60 seconds with Swissphone's Angelo Saccoccia

How do you spend your time at work?

It’s mainly spent dealing with customers issuing tenders. There is a lot of co-ordinating and decision-making regarding new customer feature requirements, R&D innovations, and investment.

What’s the one gadget that you can’t live without?

My lighter, as I’m one of the last smokers at Swissphone.

Describe your most unforgettable project.

It was an internal project regarding the acquisition of a company. After the acquisition I realised how difficult it is to bring companies’ culture and people’s expectations together under one roof.

This confirmed for me yet again that business and organisation is all about people and ‘mental’ models, which tend to defy business plans or organisational charts.

What’s the most unusual thing you’ve seen in the sector?

Given that the turnaround for many communication devices is about two to three years, I was really taken aback to have a firefighter demand spare parts for his 14-year-old pager, which had started to go on the blink. This shows how integral our alerting devices are to our customers’ professionalism and daily routines.