How do you transform a 100-year-old government-owned telco into a technically, structurally, and culturally modern competitive provider of an Anywhere Network? In Australia, they may not be sure yet of the entire recipe, but one critical ingredient — apart from a pretty scary cap-ex budget – may be a brash but focused leader.  I met yesterday with Sol Trujillo, CEO of Telstra, the world’s 12th-largest network operator by market cap, who’s been on the hustings in recent weeks with progress reports. Some comments from our discussion:

What are the key elements of such a massive change? There are four pieces. First, you have to have a vision about the converging world. We have that. Second, you have to organize your company along those lines; you can’t do this with traditional silo’d P&Ls. Third, you have to have the right people: ‘multi-cultural’, I call it, meaning from varied backgrounds that are relevant to us, like retail. Then, and here’s where you can trip up, you have to allocate resources according to that vision only. You can’t do a thousand things; you have to pick 5 or 6 across the company, but do them really well.

What’s the hardest part? We are still removing old things so we can do new things. We are still eliminating outdated SKUs, systems, and suppliers.

It’s tough to kill your own children. Exactly. It takes discipline. We are getting to a seamless world; it’s not fully brought to life yet because we’re still writing the playbook.

You’ve been critical of the Australian regulators. Talk about that. It’s the worst regulatory market in the world; that’s just a fact. You have the lowest [regulatory ceiling on] wholesale prices, with the lowest population density. That just doesn’t make any sense.

You’ve also been the target of a lot of criticism in Australia, too, as you lead the change program at Telstra. Has that let up at all? Let’s look at who doesn’t like me. It’s the media and the regulators who have issues. They don’t have to serve the customers; I do. We are changing Telstra from a regulation-focused company to a customer-focused one. The tests should be, are we growing? Are we taking market share? Those numbers are going the right way.

As a fellow network transformer, do you think Dan Hesse (new CEO of Sprint Nextel) has a tough job?  Well, it’s easier than mine. He only has 2 network technologies to integrate, not 3 as I did, and he’s got 50 million customers to work with, whereas the entire population of my market is only 20 million. When I was at US West, with a very rural character to the market, I used to fly over Iceland on trips to Europe and think, ‘well, at least there’s a less dense market for telephony than mine.’ Since I’ve come to Australia, I’ve learned that we’re even less dense here than in Iceland. So no, I don’t think his task is more difficult than mine.

Me again: I’ll say one thing, he is certainly focused. In public remarks following our meeting, his message never varied from his theme with me: Telstra is changing to a market-focused company and we’re making progress. Getting up every day to work at the same task while teaching others how to do the same, day in and day out, may be the toughest part of leading any transformation, network or otherwise. As they say in Oz, Sol, good on you!