Given the opportunity to join IBM’s Global Executive Forum again this year, I jumped. Past experience has proven that it’s an intimate, powerful gathering where C-level execs from global communications and media firms convene to mull key questions in leadership.

Last week we convened in the foggy but serene wilds of rural Hampshire, U.K., for two days of discussion about how to succeed in the new economic environment. The challenges offered by IBM were capture in the subtitle for this year’s event: Taking Risk and Finding Opportunity in Unprecedented Times.

My favorite remark of the sessions, one that I’ve repeated several times already, concerned the need for change in our legacy communications networks to embrace exploding demand for video, data, and new services. In the past I’ve heard a defensive posture from network leaders, rationalizing slow progress in the face of rapidly rising threats. But Jean-Philippe Vanot, EVP for innovation and marketing at France Telecom, said, “It’s no longer a question of if, but when.” Amen to that. Eelco Blok, KPN board member and managing director of its business and wholesale operations, talked about the imperatives to change that his firm’s leadership saw as early as 2005, triggering the brave decision to invest in an aggressive move to an all-IP network infrastructure despite a very challenging financial situation.

I shared this slide, from research that YG analyst Camille Mendler did earlier this year with the Telecommunications Executive Network (TEN), surveying network operators. She asked them what they believed the core selling proposition of a network operator is.

What 50+ network operators think they provide

Thank God, I observed, that the most popular answer was the correct one: a service management platform. Operators of networks who see their mission as providing a platform for the creation of network services of any stripe, offered either by them or by third parties, have the best opportunity to contribute to the increase in collective smarts around the world.

(However, the second most popular answer to her question is just total puffery, to put it kindly. Brand is not a selling proposition for any company, whether it runs networks or makes toothpaste. Brand is rather a means to an end. A valuable brand helps a business do things — reach a target market, for instance, or instill confidence in the minds of buyers that this toothpaste will whiten their teeth better. But brand isn’t something valuable on its own. Operators who identify brand as their selling proposition are more likely to invest in brand promotion and identity ahead of the non-trivial work of transforming their core networks. Brand is thus a dangerous red herring in a converging world.)

I like IBM’s Smarter Planet mantra; I believe in it. But to have one, we need smarter networks. In the words and reported deeds of network and media leaders at GEF, coupled with the early, admittedly modest, green shoots in the global economy, I see progress.