Metaphors are powerful. Tonight, Ivan Seidenberg, CEO and Chairman of Verizon visited the Charlie Rose show, and I was struck by his mention several times of Fed Ex as an admirable model for his company. Simply put, it’s as if he thought Verizon was in the business of delivering packets like packages. But his admiration extended to Fed Ex’s international ambitions. Now, telecommunications and transportation businesses like Fed Ex are both capital intensive. They are also about taking fundamental, old-school businesses and doing well with them with service offerings and operational genius.  Seidenberg kept returning to Fed Ex throughout the interview, so it’s clearly a part of his mental model for strategy.

Seidenberg is a cool, unruffled customer to interview. But he got visibly excited about three things: he wants more optical cable and still believes in its growth, he loves FemtoCells, and he has the ambition for Verizon to be more international, which seemed to be the most personally exciting adventure for him.

And rather surprisingly, Seidenberg also wanted Verizon to be in the business of dealing applications and content, and seemed to imply he wanted to be a content ”rights” broker.  I have more thoughts about that which I’ll add later. But if I had to read body language, this content play doesn’t exceed his love for FemtoCells and an International Verizon.

Seidenberg visualizes a world where telecoms will have international “natural” clustering in something like business zones - again, he admires Fed Ex for their international growth. He remarked that governments would do well to work to remove barriers for locality licensing, taxes/tariffs, rules, and international telecom business zones.  He also suggested that 4G will eventually wash standard conflicts clean, but he didn’t linger on the backhaul issue.

When Rose asked, Seidenberg without hesitation commented on the filters that foreign governments like Iran and China try to implement, saying he believed that they will never work completely and over the long term will fall.  He also envisioned that devices would someday be fundamentally similar enough to not be a barrier to international, universal service.  I would bet on fundamental, universal SIM cards, but I still believe that carriers and device makers would still try to differientiate on extended capabilities on the card.

Years from now, I wondered if someday we’d have international business zones that we’d recognize almost equivalently with our national citizenship.  There are a lot of new forces on telecom, water and energy distribution, and even currency - things we associate with local geo-governments, and I wonder if we are going to a place where almost everything is subscribable nearly on a dip in an dip out basis or it would be a syndicate “group plan” business association that will be nearly as important as citizenship? Discuss amongst yourselves…

Or, conversely,  maybe we’ll all be simple Skype and TwitterHead citizens: Oprah picked our US president and she picked Skype as her primary connectivity on her show to her viewers. So…all you need is Skype? However…. Oprah loves her Blackberry, Kindle,  and iPod devices, so it’s impossible to calculate how the delight of a device vs simple service vs. explosive content will continue to pull the market.  Simplicity is great, but you can’t count out invention and customer affection.

In recently in the US, there has been controversy around exclusive device deals and platforms, and I believe there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of mobile business. And the layman mobile chatter volleys without irony between “why can’t I have simple choices …and no boundaries… and be offered the coolest thing ever that totally blows my mind? (i.e. what I heard they have in some town in Korea)”  It’s a great time, because there’s so much vitality and potential. As the economy stablizes and capital investment improves, it’ll just get better. One question from Rose that Seidenberg sort of dodged was aimed at how much R&D investment does Verizon make? Seidenberg was right that it’s harder to quantify when you deal with partners in the ways telecoms do, but R&D investment at this time will tell the future winners. That was the case after the Depression in the US and after the Recession in the 1970’s as well.

Seidenberg discussed his involvement in a US government business roundtable, and government and international affairs is a new facination for him. Maybe he sees it as the new frontier, but across the next decade, it will be interesting to watch to see whether he remains at Verizon or enters some sort of political post.  He seems to have some ambitions to see realized at Verizon, but I bet he would go for it within a few years, if the right one were offered.

The force on the exciting mobile market that could make everything go gray, undifferentiated and uninspired is government. And now we deal with not only our local government, but multi-national pressures. Either, government allows or enforces a monopoly or government does not enable an environment where businesses that take risk are allowed to reasonably enjoy the fruits of that risk. In just one country, a healthy, fertile business environment is a garden that needs constant weeding, but across borders, it will be the remarkable challenge of our generation.