out the hard way if I'm right or you are right". Needless to say, the report was not well received by management who had hoped to use it to fend off the treasury's efforts to privatise it.
The trouble with Telstra is that its still a monopoly and it cannot (and won't) change its business practices until it is forced to by competition. I'm not holding my breath.
By the way the MD at teh time was Mel Ward - a communications engineer.