Foreign Exchange

2010-05-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

DEAR Your Excellency,

I realize that I am calling you this, most possibly against your wishes. In your desire to truly respect the will of this nation, you refuse to be called President until the day of your official proclamation. However, the laws of statistical probability – if not quite the laws of this country -- are all now stacked in my favour, and I am fairly certain that I will probably not be eating crow anytime soon.

You have enjoyed a truly convincing victory, in what has to be the most remarkable election exercise this country has ever seen. Possibly the cleanest polls ever, it was an election worthy of a democratic process in the information age – informed, lively and free. You, Mr. President, are the first leader of a cyber-age Philippines.

Click here for Election 2010 updates

And yet, as much as you belong to this internet generation, you also represent the hopes and aspirations of those who belong to earlier ones.

Many will recall your father as a youthful senator and eager president-in-waiting, whose own dreams were ruthlessly crushed by the dictator Marcos -- as he lay dying on the tarmac upon his arrival -- to free his homeland from the shackles of tyranny and oppression.

Millions like me also remember your mother’s sacrifice. We stood shoulder to shoulder with her as she marched the streets to press for the dictator’s departure, and supported her unconditionally, when her presidency was threatened several times by those jealous of her overwhelming popular mandate.

Mr. President, in a secular sense, you are this country’s long-awaited messiah.

You have ascended to power to fulfill your father’s lofty promise, and your mother’s supreme sacrifice. In you, those who watched helplessly as Ninoy was gunned down, and prayed fervently as Cory was besieged by hungry power grabbers, shall have their fulfillment and salvation. It is a weighty responsibility, Mr. President, but you have little choice in the matter. Carrying the Aquino name has given you that duty, and whether you like it or not, this is now your manifest destiny.

Our nation is in immediate need of healing.

Our civil service is corrupt and inefficient, our public officials inept and greedy, and our people jaded and disillusioned. It will take a leader who can deftly combine the popular touch with a sharp economic acumen, genuine humane compassion with a strict sense of discipline, and skilled secular governance with a strong moral compass, to pull this country together. Yes Mr. President, the demands are difficult, but we know you expected no less when you made the decision to walk in your illustrious parents’ footsteps.

But worry not, Mr. President, for we will be with you every step of the way. Steadfast and unwavering, proud and unbowed, we will march forward to claim what we have long coveted – the material comforts that many of our neighbour countries have long enjoyed, and the respect of the world that this nation has been denied for so long.

Mr. President, we can make this nation great again. More beckoning than Mr. Reagan’s shining city upon a hill, and more luminous than Mr. Bush’s thousand points of light, we can bring forth -- during your presidency -- a Camelot more storied than the reign of the legendary Kennedys.

I can only recall few instances in my life when I truly believed, as your father did, that the Filipino is worth dying for. When your father died on that tarmac, when your mother took her oath as president of this country, and now, this historic time of your election.

Mr. President, do this nation proud. Lead us to greater glory, as we strive to claim what are rightfully ours – the freedom from want, the respect of our freedoms, and the world’s total respect for our great nation.

Good luck, Mr. President. This nation’s prayers are with you.
(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com/ & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)

Published in the Sun.Star Daily, 15 May 2010.

Market positioning 2

2010-02-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

SUBIC is Gordon, and Gordon is Subic.

The man has intimately woven the Subic brand into his persona, the two are almost now indistinguishable. From an American backwater with hardly any source of income apart from the entertainment spending of naval officers and men, Dick has made a destination haven of sorts for the place. Today it boasts of entertainment centers, gambling casinos and first class hotels.

And of course, it has business and industry too. Gordon wants to duplicate the microeconomy that is Subic, into the macroeconomy that is the Philippines, and he is building his platform on that promise.
And of course, what would an election be without Erap? The man for the masses he claims to be, with the common man’s aspirations tagged into his platform. And probably he is right to stake his wagon to such a horse. After all, these are the people who flock in droves to see his movies, and therefore it is only logical that they will be the ones to support him in his drive to regain the presidency.

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Brother Eddie? Oh, of course the man of God. Righteous, morally upright and incorruptible, with the fear of God on his side.

Brother Eddie wants to transform the country into a bastion of conservative Christianity, much like Pat Robertson of the 700 Club in the United States wants to do. And there too is a significant chunk of the electorate waiting to be tapped.

These men are the products, and we are the buyers. How they position themselves before us, dictates how we will assess them and make our choices. Do we want an honest and upright person?
Is technocratic competence more important for us? Do we need a man for the masses? Or is religious zeal uppermost in our echelon of values? Whichever trait appeals to the most voters should win, no?
In theory, yes. But just like the dilemma of market positioning, it isn’t always quite so simple.

Credibility in positioning is important. First of all, how believable are their declared attributes? Noynoy claims to be an honest lad. Does he have the credibility to do so?

Gordon passes himself off as a transformational technocrat. Does he have the track record to do it? And Erap comes with the guise of being a man of the poor. Do his deeds bear him out on this claim?
It is easy enough to claim any number of attributes, but proving it is another thing. And a false or weak claim to an attribute can very well derail a person’s candidacy, and expose him or her to being a charlatan.

The other important consideration is the uniqueness of a position. How crowded is their place in marketing space? Are others already occupying it? For instance, Gordon and Gibo have fairly similar stakes to the “technocrat” attribute. Just as Dick claims to be the management guru of the lot, Gibo also says the same thing about himself.

Who will people believe between them? Or will they end up splitting the vote into two?
The same goes for the “man of the masses” title. Manny Villar thought he had appropriated the tag for himself, but at the last minute Erap surprised everyone by having his candidacy accepted by the Comelec. Which leaves Manny in a very tight pickle indeed because his “Tondo boy” credentials are also the same ones which Erap is using to entice voters to his side.

It is going to be an interesting marketing game all the way to May!

(http://asbbforeignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on February 20, 2010.

Market positioning

2010-02-13T21:19:00.000-08:00

A SOAP is a soap is a soap. Well, in the old days at least, that was the thinking. As long as it bubbled, cleaned, and made one smell reasonably fresh, it had done its job. One soap was as good as any other.

Today, the choice for consumers is not quite as limited as that anymore.

Click here for stories and updates on the Sinulog 2010 Festival.

If one wanted to be doubly sure about cleanliness, there are any number of germicidal soaps out there in the market specifically for their needs. From sulfur and zinc soaps, to those with other germicidal ingredients, the choice is varied. For those whose main concern is moisturizing, for them too there is a wide variety of available products, which all claim to be able to add moisture to one’s dry skin. And then, of course, there is the craze of the moment—whitening soaps, which cater to the Filipinos’ obsession to be of the color they are not.

For them too there are a lot of products which promise to fulfill this vanity, and to make them look like they were born in Los Angeles, California instead of Angeles City, Pampanga.

There are even soaps which do not look like soaps at all.

Those among us of the more sophisticated bent go for liquid shower gels to cleanse ourselves, preferring the convenience and exclusivity of the product over the mass market appeal of the soap bar. From products sold by mass market FMCGs, to the more niche appeal of those from the Body Shop, to the really snobbish Molton Brown, there is likewise a large selection to choose from. So long as there is money to spend, there are products to buy.

All a matter of market positioning among the competing products.

Some products stand for cleanliness, others for moisturizing, a number for low cost, and a few for exclusivity. Each group appeals to a particular segment of consumer, whose needs and wants it is able to address.

The coming May 2010 elections is an interesting study in political market positioning among the candidates. From Noynoy to Gibo, Manny to Erap, Dick to Eddie, and Nick to Jamby, all project themselves somewhat differently to the electorate.

And whether or not their images will resonate with voters in terms of the satisfaction of the latter’s needs and wants, determines whether they will succeed in governing this country, or end up returning to their day jobs.

First off, we have Noynoy, the honest boy. Born to Cory and Ninoy, he promises to carry the torch of integrity, and rid the country of the scourge of graft and corruption.

His campaign slogan says that he will not steal, and will give back to the people every cent they paid in tax in the form of better services. To those of us who are fed up with financial scandals, tax cheats and other political shenanigans, his campaign is the beacon of hope for clean government.
Then we have Noynoy’s cousin, Gibo Teodoro. He positions himself as an intelligent voter’s choice. Brainy, articulate and extremely competent, his message to the voters is that he will elevate this country to greater heights. Ready to fly, is his slogan.

Manny Villar, the self-made billionaire from the slums of Tondo, comes to the voter with his “man for the masses” appeal. I’ve been there, done that, paid all my dues, is his rallying cry.
He is saying to the voters that if they vote for him, he will do all he can to elevate the plight of the poor, in the same way as he elevated his own station in life many years ago.

More next week…
(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on February 13, 2010.

No exchange

2010-02-06T21:25:00.000-08:00

IN the 1980’s, the first shots of the shareholder revolution were fired, in the United States and in Europe.

Prior to this, management boards were all-powerful, and were virtually running their organizations like total owners.

Shareholders, who often owned majority of the companies they invested in, were relegated to the role of spectators, watching, sometimes helplessly, as management ran their companies to the ground, or undertook some really bad decisions that jeopardized their investments.

Click here for stories and updates on the Sinulog 2010 Festival.

The rise in the vigilance of shareholders about the well-being of the companies they were invested in came at just the right time, as the companies they owned began to fail, one after the other, through a series of errors and ill-timed decisions.

The 1980s was the time when the Maxwell pension scandal broke out in the United Kingdom. Robert Maxwell, the larger-than-life media mogul who ruled over Britain’s tabloid press at the time, was caught fiddling with his company’s pension plan. Money that was supposed to go to widows, orphans and senior citizens was funneled to fund the man’s frivolous ways, and many of his retired workers ended up broke and penniless.

In the United States at the same time, corporate wrongdoing were a dime a dozen. This era was dominated by “greed” and “excess,” epitomized by Michael Douglas’ character in the movie “Wall Street.” The ‘80s was marked by takeovers, mergers and acquisitions that seemed to make no business sense, culminating in the famous RJR Nabisco saga, which led to the ultimate collapse of the mergers and acquisitions bubble in the United States.

Shareholder and investor activism, to a large degree, helped to tame corporations into doing the right things.

In Britain, their actions led to widespread pension reform, which ushered in the era of safe and reliable pension fund management in that country. In America, shareholders ousted a larger number of chairmen, chief executives and other senior managers, helping to instill prudence and common sense once more in corporate affairs. Without those drastic actions, life in corporate Europe and America would have turned out very differently indeed.

But what about in politics? What redress do voters have against incompetent and unfit officials, who happen to have been voted into power on the strength of false expectations? Is there such a thing as a shareholder revolt in political terms?

Yes there is, and in the Philippines we have tried it at least a couple of times already. In fact, we have names for them —Edsa 1 and Edsa 2, with numerous other mini-uprisings in between.
Problem is, we cannot have too many of them.

Coup d’etats are, in actual fact, illegal and against democratic principles. OK, Edsa 1 was wholly justified, even as Edsa 2 was much less so. But unlike shareholder revolts, which mostly strengthen the organizations where they take place, forced expulsion of democratically elected leaders is bad news for business. While investors may like to undertake their own revolts, they are mostly not too pleased when these revolts take place in the countries where they are in.

Which leaves us, the electorate, with only one choice this coming May. Since we cannot change our board of directors in mid-term, we need to make sure that those we elect are already the right ones to begin with.

Unlike in business, in politics, it is “no-return, no-exchange.”

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on February 06, 2010.

Can we trust the Filipino?

2010-01-30T21:38:00.000-08:00

IN the early years of my immersion in Western cultures, a couple of differences between “them” and “us” struck me the most.

The first one clearly is the prevalence of religious iconoclasm, especially among the Europeans. In the United Kingdom, which has been my home for many years, churches and places of worship often lie empty and neglected, many turned into historically themed residential dwellings and apartment blocks. Religion just has no place in their lives anymore.

Valentine's 2009 blog

This was a real shock to me in the beginning, as having been raised in the Philippines as a young man, I had been accustomed to seeing people religiously flocking in droves to churches on Sundays, and other days of obligation. Not to mention being witness to the spectacle of people nailing themselves to crosses and engaging in other acts of great religious fervor, especially during the season of Lent.

Not in the West.

I remember once visiting one of the Western Isles of Scotland on a Sunday, and hearing mass while we were there. Looking all around me, all I could see were white-haired folk, with nary a young soul in sight. Religious devotion is dying with the older generation, and their young are not being motivated to follow in their path.

The other thing which surprised me with the West was the degree of trust they had in other people. The unwritten rule over there seems to be that “all men are honest, unless proven otherwise.”
Insurance companies over there, for instance, spend very little time investigating claims for damages, preferring instead to pay up almost as soon as they are reported. As a consequence many of my Filipino friends there routinely took advantage of the situation, reporting goods they had purchased like computers, for example, as damaged so they could get new ones as replacement.

The traffic accident reporting process, too, is something unheard of back in the Philippines. When two vehicles have a minor accident, each person simply reports to his or her auto insurance company what happened, and they would get paid. No need for a policeman to hold up traffic for hours like in Manila, while they take a sketch and make a report of the incident for the insurance companies.
The funny thing is, of course, that the two things that really caught my attention would, at first glance, seem to be irreconcilable differences.

For how could societies that hardly believed in God anymore, still rely so much on the good faith and honesty of their members? In my experience up to that point, ungodly men and women were supposed to be immoral and dishonest individuals. How else could they be, when they hardly believed in a just and righteous God anymore? Where would they have learned their values, and shaped their morality?

It was just too difficult for me to reconcile.

My thoughts, of course, immediately turned to home for comparison. In the Philippines, everyone – bar a very small minority – believe in a god, whoever that God is supposed to be.

Everyone goes to church on Sundays, or otherwise attends mosques on Fridays. Anyone coming over to the Philippines for the first time would see this, and automatically assume that our godliness meant that we were, without exception, an honest and morally upstanding nation.

More next week.
(http://asbb-foreignexchange. blogspot.com)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on January 30, 2010.

Teamwork

2010-01-30T21:31:00.000-08:00

IN the corporate world, we take it for granted that everyone knows the importance of good teamwork. For example, if you think of Bill Gates, you immediately think of Paul Allen as well. Without one or the other of this pair, the world will not know of a company as influential as Microsoft, and perhaps the world of computing would not have been the same.

It is critical that top executives of corporations think alike, and support each other’s decisions. Otherwise, it would be a very fractious and chaotic organisation indeed, where the ones in-charge at the top would be fighting each other every step of the way, and having different agenda for the future.

Click here for stories and updates on the Sinulog 2010 Festival.

Political systems in most places follow this principle.

In the United States, for example, a vote for the president is also a vote for the vice president. One will never see a case in America where the president is a Republican,and the vice president a Democrat, or vice versa. It has to be that the pair belong to one party only.

It is, of course, only logical that this should be the case.

Vice presidents are, as they say, only a “heartbeat” away from the presidency. When the commander-in-chief dies or is in any way incapacitated and unable to govern, the vice president steps in and fills his shoes. It is therefore important that there is a continuity of programs of government, as one transitions to the other. It promotes a seamless change and ensures that the governance of the nation is not compromised.

In our country, however, we seem to be of a different mindset entirely.

Unlike most republican governments anywhere, in the Philippines, the president and the vice president have separate mandates. That is to say, the president could come from one party, and the vice president from another. Take for example the current administration, where President Arroyo and Vice President de Castro are from separate camps. Or even the previous government of President Estrada and Vice President Arroyo, who also belonged to different political persuasions.

In the case of the administration before this one, we had the vice president always positioning herself to take over the reins of power, and never really fully cooperating with the president to make effective governance happen. And when Edsa II took place, she was only too quick to pounce on the chance to crown herself number one.

Under the current regime, we have an impotent vice president, who despite his years of broadcast journalism experience, we have yet to hear hiim speak over national media on issues of substance. In both cases, the relationship at the top is a dysfunctional one, to say the least.

If other countries cannot do it, I do not know what makes the Philippines so special, that we think we can function effectively with having presidents and vice presidents coming from different political persuasions. When countries with mature political systems like the United States are practical enough to admit that this would not work, the logic of why we do ours the way we do it still continues to mystify me.

It is time we realised the folly of this situation. For two consecutive administrations now we have been witness to the charade that is the presidential and vice presidential tandem.

On both occasions, the second-in-command has been little more than a waste of space. Little wonder then that all the vice president has left to do is to plot for the overthrow of the boss, in order to take over the reins of power as quickly as possible.

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on January 30, 2010.

Filipino diaspora

2010-01-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

ONE of the tragic things about Filipinos is that wherever tragedy strikes in the world, one of us is bound to be involved.

When ocean liners sink at sea, we usually hear news of a number of Filipinos suffering in the tragedy. When a bomb blows up in Iraq, there is bound to be a Filipino onsite. And when a convoy of workers is attacked in Afghanistan, one of our countrymen may just be among the victims.

Click here for stories and updates on the Sinulog 2010 Festival.

Sure, you may say, but so are Americans and Europeans.

They are usually the passengers in those cruise liners that sink at sea. They will be the soldiers targeted by those roadside bombs in Iraq. And they are usually the contractors who may be attacked by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But with one big difference.

Americans and Europeans are in those places because they choose to be there. Our countrymen are there because they have to be.

Despite Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo’s claims to the country, the sad fact is that we are a destitute nation. So bad is the state of our economy that our greater Filipino family has to send its sons and daughters abroad so that we will have food on our table.

In a way, this is something to be proud about.

The world entrusts us with its infirm and its elderly.

We provide comfort and relaxation to weary Westerners, as they escape from the rat race and get away to their destinations of choice.

And we provide order in the homes of so many families around the world, as without us chaos will reign over their households.

But it cannot be denied that most of our countrymen have to resort to lives away from their beloved country, because there is nothing for them to do back here that would enable them to have some semblance of a decent livelihood.

If they chose to remain here, they would probably be unemployed, or, at the very least, working in jobs that would not be able to support their family’s needs.

And that’s why they leave.

Not in the hundreds.

Not even in the thousands.

They leave in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

Every day, to every conceivable destination on earth.

Just this week, the impoverished island nation of Haiti was rocked by a powerful earthquake.
And guess what?

Some of our countrymen too perished underneath the rubble.
All right, some of them were there working as United Nations diplomats, while others were on duty as UN peacekeepers.

But among their number were ordinary workers who left to work in a very poor country like Haiti, because at least there, they earned more than they could possibly hope for in their own land.
Yet again, something for our next President to think about.

Not that he has to prevent our countrymen from leaving the country. Mobility and freedom to travel is after all a right that everyone ought to enjoy.

But there is one important thing he must note.

The situation cannot be as it is today, when almost everyone who queues up for a passport needs to do so in order to get a better paying job abroad.

When almost everyone who leaves does so unwillingly and with much sadness, if only to provide his or her family a better life.

Our countrymen must be no different than the Americans and the Europeans.

They should be able to leave their country anytime, to be sure.

But they must only do so because they choose to, and not because they have to.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on January 23, 2010.

BPO Phenomenon (conclusion)

2010-01-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

FIGHTING cocks in exchange for allowing your business to set up in their municipality may seem like a fair trade to some city council members in certain cities, but is certainly a source of great annoyance to potential investors in the country who are here to start a genuine business, provide employment and improve the national economy in the process.

Many of our so-called leaders and government officials fail to see that the short-sightedness of their actions harms the long-term term viability of the Philippines as a business destination. This is no different from the attitude of our public vehicle drivers and some in the tourist trade, which we have written about before. Instead of trying to cultivate good relationships with visitors so they keep coming back for more, they fleece them and practically rob them of their money the first time around, so they never ever have to think about coming back. No way to treat a customer, right?

Click here for stories and updates on the Sinulog 2010 Festival.

Apart from the obvious advantages of the Philippines as a BPO destination, the other important draw that brings investors here are the incentives we offer to potential locators.

The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) is a very critical lynchpin in this effort, as it is through this agency that a significant number of the investment incentives are administered. And as we have said many times before, Peza as an agency cannot be commended enough for the sterling job that it has done, and continues to do for the investment community.

The problem is that Peza, on its own, cannot do the job without the aid of the other agencies in government that investors also have to deal with. And herein lies the problem.

Our government agencies don’t talk. Nobody is interested in what the others are doing. It’s as if they all exist in a world of their own.

Take for example the VAT zero-rating of companies that are registered with Peza. Some of these companies, although zero-rated, will have incurred some form of input VAT payment, if for instance they were doing some set-up work before their Peza registration was approved. Since many of these companies are “exporters,” in that their customers will be from overseas, they will not be able to pass on the input VAT that they will have paid.

In theory, these companies are entitled to claim their input VAT paid from the BIR. But theory is far simpler than practice.

Just try asking any company, or any tax expert for that matter, on just how “easy” it is to try to claim back input VAT from the BIR. Ever heard of impossible? Try something more difficult than that!
The next president surely has his work cut out for him, to try to make us the BPO destination of choice over India, Eastern Europe or indeed China, which seems to be emerging as the next BPO boom location.

First on the list of things to improve will be the agencies that have touchpoints with BPO locators. The BIR is first on that list. As long as they take a very narrow view on tax issues, and make it difficult for investors to realise the full extent of their investment incentives, they will feel cheated, and come away thinking they were duped. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.

And of course, although they may be under the radar most of the time, municipal governments will have to get their act together as well. The fighting cock story of one of my BPO contacts is something that cannot be allowed to continue.

Local governments should not be allowed to railroad the good efforts that the national government is trying very hard to implement.

So Mr. incoming President, are you ready for the challenge?

Wishing all our readers and friends a happy Fiesta Senor celebration. Pit Senyor!

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on January 16, 2010.

BPO phenomenon (Part 2)

2010-01-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

FIRST of all, may I wish all our readers a very Happy New Year! May this year be much better than the last.

For updates from around the country, follow Sun.Star on Twitter

On the other side of the new year, we were talking about the nascent Philippine business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, and how this has helped the Philippines sort out its economic difficulties in a significant way, the ineptness of our current economic and political leaders, notwithstanding.
If there ever was an industry that the Philippines can and should lay claim to, it has to be that of business process outsourcing. Much more than Japan and South Korea can monopolize manufacturing technology as their own, there are a lot of advantages that can make the Philippines the king of BPO, if it chooses to be.

First, we are by far, still much cheaper than the developed countries, in terms of our labor rates.
Where our newly hired employee in a BPO company—fresh out of college—would pick up a starting salary of about P15,000, this person’s equivalent in the United States and Europe would easily be making over P100,000, for doing exactly the same kind of work.

Second, our relative command of the English language is almost second to none in the developing world. As it happens, most BPO work today comes from the English-speaking economies in North America and Europe, so the trend suits us nicely from this perspective.

None of our neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and certainly not the Chinese, have our expertise in terms of speaking and working in the English language, so from that standpoint, we have a virtual monopoly of the market.

Of course, India—our most significant competitor for BPO business—is also very strong in English language skills.

But between them and us, there is enough of a market to go around.

The attractive promise of the BPO industry notwithstanding, there is still much that we have not done in order to maximize the country’s opportunity to attract more locators to come in.

Plenty, in fact, to make the next president aspirant already start having sleepless nights thinking what he could do to change the situation.For starters, we need to be more investor-friendly.

It is easy enough to claim that we make it easy for companies to come in and do business in the Philippines, but another thing to actually make it happen. Talk is cheap, as they say, but actions speak louder than words.

Take the issue of investment incentives, for example.

The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza), among all the government agencies, has to be the friendliest and the easiest to deal with, among all the other regulators that BPO companies come across. This is the good news. The bad news is that everybody else is the opposite, and riddled with all sorts of graft and other corrupt activities.

Take the case of an unnamed BPO company that wanted to locate in one of the areas where these types of companies are normally clustered. To complete its Peza registration, it had to have some clearances from the municipality of the place where it was wanting to locate. One would have thought that the city council would pull out all the stops to make sure that the clearances were issued on time, so the company could commence with its business posthaste.

But did it do this?

No, sir. Upon learning that this company’s headquarters is in Houston, Texas, it had the nerve to ask the company for some fighting cocks, in exchange for the releaseof its clearances. More next week…

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on January 09, 2010.

BPO phenomenon

2009-12-19T21:52:00.000-08:00

WHO hasn’t heard of BPO? No, I am not talking of Banco De Oro. That would be BDO, although I am certain that most people know all about BDO and its current domination of the Philippine banking scene.

I am talking about BPO as in business process outsourcing. I would imagine that as many people who have heard about BDO would have also come across a BPO, in some way or other.

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It is hard to miss the ubiquitous structures where these companies are located. In many places where they are, the buildings housing them are prominently clustered together, making them visible for all to see.

In Metro Manila, there are four centers where these BPOs are mostly situated—Makati, Alabang, Eastwood (Quezon City) and Ortigas. Cubao and the area around UP Diliman are also fast becoming magnets for these companies to locate in, thanks to generous incentives from the site’s developers. There are also many centers outside of Manila, like Clark (Pampanga), Cebu, Davao, Baguio and Iloilo.
Or, if someone has not noticed (a bit difficult to believe) these places, perhaps one has a relative or a friend who happens to be connected with a BPO organization. After all, apart from nursing and leaving for abroad, going into a BPO seems to be the career of choice for many of our young graduates.

Generically called call centers (although believe it or not, there are many types of BPOs, and call centers are only a segment of the industry), these companies have attracted a large number of our young working population. By the Business Processing Association of the Philippines’ own estimates, one million of them will have been working in some type of BPO within five years’ time. Had it not been for the global financial crisis, the five years would have even been shorter.

But just what does a BPO do? Well, everything really that a business organization does can be outsourced, or done by a third-party organization. For example, to answer calls from its customers, an American utility company may choose to have those calls answered in the Philippines, instead of in the United States. The advantage is obvious. Each customer service representative in the US probably earns the equivalent of about four or five customer service representatives in the Philippines. So obviously, as long as it takes less than four or five Filipinos to do the job of one American, it makes sense to locate the process here.

The even better thing, of course, is that it does not take four or five Filipinos to do the job. In some cases, it even takes less than one.

How does this happen? Well, by the simple phenomenon called underemployment. Let me qualify this statement by calling it “relative underemployment.”

Why relative? Because in the United States, a customer service representative does not need to have graduated from college to do the job. A simple high school leaver will be fine, thank you very much. Here in the Philippines, however, it is a slightly different story.

People who work in BPOs here have all invariably completed some kind of college degree. For the most part, they would have done something like a business-related, or perhaps communications-related, course. That is a minimum requirement for acceptance to the job.

Happy Christmas to all our readers, and their families and loved ones. May this holiday season be truly blessed for us all!

More next week...
(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on December 19, 2009

Future expectations

2009-12-14T21:55:00.000-08:00

WE all remember the dotcom boom.

Who doesn’t have any memory of those heady times, when share prices of heretofore unknown companies rose to stratospheric levels? When any company with a dotcom after their name could simply do an IPO and their shares would just sell like the proverbial hotcakes?

All to do with future expectations, as we know. Everyone who bought any of those overvalued (as we now know them to be today) shares were of the same mind that at some point, what they were buying would be worth far more than what they paid for.

After all, no one invests in anything to make a loss. The rationale for any investor in buying any asset is always that at some point in the future, that asset is going to make a return for the investor.

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Question is, how far off into the future will those expectations hold? How far off is the investor’s horizon in deciding whether what seems not to be too valuable today, would suddenly turn and become very valuable in the future?

The answer is – it depends.

On what, might we ask, does the answer depend?

Well, mainly on how long those expectations remain positive.

A bit of an evasive answer, right?

Well, not really.

Witness the current financial crisis. For a number of years, asset-backed securities, securitized by American mortgages, seemed to be bullet-proof. As the popular belief went, who does not need a house to live in? And if this were to be true, then surely mortgages would be an eternal fountain from where untold wealth for all would spring.

And spring it did, until late 2008. For when the whole world collectively realized that although everyone needed a home, they still had to be able to afford to buy one and pay for it (and it seemed that many Americans had become unable to do the latter), then, the whole myth of high expectations collapsed.

Which brings me to the issue of President Barrack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Even in his very own acceptance speech, Obama was humble enough to admit that by any stretch of the imagination, he was not deserving of the award – or at least not yet. He had not done enough to spread the word of peace across the world, and therefore had no business being in that podium, at that point in time.

Obama, more than most American presidents who came before him, has benefited greatly from future expectations. And understandably so. As his country’s first non-white president, many of his countrymen – white and non-white alike – look to him to be able to do almost superhuman things, and right many of the wrongs that all of his collective predecessors could not.

But the weight of future expectations is a heavy burden to carry. Many of the dotcom companies who enjoyed the heady days of yore know this only too well.

A large number of financial institutions that made a killing packaging and selling mortgage-backed securities are also only too aware of its perils.

Which is why Obama must do all he can to be able to deliver on his future promises. Or risk falling on his own sword, and be impaled by the weight of unfulfilled expectations.

(Belated greetings to my son, Jacob Anthony, and sister, Aleli, who celebrated their birthdays on the 26th of November and the 6th of December, respectively).
(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on December 14, 2009.

Unacceptable risk

2009-11-28T21:44:00.000-08:00

THIS last week was a sickener, to say the least. While people in the United States were celebrating Thanksgiving, the traditional holiday for showing gratitude for one’s blessings, all we could do for ourselves was to engage in national mourning on an unprecedented scale.

For down South, in that part of the Philippines which has known little peace for as long as most of us can remember, dozens of innocent civilians were massacred, in what has to be a monstrous act of barbaric proportions, so savagely calculated in its intensity, and yet so mindlessly inane in its execution.

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Whoever the perpetrators of that massacre were, and whatever their motivations for doing so happen to be, there has to be no escaping their utter disregard for public opinion, let alone the laws of the country in which they reside. For how else could they have imagined that an entire nation—not to mention the families, relatives and friends of the victims—would not look after an entire convoy that just disappears from the face of the earth?

Reports say that the assassins planned everything in advance—from staking out the convoy’s route, to digging mass graves in which the bodies and even the vehicles of those they were going to murder, were to be buried. But what were they thinking? That people would just accept the newfound existence of some kind of “Bermuda triangle” in Maguindanao, which is able to swallow people and vehicles without a trace? Would no one come looking? And would no one notice the freshly turned earth just a few kilometers up the road, and start wondering how on earth asuch haphazard diggings could just have sprung up for no apparent reason?

Most of all, what about national, and even world, opinion? Did the perpetrators simply think that killing dozens of people would not attract any attention outside their little enclave in the South? That nobody would speak out against the heinousness of their deed, and the world would just continue turning on its axis, as if nothing ever happened at all?

The problem is, the perpetrators knew. They were fully aware that the nation would know. They knew full well the world would know. But they just did not care. Too drunk with power, they disregarded everything—our nation’s laws, our people’s customs and traditions, and our national honor and pride—just to be able to show who is boss.

Somewhere along the line, the current administration has to share in the blame. Its practice of “business politics”—of paying back political IOUs, regardless of how these IOUs were incurred—is mostly to blame.

The part of the world where this all took place was a haven for the current administration during the last elections, with some places registering zero votes for the president’s opponents.

Zero votes? Hell, even statistical error tells us that there must be someone out there, from among the thousands of voters, with a dissenting opinion, or even just someone who ticked the wrong box. But it was a perfect delivery, which demands no less than the perfectpayback.

But in business, as in politics, there is something called unacceptable risk. This is what happened in the recent financial crisis, when banks and other financial institutions suddenly began to realize that not all was well with the US mortgage market, and that they had better jettison the assets they were holding, which were backed up by these mortgages.

Our only hope for justice to prevail, is that the current administration would realize that its alliances in that part of the country have now become an unacceptable risk, that even the dangers of not paying back political debt are now far outweighed by the consequences of coddling criminals and fugitives from the law.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on November 28, 2009.

Finex does Cebu 2

2009-10-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

WHAT does Cebu have that other places in the Philippines do not?

What does this island in the sun, with so few native resources to speak of, have that makes it stand out as a beehive of creative entrepreneurial activity?

Kenneth Cobonpue, Butch Carungay and Bunny Pages—guests during the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (Finex) Annual Convention in Cebu City at the beginning of this month—were all proof that there is indeed something unique among Cebuanos, and in Cebu’s ability to be the incubator of entrepreneurial ideas and ventures.

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Back in time there was Penshoppe, of course. From a little mom and pop shop in Cebu, it has become a national brand, a favorite among the young and energetic set.

And Julie’s Bakeshop? Who would now not have seen one somewhere in a bus stop anywhere in the Philippines? I remember in my younger days when it was still alone outlet in Fuente Osmeña, and how over time, with creativity and imagination, it has managed to franchise its way to national prominence.

And even among the country’s crème de la crème in business, it is Cebuanos who stand tall and proud above the rest. John Gokongwei, Henry Sy and Lucio Tan all trace their roots to Cebu. So do the Gotianuns, who have developed Alabang into a viable alternative to the Makati Business District.

So there is indeed a secret to Cebu. Maybe it is the sun and the sea. Or perhaps the steely drive and determination of a people descended from the blood of our first national hero, Lapu-lapu. Fiercely independent and tribal, Cebuanos love to help each other out in achieving fame and fortune. The strength of the island’s various chambers and trade associations, and the cooperation among its members attest to the fact that amid the healthy competition, there is also a lot of cooperative collaboration going on.

For instance, Kenneth Cobonpue, for all his busy schedule, takes time out to teach design courses at the UP Cebu’s Fine Arts Program. This is his way of giving back his skill and talent to the next generation of designers, so Cebu will always be blessed with talented artisans for the future.

It has been many years since I have been out of the place I like to call home. But every time I manage to make my way back there, I always come away feeling energized and recharged.

The energy, creativity and enthusiasm of the Cebuano are indeed contagious.

Outside of the Finex convention proper, I was also able to see the progress that the island has made in terms of its information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector—familiar to me because of the industry

I am now in. Even by the standards of Manila, the progress seems impressive.

I had a chance to make my way to the IT Park across the Waterfront Hotel, and the buzz and flurry of activity among the businesses there were palpable. All the recognizable names among the leading BPO organizations seem to be represented, a testament to their belief in the ability of the Cebuanos to be able to deliver world-class IT and BPO services to their demanding customers all over the world.

And on the way back to Manila, I found myself aboard one of Cebu Pacific’s brand new airbuses, amazed by the airline’s ability to depart and arrive on time, and even more amazed by its ability to offer fares at very competitive rates.

And little wonder that it can do all this, because it is owned by Mr. Gokongwei himself, one of Cebu’s favorite sons.
(http://asbb-foreignex-change.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on October 23, 2009.

Finex does Cebu

2009-10-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

I THOUGHT I had seen the end of it. Of Ondoy that is. The week after the storm hit Metro Manila, leaving in its wake hundreds of people dead, many families left to rue their losses in property and loved ones, not to mention the billions of pesos of damage wrought on our already ravaged economy,

I was glad to be out of the capital.

Yes, I was in Cebu of all places, to attend the annual convention of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (Finex), the country’s premier association of professionals in the field of finance. Held at the new Parklane Hotel across the sprawling Cebu Business Park, the event was very well attended, not only by the association’s movers and shakers in Manila, but also by the hardworking and loyal members of its satellite and affiliate organizations in the provinces.

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Dignitaries too were in full attendance. Cebu’s own Mike Rama delivered the opening address to the visiting financiers, exhorting them on their theme of “Transcending Global Challenges.” Then there was former energy secretary Vince Perez, engaging as usual, and in his element as he was talking about opportunities in the alternative energy sector. There was also Region 7’s own Gary Teves, whose job it was to explain to all gathered what the government was doing to fix its seemingly bottomless budget deficit, a task not made any easier by the ravages of Ondoy. And finally there was Cebu’s son Ace Durano, regaling the audience with his tales of endless possibilities for the country’s tourism sector.

All in all, the Finex convention was a resounding success, showcasing the province and city’s progress in the process.

In addition to the parade of dignitaries, the event also featured notable Cebuano success stories in the field of business—a reminder to the Manileños that entrepreneurship was alive and well in places outside of the capital, and most especially in Cebu.

First on the list of the guest entrepreneurs was Kenneth Cobonpue, who at this stage is already considered one of the country’s top design gurus. His products have received worldwide acclaim, and his client list counts the likes of Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford among his loyal customers.

Hot on Ken’s heels was young Wharton-schooled businessman Butch Carungay, who spoke about his passion for design as inspiring his move away from investment banking to the fashion accessories business. Already holding shows in Paris, Milan and New York, Butch told an admiring audience how he raised the game in terms of the country’s fashion accessories exports, transforming the image of Philippine fashion accessories from cheap generic to expensive branded items.

The third but certainly not the least among the Cebuano entrepreneurs was Bunny Pages, owner of a number of business interests that span education and hospitality.

Displaying an uncanny ability to spot undervalued businesses and up and coming opportunities, he narrated his story, and how he has always been able to acquire businesses that were seemingly underdelivering on their promise, and how he was able to make them deliver their potential. With his life motto of always “moving forward,” he certainly wowed the audience with his keen sense of the possibilities of business opportunities out there.

It was Cebu’s turn to shine under the lights, and the island certainly did not disappoint. If there were any doubters among the country’s top financiers about Cebu’ s future growth prospects, all of them certainly left convinced about the island’s potential. More next week.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on October 17, 2009.

What’s in a name (conclusion)

2009-07-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

CORPORATE names count for a lot, es-pecially in today’s overcrowded marketing space.
Household brands like Coca-Cola, Budweiser and Marlboro have proved priceless for their corporate parents, and their reputations are being zealously guarded by their trademark owners, like the golden treasures of Fort Knox.

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And quite rightly so.

Who would, for example, not recognize the name Coca-Cola? From the hinterlands of the Amazon to the foothills of the Himalayas, it would probably be difficult to find somebody who would not be able to identify the unmistakably curvy bottle that embodies the brand.

And then there is the new Coke – Microsoft. It would not be a stretch to imagine that not a soul in the whole wide world would be oblivious to the name. Just in our own country, the ubiquitous Internet café is everywhere, and even street urchins are now savvy enough to create their own Friendster and Facebook accounts on Microsoft-operated PCs.

With the age of globalization, of course, comes the age of the global brands. Spread by the increasing reach of mass media and, of course, the all-conquering worldwide web, the powerful advertising messages of these global brands have become almost impossible for anyone to escape.
The other trend that has fuelled the rise of brand empires is the advent of mega sports franchises like Manchester United and Real Madrid. With an audience estimated in the billions, and a passionate following circling the world many times over, the brands that the shirts of these teams carry is guaranteed instant name recognition.

This is what AIG experienced when in 2007, it sponsored the Manchester United name, and had its brand emblazoned across the chest of sporting gods like Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand. Almost instantly, the heretofore almost anonymous AIG name became synonymous with the Red Devils, and fans all overwere mouthing the brand like a mantra, from the pubs of Manchester to the beer gardens of Bangkok.

The AIG name worked like a charm for United, too. In 2007, the team won its first Premier League title in many years, and in the next year retained the title, along with winning the Champions League for only the second time in almost a decade.

Then came September 2008, and the world changed for AIG. From a name synonymous with victory, it suddenly became an object of ridicule and loathing–exemplars of the greed that people had now come to associate with corporate America, and the genesis of the global financial crisis.
Today, the name that AIG has built so painstakingly with its business success over so many years, as well as the added Manchester United boost, is about to be consigned to history.

Its component companies —including our very own Philamlife—are scrambling to rid themselves of the AIG tag, and reinventing their images behind new brands, preferably as far away from the AIG association as possible.

And little wonder that they are. Corporate brand names may be global franchises, and they may reap golden rewards for their owners when used properly. But once tarnished, they become like lead weights that only drag their companies down, if not abandoned in time.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on July 25, 2009.

What is in a name?

2009-07-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

WHAT'S in a name?

Apparently, a lot!

In the United Kingdom today, for example, the IN thing to have is what is called a double-barrelled name, or the hyphenated (or sometimes non-hyphenated) combination of one’s maiden and married names (or for males, their maternal and parental surnames or even grandmaternal and grandpaternal surnames, if the name has extended to more than one generation).
Thus, you have people like Anthony Worral-Thompson, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Sascha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter standing out from the rest of their crowds, their names adding cachet to their already celebrity standing.

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Names count for a lot, too, even in the Philippines.

In my generation, it was American names for babies that were fashionable. Thus, many of my contemporaries have names like Randy, Leslie, Joy and Florence.

In my grandfather’s generation, their names tended to be Spanish-sounding ones, such as Juanito, Fernando, Vidala and Elena. Today, in the generation after us, Spanish names have become fashionable once more, usually given as combinations like Juan-Emmanuel. Likewise, “old-sounding”

English names have come back into vogue, like Jacob Anthony or Joshua Thomas.

Corporates, too, have their own favorites as far as names are concerned.

In the early part of the last century, the IN thing to have was long and rather formal sounding corporate names, just like the double-barrelled English surnames in our example. Jardine Davies, The Imperial Chemical Company, Patons & Baldwins, Procter & Gamble—these were just some of the organizations that were famous during that era, with some surviving and being even more famous today.

Organizations established in more contemporary times had shorter, and in some instances, “weirder” names than those founded before them. Sprint, Verizon, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are probably good examples of these.

And yet for all the generational nuances, once established, names are likely to be kept for a long time by the organizations that have them. Today, for example, the turn-of-the-century Jardine organizations and Procter & Gamble stand shoulder to shoulder with more recently established ones, like Amazon and Google. Different generations with different norms on the form and structure of their company names. And yet, all of them are powerful brands, with name recognition very high among their target customers.

What this seems to show, then, is that it is not the names as such, but the positive associations that come with the name. Be they the long versions of a hundred years ago, or the abbreviated ones from the turn of the millennium, so long as the names themselves have earned the credibility and respect from their customers, the name is a winner.

But what happens to those with long-established corporate identities, that now suddenly find themselves out of favor in the name recall game?

The global financial crisis has forced this question into the open, with erstwhile “famous” names like Citicorp (Citibank), Merrill Lynch, The Royal Bank of Scotland, AIG and many others having had theirs tarnished—and some would even argue—beyond repair.

What is to be done with them?

More next week.
(http://asbb-foreignexchange. blogspot.com & http://twitter. com/asbbatuhan)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on July 18, 2009.

A sleeping giant awakens

2009-04-15T22:38:00.001-07:00

IN the era of the truly global economy, few players stand out from the rest. These are the giant multinational corporations, whose reach transcends borders, and whose activities dwarf many of even the world’s biggest economies.

And among those business organizations that can be considered truly global in scope and reach, perhaps none could claim to have such a profound influence on the world’s economy than the American International Group (AIG).

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Prior to the meltdown of the world’s financial markets last year, AIG was a behemoth among giants, casting its influence in all corners of the world, and having a stake in all sectors of the financial services industry, from retail to corporate banking, to corporate finance and investment banking, and to securities underwriting and insurance.

So huge was its business expanse that if we were to borrow an old phrase from the English colonialists, we could say that “the sun never sets on AIG’s business.”

Of course, fate has a way of dealing with even the most mighty, and it did deal AIG an almost fatal blow on the occasion of the global financial meltdown.

As it turns out, one of the reasons for the organization’s dominance in the international scene was its large-scale participation in the burgeoning business of assetsecuritization—the now infamous sub-prime mortgage saga, which brought down in its wake a number of well-respected financial institutions, including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and many others.

When the American housing market started to turn sour, the assets underlying the securities that AIG and the other market makers were issuing shrunk in value, forcing the issuers to ante up collateral to guarantee them with the subsequent buyers. The resulting need for huge amounts of cash collateral forced many into bankruptcy, consolidation and even liquidation.

As the old adage goes, “owe the bank a few thousand dollars, and the bank owns you; owe the bank a few million dollars, and you own the bank.” Fortunately for AIG, the sheer size of its exposure into the global debt markets made it impossible to allow its collapse. If it were to happen, the knock-on impact would be unimaginable. So to stave off a complete financial Armageddon, the Federal government stepped in and rescued the financial giant, propping it up with billions of dollars in federallyguaranteed loans.

While many had written off the financial giant to eventual collapse, slowly but surely AIG rebuilt itself from the ashes of its former self. Many of AIG’s core businesses remained strong, with dominant positions in the major global markets.

For example, Philamlife remains the Philippines’ largest insurer, with a franchise envied by all of its competitors.

A significant part of AIG’s resurgence is the contribution of its current chief executive, Edward Liddy.
A respected investment banker and insurance executive, Liddy brought with him to AIG a credible reputation, which allowed AIG to have an effective dialogue with the Federal government, its current backer and guarantor. It also gave the insurance company a better image in the financial markets.
Today, after a successful stint at stabilizing the wounded giant, Liddy steps down and gives way to an equally respected executive in Robert Benmosche, former MetLife CEO.

Where AIG will go from here on is still a big question mark.

But as Admiral Yamamoto once said after bombing Pearl Harbor, the sleeping giant might just be reawakening.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on August 15, 2009.

Are you ready for this?

2009-02-09T22:16:00.000-08:00

NO, it’s not an excerpt from the Queen song.

I am referring to the path-breaking choice that Americans may have to make in the presidential elections in November.

Never has the world’s most powerful democratic nation been confronted with as unprecedented a choice — in fact two choices — at least concerning one half of the electoral process.

Would they elect a white woman or a black man to the presidency of the most influential nation on earth?

Never before have the gender and color barrier ever been breached in the contest for the American presidency. The Rev. Jesse Jackson tried and failed to secure his party’s nomination for the presidency, and Geraldine Ferraro, although managing to gain her party’s confidence, was only running for the post of vice president.

But a woman or a black man for the highest elected post in perhaps all of the world? Is America ready for this? Is the world even ready for this?

All the way from George Washington to George W. Bush — 43 presidents and 212 years later — there has never been a person of color of any gender or a female person of any color who has managed to occupy the highest office of the land. And even that exclusive club is limited still.

White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs), with the exception only of a few with Irish-Catholic roots, have tended to keep the office of the presidency as a virtual monopoly for themselves.

Only the Americans themselves can really say if they are ready. As a shining beacon of hope, democracy and liberty to the rest of the world, is the nation finally at a stage where it can actually practice what it has preached for so long?

Oh yes, indeed. We forget that among America’s nation-students, many have already breached the gender or color barriers long ago. Even a conservative male-dominated Moslem country has had Benazir Bhutto as prime minister, and an ethnically more homogenous Peru has elected a Japanese-Peruvian, Alberto Fujimori, as its president.

But in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where women and persons of color have enjoyed success in almost any field of endeavor, the long line of almost exclusively WASPs has remained unbroken — that is until this year’s election rolls along.

The Democratic Party will certainly break the mould first, for the first time nominating a candidate belonging to either category as its standard bearer for the electoral contest. Because apart from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, everyone else in the party has put away his or her presidential ambitions on hold, at least for another four years.

But the bigger question remains — can America go all the way and break the mould as a nation, by choosing whoever it is that the Democrats put up for the public vote?

It all remains to be seen, of course, because America today is saddled with a host of serious problems that have neither to do with race nor gender. Its economy is badly in need of rejuvenation, and issues of security continue to haunt its collective consciousness — both problems which Democrats have not been known to be very good at solving, apart perhaps from the Clinton years being economically prosperous times for the nation.

But the implications for America will be significant if it does go ahead and break new ground. For it will give the rest of the world the unequivocal message that all of us — black or white, male or female — are truly equal as people on this earth.

(asbb.mbm91@aimalumni.org)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on February 9, 2009.

In the eye of the storm (Conclusion)

2008-12-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

WE have seen the enemy, and it is us.

As far as the American consumers and the current financial crisis are concerned, the above phrase could not be any more appropriate. The biggest share of the collective blame lies squarely with them, and the way the United States lives today.

Many of us have friends and family in the United States. A good number will have been there ourselves.

Therefore, when I make a statement like this, it should come as a surprise to no one. How many of our friends and acquaintances Stateside own large SUVs? How many live in nice homes, with all the furniture and furnishings obtained through easy credit? How many generally live a lifestyle that seems to be beyond their reach, and act as if money is always there when they need it?

The truth is, watching the crisis unfold has been like witnessing a runaway train in slow motion.

We all knew the accident was bound to happen at some point, but everyone was powerless to stop it.

All the fingers are now pointed at the banks, the financial institutions and the car companies, for all having acted irresponsibly and caused the world to fall down. But if we really stepped back a bit from the burning rubble and tried to sift for evidence, we would probably conclude that the fire had its origins somewhere else.

Take the car companies, who are now being accused of making the “wrong” cars and not being “sensitive” enough to the needs of their consumers.

Well just a year ago—and probably even more recently than that, what their consumers wanted were large gas-guzzling SUVs. Back in the days when petrol was more affordable, did anyone, apart from Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, ever consider being seen in a hybrid car? I don’t believe so. So really they were not being irresponsible, they were just being market savvy.

And what of the savings banks which were all rushing to grant more outrageously priced mortgages, the investment banks tripping all over themselves to package the loans and sell them off as investment-grade Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), and the insurance companies like AIG thinking they could benefit from the whole situation by insuring the CDOs by means of Credit Default Swaps?

If we are really being very honest about it, they were just acting according to their roles in a free market. They saw a demand, and went ahead and tried to fill it. This is, after all, the mantra of capitalist economics—give the consumer what he or she wants, and your business succeeds.
The consumers want cheap loans, give it to them. They like to ride in large SUVs, make some for them.

We cannot, and most especially the Americans, cannot have their cake and eat it too. The capitalist world (and today this means all the world) has made a choice, and it is a simple one. It wants free markets to work without state intervention. It resents overregulation, and prefers only minimum oversight to ensure the compliance to laws and regulations, but not a sense check of their “greater good” to society.

In such a society, where the free hand of the market governs, the premise is that the ultimate responsibility lies with the consumer. This is the whole premise of a capitalist society—that no matter what happens, we believe that we should be free to make our own choices, and to create our own opportunities.

Unfortunately, this choice has a flipside, too. We should also be responsible for our actions, and accountable for the consequences of our excesses.

This crisis is simply a reminder to all of us consumers, and to the American consumer in particular, that the buck stops right here.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange. blogspot.com)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on December 05, 2008.

The modern business of slavery

2008-07-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

IT is a well-know fact, even to basketball-crazy Filipinos, that football—for most parts of the world - has become the equivalent of religion.

In Manchester, for example, Church of England Sunday services are now rarely attended, especially by younger parishioners. In contrast, Old Trafford, home of the world-famous Manchester United team, draws tens of thousands to its Sunday matches.

It is, thus, a surprise when one hears a word that is probably not always equated with successful phenomena of this magnitude. That word is slavery.

Yes, slavery. A word with connotations of squalor and poverty. One that denotes bondage and oppression, and so far-removed from the success and opulence that those in the game now enjoy.

Sepp Blatter, president of football’s governing body FIFA, made the allusion recently in describing the situation facing Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo—arguably one of the game’s best players today—and who is reportedly linked with a move to Spanish giants Real Madrid.

The move makes good commercial sense for both parties.

Ronaldo has recently won the Champions league with United —an accomplishment seen as second only to winning the World Cup. Real Madrid, on the other hand, although considered “Kings of Europe” for having won the tournament the most number of times, has not done so in recent years. For them, having a player of this caliber just might propel them to their former heights of glory.

For Ronaldo, on the other hand, winning it with another team will prove that he did not achieve victory the first time around simply by riding on the coattails of a great team like United. It will recognize him as a truly one of a kind player that wins tournaments for teams, and not just with them.

Just one hitch stands in the way of this dream partnership, however. Ronaldo is still contracted to United for a few years to come yet—until the Olympics come around to England in 2012, to be exact.

This is where Sepp Blatter steps in and pronounces the player’s situation as “slavery.” He further advises United to respect his wishes, and to let him go to Real Madrid, should it be his desire to do so.

FIFA has never had good relations with English football for a variety of reasons, and Blatter and Alex Ferguson, United’s fiery Scottish manager, have never gotten along particularly well over the years. But this perceived interference by Blatter in the club’s affairs did not exactly qualify as diplomacy on Blatter’s part.

Today’s players of Ronaldo’s caliber are simply no slaves, in whatever terms we may describe slavery to be. They earn in a day far in excess of what even top executives in the Philippines can hope to make in a year. They and their dependents are set for life, and this through doing the thing they love the most – playing football.

How many of us can claim to enjoy such privilege?

The business of slavery is alive and well in the modern world.

Young girls from Eastern Europe and Asia are trafficked against their wishes to brothels in the West, where criminal gangs make huge amounts of money from exploiting them.

Modern sportswear manufacturers realize huge amounts of profit by sub-contracting their goods with sweatshops in China and India, employing child labor at ridiculously low wages. And back home, syndicates employ street children to beg and steal for their benefit.

Yes, slavery is still a thriving business in the modern world. But it would do Sepp Blatter well next time to think twice before comparing Ronaldo’s dilemma, to the real slavery that confronts us every day in our part of the world.

(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com)
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on July 26, 2008.

Counting the Cost of Iraq (2)

2008-04-12T02:41:00.000-07:00

Is it, or is it not? This seems to be the question on everyone’s minds, but as yet, it seems that economists are divided over the answer.

Whether or not America is already in recession is something that people may still be debating about, but really purely on semantics. In reality, the slowdown is already very much upon the economy, and signs of it are everywhere.

Whoever has not heard of the sub-prime mortgage market before has surely been well educated about it by now. Already claiming a number of iconic American financial institutions like Bear Stearns, it has also caused the downfall of Northern Rock, one of the United Kingdom’s most trusted names in mortgage lending.

Of course, weakness in the financial system is never good, at least not for an economy that relies on borrowed money (and time) to finance itself. America -- as is all too familiar to most of us who have lived or visited there -- does not dwell in the present, as far as financing its consumer spending goes. Not in the least do consumers think about how much they earn before succumbing to that temptation to spend, but only about how much their credit limit can afford. Thus it is not uncommon for someone who subsists on survival wages to own expensive goods, all financed by plastic, and paid monthly in instalments so insignificant that in reality, it will take the borrower’s entire lifetime to ever repay.

As long as things stay on the up and up, living dangerously – in the financial sense – seems to be sustainable. Since the Clinton years, Americans have enjoyed an unprecedented period of economic prosperity that has made their economy the envy of those in the rest of the world. Set against the backdrop of economic confusion in the European Union, the stagnation of the Japanese economy, and fiscal mismanagement just about everywhere else, it seems the United States could do no wrong.

Clearly, with such a buoyant mood comes a certain sense of invincibility, and inevitably, recklessness. It is probably unwise to blame the financial community for causing the problem in its entirety, but it is not totally without basis to say that not-so-prudent instruments such as risky sub-prime mortgages and questionable asset-backed securities saw their heyday during the boom years.

Enter the “shock and awe” of George Bush’s Iraq adventure.

Without question, the decision to invade the Middle Eastern country was also spurred on by the same sense of American dominance that prevailed in the economic arena. After all, prosperity is power, and America certainly was feeling pretty powerful in those days.

Those days, unfortunately, are now long gone.

However little you remember of your economics classes all those many years ago, this you must not forget – psychology and economics are inseparable twins. The failure of the U.S. to impose its will on Iraq, the seeming hopelessness of the American occupation forces in the face of their enemies’ hit and run tactics, and the uncertainty of global oil supplies as a consequence of the protracted conflict, have all but depressed the American consumer into thinking that all cannot be well for the future. And as we already said, whatever the mind thinks, the economy mirrors. The result is an impending economic slowdown that now threatens to derail the global economy.

George W. Bush may have been motivated by dreams of historical immortality when he invaded Iraq – to be remembered like the war-time presidents who are forever worshipped in America's collective memory. But all he has managed so far is to awaken the nation’s most harrowing nightmare – that of an economy waking up to the fact that all along, it has been living on borrowed time – and the payback is drawing nigh.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, April 12, 2008

Counting The Cost of Iraq

2008-03-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

Whatever it was that George W. Bush must have been thinking when he decided to sponsor the invasion of Iraq, at the recent passing of its fifth anniversary, all those thoughts would have long been part of his distant memory. For never perhaps in his most pessimistic estimates would Bush have envisioned that Iraq would turn out the way it has—the killing fields not only of American soldiers, but the burial ground of its economy as well.

As far as casualties go, it is not quite on the scale of America’s previous engagements, such as the Great World War, the Second World War or even the more confined Vietnam conflict just yet. Those campaigns cost the United States whole generations of men and women—killed or wounded, with the latter both in physical and psychological terms. The Iraqi war has so far eluded the high body counts of Vietnam, but the impact it has had on the country cannot be underestimated.

They called Vietnam “a war made for television,” and unlike any other before it. It was responsible for exposing the horrors of armed conflict to the average family in middle America. It coincided, of course, with the rise of television as the medium of choice for news and information, and TV made sure that every twist and turn of that conflict made their way to America’s living rooms every evening, without fail.

The result was a generation of politicized Americans so horrified by the images of war that played out before their eyes, it took the US many years to even consider intervening in other countries’ troubles ever again.

History, however, has a way of glossing over the horrors of the past, especially once the generation that saw those horrors firsthand are no longer as traumatized with the experience. This was especially true with the administration of the current President Bush.

Unlike his father—who was a World War II fighter pilot—and even latter-day political stalwarts like John Kerry and John McCain, Bush did not fight in any conflict America was involved in, preferring instead to serve his country through the relatively safer duties of the Texas Air National Guard. Without demeaning the service, nor the patriotism of those who serve in the Guard, Bush was able to avoid actual conflict, and as a result, was probably less horrified by the prospect of waging war, and its deadly consequences.

He was thus able to rationalize his intentions as being purely motivated by America’s national security interests, and divorce himself from the emotions that the likes of Kerry and McCain would have, by definition, brought into the decision. In a manner of speaking, it was easier for him to send young Americans “in harm’s way,” because he himself had no idea what “in harm’s way” really meant to those soldiers on the ground.

Today, however, his memory vividly aided by the seemingly endless chain of flights ferrying back the dead and wounded from the battlefields of Iraq, George Bush must be one well-informed man indeed—well informed that is on the true horrors of war.

As it is, the scene of grieving widows and orphans must be enough to give any president sleepless nights over the propriety of his actions. But that is just one aspect of the cost of this terrible war—the other dimensions are just as damaging, and perhaps, even more damning for the legacy of this two-term president about to end his turn in power.

More next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, March 29, 2008

Economic Diet (Part 2)

2008-03-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

America, certainly, is a land of the obese and overweight.

Despite the obsession with Size Zero among the anorexic Hollywood crowd, the average American is a great deal many sizes more than your waif-like A-lister. Years of supersizing on burgers, fries and shakes tell their toll on a population that is probably, pound for pound, among the most overweight in the world.

What is going on in their physical state is exactly mirrored in their economic affairs as well.

Maxed-out credit cards—the financial equivalent of obesity—seems to be the norm among most Americans these days. The availability of cheap credit to people who are not used to financial prudence has given rise to this phenomenon, and fuelled what could yet be a time-bomb waiting to explode on the world.

One of the problems with our modern eco-nomy is that it has become too complicated for most of our consumers to understand. And one of the most misunderstood elements is personal credit—manifested by the now ubiquitous plastic credit card.

As they were conceived, credit cards were meant to replace cash in financial transactions. Convenience was its key feature, in that consumers no longer had to carry and count cash and change whenever and wherever they shopped. The operative word here, however, is “replace.”

The assumption is that the card holder still has the “cash” to purchase something with, just that payment is not actually made with the physical cash during the actual transaction.

Herein lies the big problem.

Today, credit cards are not looked at as replacements for cash transactions anymore, but as “supplements” to one’s actual cash funds. In other words, with an income of $2,000 per month, and a credit card with a $10,000 limit, most would assume that they could spend more than their monthly cash income.

But how could this be sustainable. If one consistently spent $2,000 plus per month on credit card purchases, and yet earned only $2,000 per month in income, how could one possibly hope to pay for all of his or her debt?

The answer is—one cannot.

Many Americans carry perpetual credit card balances, which they just transfer from credit card to credit card, without any prospect of ever paying for it in full. In good times, this practice is OK for a while, but when credit tightens in the event of an economic slowdown, all hell breaks loose.

What America, and indeed most of the West, now need is a re-education in personal financial prudence. People need to get back to basics and understand what personal financial responsibility is all about.

Before the invention of credit cards, this huge debt problem that now plagues America did not exist in this magnitude. With the plastic economy that we have today, somehow the issue seems to be spiraling well out of control.

I certainly would not advocate banning all personal credit altogether, because it has its important place in a functioning modern economy. What I would suggest, however, is moderation from consumers in spending with credit, as well as from financial institutions in extending that credit.

With a little bit more responsibility from both sides, whilst we still will not be able to avoid economic cycles altogether, it will be one hell of a smoother ride, I can guarantee you.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, March 15, 2008

Economic Diet

2008-03-01T02:34:00.000-08:00

Watching the Academy Awards ceremony last week, one would be forgiven for thinking that all is well in the United States of America. The endless parade of the Hollywood glitterati through the red carpet—in their designer frocks and million-dollar blings—would never give away the fact that storm clouds are a-brewing in the American economy.

And dark storm clouds they seem to be as well too.

Yes, for ordinary Americans, 2008 would seem to be a very difficult year indeed. The housing market is in the doldrums, unemployment is on the rise, and business confidence is at an all-time low. To compound the situation further, fuel prices show no sign of coming down, just as the war in Iraq seems to go on forever and ever.

One need not be an economist to tell that all is not well indeed!

It is amazing how today we know so much more about our health and well being. It used to be that in the past, dieting and exercise was the preserve of either the idle rich, or movie stars who need it to continue earning a living. Today, the general population is quite aware of their lifestyle habits, and most people know what they need to be doing to stay physically healthy.

Funny enough, we are being told now that the best diet is a no-diet. In other words, if one ate sensibly, exercised regularly and stayed away from excessive drinking and smoking, this lifestyle would benefit our health much better than indulging in excess, and then going on starvation diets to burn off the excess poundage afterwards. The latter not only stresses the heart but harms other vital organs as well, such as our liver.

In other words, for our health, the key is moderation.

A bit amazing therefore that what we know to be good for our physical health, we still haven’t quite figured out would be good for our economic health as well. One only needs to look back a few years ago at the American economy to understand what we mean.

During the good years, money, it seemed, was no object to the American consumer. Fuelled by the availability of cheap credit, everyone went on spending sprees, buying everything in sight—from fancy houses, expensive cars, flashy jewelry, designer clothes and grand vacations.

This orgy of spending, in turn, benefited a lot of businesses while it lasted. Companies expanded to meet the demand, employing more people to support their growing businesses. The newly employed, in turn, took it upon themselves to fuel the spending spree even more, creating still more demand and feeding a growing cycle of prosperity that seemed to go on and on.

But as the unhealthy soon find out about their condition, so does the economy realize that all is not well.

Like a chronic disease slowly manifesting itself over time, certain triggers eventually lead to a correction. High fuel prices tell their toll first. Rising business costs compel some to save money elsewhere, often by reducing their workforce. Sometimes they outsource a number of their processes overseas, for the same financial benefits, and also with similar consequences to their employees.

Of course, people without jobs lose the capacity to buy, and also the ability to pay for their past purchases.

More next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, March 01, 2008

Origin Of Crime

2008-02-23T02:25:00.000-08:00

Sometime back, we wrote about one of the most horrify ing crimes Britain had ever seen.

In the English town of Ipswich, five women had been senselessly murdered. All had one thing in common, apart from being victims of a sadistic maniacal killer — they were all hard drug users — addicted to narcotic substances like cocaine and heroine. And in order to fund their expensive but unbreakable habit, they all turned to the one thing that women in desperate situations have sometimes resorted to over the ages — selling themselves for cash.

Although all of them had once been normal young ladies — with a few even coming from privileged backgrounds — their situations had invariably led them to prostitute themselves just to support their addictions. Addictions that, in the end, eventually cost them their lives.

Just this week, justice was finally served on the perpetrator of this most heinous of crimes. A forklift truck operator by the name of Steve Wright has been found guilty by a jury of his peers, and is expected to be sentenced to life, without possibility of parole.

Or possibly — not.

Because in the United Kingdom today, the subject of crime has become what many hardliners and conservatives would call “kindergarten justice” – where criminals, including even the most violent ones, often get away with literally just slaps on the wrist.

Mr. Wright’s offence, however, is something else entirely.

In a show of anger that seems quite out of character with British stoicism, calls for the restoration of the death penalty have come from many quarters, including those who have in the past been quite liberal in terms of their attitudes towards criminals and their punishment.

In this instance, people feel that the gravity of the offences ought to merit something that is beyond the normal range of sentencing norms — a price that the perpetrator should feel is the just retribution for his act — and that should equate the callousness and cold-blooded nature of his crimes with the severity of the punishment. And in a lot of people’s minds, he ought to pay with his own life, just as he had taken those of his victims’.

Reinstating the death penalty in Britain, however, is a feat that is perhaps as difficult to achieve as abolishing the monarchy, though ironically it was the latter who had used the former to such effect in ensuring that its subjects stayed in line and obeyed their majesties’ every word and command.

Modern Britain, and indeed much of Western society, now believes that the answer to preventing crime is rehabilitating, not punishing the criminal. In today’s view of the criminal mind, the main motivations seem to be more circumstances beyond the criminal’s control, such as poverty, child abuse, social neglect, drug abuse, and mental illness.

There is very little room for believing that perpetrators are genuinely aware of their crimes, and take pleasure from committing it. In many people’s minds, the criminal is as much a victim of his crime as the actual victim is.

But could this view to the origins of crime really be sustainable? And could this attitude in fact deter criminals from perpetrating their dastardly deeds on the rest of us in society?

Time will tell. For in the West today, many are increasingly of the belief that society’s lax attitudes towards criminals and criminality is partly to blame for helping to fuel the rise in violent crime that seems to have become the biggest scourge of our time.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, February 23, 2008

Are You Ready For This?

2008-02-09T02:19:00.000-08:00

NO, it’s not an excerpt from the Queen song.

I am referring to the path-breaking choice that Americans may have to make in the presidential elections in November.

Never has the world’s most powerful democratic nation been confronted with as unprecedented a choice — in fact two choices — at least concerning one half of the electoral process.

Would they elect a white woman or a black man to the presidency of the most influential nation on earth?

Never before have the gender and color barrier ever been breached in the contest for the American presidency. The Rev. Jesse Jackson tried and failed to secure his party’s nomination for the presidency, and Geraldine Ferraro, although managing to gain her party’s confidence, was only running for the post of vice president.

But a woman or a black man for the highest elected post in perhaps all of the world? Is America ready for this? Is the world even ready for this?

All the way from George Washington to George W. Bush — 43 presidents and 212 years later — there has never been a person of color of any gender or a female person of any color who has managed to occupy the highest office of the land. And even that exclusive club is limited still.

White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs), with the exception only of a few with Irish-Catholic roots, have tended to keep the office of the presidency as a virtual monopoly for themselves.

Only the Americans themselves can really say if they are ready. As a shining beacon of hope, democracy and liberty to the rest of the world, is the nation finally at a stage where it can actually practice what it has preached for so long?

Oh yes, indeed. We forget that among America’s nation-students, many have already breached the gender or color barriers long ago. Even a conservative male-dominated Moslem country has had Benazir Bhutto as prime minister, and an ethnically more homogenous Peru has elected a Japanese-Peruvian, Alberto Fujimori, as its president.

But in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where women and persons of color have enjoyed success in almost any field of endeavor, the long line of almost exclusively WASPs has remained unbroken — that is until this year’s election rolls along.

The Democratic Party will certainly break the mould first, for the first time nominating a candidate belonging to either category as its standard bearer for the electoral contest. Because apart from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, everyone else in the party has put away his or her presidential ambitions on hold, at least for another four years.

But the bigger question remains — can America go all the way and break the mould as a nation, by choosing whoever it is that the Democrats put up for the public vote?

It all remains to be seen, of course, because America today is saddled with a host of serious problems that have neither to do with race nor gender. Its economy is badly in need of rejuvenation, and issues of security continue to haunt its collective consciousness — both problems which Democrats have not been known to be very good at solving, apart perhaps from the Clinton years being economically prosperous times for the nation.

But the implications for America will be significant if it does go ahead and break new ground. For it will give the rest of the world the unequivocal message that all of us — black or white, male or female — are truly equal as people on this earth.

Published in The Sun Star Daily, Saturday, February 09, 2008

Corruption Western-Style

2008-02-02T02:12:00.000-08:00

CORRUPTION has got to be one of the major challenges of our time.

Along with the issues of sustainable economic development, global warming, the elusive peace in the Middle East and the new pandemics affecting large swathes of our population, solving the problem could prove to be a critical turning point in our modern age.

What makes it so crucial is that it affects the solution to almost any other issue of significance that we are trying to solve. Take for example the Aids problem in the developing world.

Already as it is, there is a major funding shortage to finance new research, and the production of cheaper drug formulations that would benefit the majority of sufferers. As it happens, most of the affected areas are also in places where corruption is at its most rampant. As a result, millions of dollars that would otherwise have gone to combating the disease goes to the pockets of crooked bureaucrats, who care not if their countrymen continue to die by the thousands so long as they get their share of the largesse.

The same thing could be said with the care of refugees displaced by frequent conflicts in the world’s troubled hot spots. They too are frequent victims of corrupt practices in the places where they are, with funds supposed to be for their welfare continuing to be siphoned to the bank accounts of the very people who are supposed to be looking after them.

There has always been the belief, and perhaps this is mainly accurate, that corruption affects less developed economies more than they do countries in the West. After all, research and evidence shows that large parts of Africa, many countries in Asia, and a good number of states in Latin America – all less developed regions – lead the world in terms of corruption-related problems.

It is not too difficult to see why.

These countries are also stricken with extreme poverty, in most cases, making the temptation to profit from illicit means very strong indeed. Many of the institutions in these countries tend to be weak and unstable, making corruption cases very difficult to uncover and prosecute. And, of course, a strong and independent media is almost always non-existent, and therefore scandals are that much harder to investigate.

But the events of last week show that even in the advanced economies of the West, corruption is still very much alive and well.

Take the case of Derek Conway, a Conservative member of the British Parliament. Not unlike the practice of some Filipino politicians, Conway stands accused of improperly including his son in his staff payroll, without the latter having any clear official duties to back up his designation of researcher.

And the story only gets more interesting.

It seems another son may have also been paid in the same way, and even a Canadian friend of their sons could also have been on the receiving end of some payments.

What does this prove?

Nothing perhaps that we Filipinos, so used to seeing corruption within our midst, do not already know.

Integrity, and thus the ability to resist the temptation to engage in corruption, is not only enforced by systems of good governance, such as Britain has, but rather starts much earlier than that – during a person’s formative years when he learns the good old fashioned values of honesty, truthfulness and fair play.

Leave it any later than this, and it all remains just a matter of time, and the right opportunity to come along.

Published in The Sun Star Daily, Saturday, February 02, 2008

Economic Insanity

2008-01-26T02:03:00.000-08:00

ESPECIALLY to the younger ones among us, the events of last week must have been one of the worst in their living memory – in economic terms, that is.

All around the world, going around the time zones like some dark and insidious plague, stock markets plummeted to their lowest levels in years, with each successive opening spooked by the results of the one before it.

Billions of dollars in market value were wiped out in a matter of minutes.

But then like some white knight to the rescue, the markets of the Far East sprung into action, buoyed partly by the response of the U.S. Federal Reserve, as well as confidence in their own economies to withstand the possibility of an economic slowdown in the West. And from that wellspring of optimism, a reversal of sorts took place in the major markets, recovering most of the value they lost in that single day of pandemonium. By week’s end, though still fragile, much of the damage seems to have been repaired, at least momentarily.

Difficult to explain sometimes, the financial markets. But perhaps not so strange when you think of who’s behind this amorphous thing called the “the market.”

That’s we, the people, of course.

No wonder then that markets act so strangely sometimes –- being the collective sentiment of thousands upon thousands of individual sellers, consumers, financiers and financial intermediaries interacting with one another in all sorts of ways.

It’s hard to explain the reasons behind these movements most times. If we really think about it, nothing much seems to have changed in our world from, say, a couple of years back. The planet is as populous as ever, climate change is still a major challenge of our time, and peace in the Middle East remains as elusive as it has always been. So why the sudden shift in our economic prosperity between then and now? What has happened to the world that has made us collectively poorer than we were a couple of years ago?

In tangible terms, perhaps nothing much has really changed. But our sentiments have shifted significantly. With the war in Iraq dragging on with no end in sight, worries have started to creep up concerning the future supplies of oil, thereby pushing prices up and putting pressure on costs for all manner of businesses, as well as ordinary consumers.

In response to rising costs, businesses reacted by slashing their organizations, or else exporting parts of their businesses to lower cost overseas locations, displacing thousands of their employees in the process.

Of course, the possibility of losing their jobs has unsettled a lot of consumers, causing them to hold back on their spending in order to prepare for an uncertain future. And guess what? Less consumer spending means lower corporate earnings, which lead to more rounds of layoffs, which lead to even lower consumer spending, ad infinitum.

The global economy is into a deeper and deeper spiral of despair, with no one seemingly able to pull it away from its downward course.

It is safe to say that if the economy were a person, it would have committed suicide a long time ago due to a severe mental disorder, or perhaps it would have already been interred into an asylum for the mentally deranged, for which person could afford to live with the ups and downs that the global economy undergoes every now and again?

The truth is that no person could live a life with the ups and downs of the world economy. But like it or not, we all have to live with the consequences of such seemingly insane economic behavior.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, January 26, 2008

The Covenant

2008-01-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

THESE days, it is difficult to turn on the television in Britain and not hear anything to do with gang violence.

Just this morning when I was getting ready to work, I was greeted with the heartbreaking scene of a widow crying to reporters outside the courthouse where her husband’s teenage murderers had just been sentenced for their crime. In some areas, things are supposed to have gone so bad that a number of schools have had to resort to American-type screenings for schoolchildren entering the premises, looking into their schoolbags for everything from knives, guns and an assorted array of deadly weaponry.

From all indications, it seems that the tendency for youths to join gangs has been on the uptrend, alarming authorities in the country, who appear to be helpless to stop the phenomenon.

In one informative program that I saw on the issue recently, one commentator expressed a view that seemed to me to hit the nail right on the head vis-à-vis the reason for the uptrend.

He said that youths turn to gangs as a proxy for the sense of belonging and affiliation that they do not receive in their own families.This, in a sense, is very true.

In modern day Britain, in most of the Western world, and indeed even in growing economies like the Philippines, families are becoming more and more fragmented. Either because of changing family values, the pressures of work or a combination of any of the other stresses of modern-day living, the family is losing its cohesion. Even in matters of discipline, parents have now outsourced this to schools and state authorities, conveniently blaming everyone but themselves for the problem.

In a perverse sense, one can understand why youths are drawn to their gang affiliations. Albeit in a very distorted sense, gang members have a deep sense of unwavering loyalty to each other, pledging total allegiance to the group, whatever the consequences. More than anything else, it is the sense of loyalty for each other that bind them together, and make gang life so attractive for disenchanted young people.

Commercial organizations can learn from this in a very significant way — not the violence mind you, but the impact that the perception of total loyalty has in terms of galvanizing groups into action.

Many of today’s organizations have lost the loyalty of their employees, because they have been unable to provide the assurance of total loyalty to their staff. Just as respect begets respect, loyalty to employees begets loyalty from employees.

Sadly, these days this is no longer the case.

As Scott Adams’ cartoon character Dilbert says in a famous cartoon, employees’ are no longer the company’s greatest resource. They are now seventh, right behind carbon paper and paper clips.

Behind the gallows humor is a painful truth. Too often, companies do what they do without regard for the potential impact these decisions may have on their employees.

Information about important and life changing situations like mass layoffs, business closures and job redundancies are kept well away from employees until after it is too late, rendering them unable to take the necessary steps to look after themselves.

Is it any wonder then that in today’s climate, employee loyalty has become a scare commodity to come by?

Published in The Sun Star Daily, Saturday, January 19, 2008

Openness

2008-01-12T01:54:00.000-08:00

FUNNY how these days, it is not easy to talk about workplace matters with your colleagues anymore. I used to remember a time when people were more open about their thoughts and opinions about work, and how stories around the “water cooler” or the “coffee machine” were seen as the real pulse of the organization.

Due to the uncertainty that tends to accompany the modern working environment, a lot of talk these days tends to be sanitized and neutral, and doesn’t tell you very much about what people are really thinking.

It was, therefore, somewhat of a surprise when a colleague of mine, who I am very cordial with, but with whom the topic of conversation tended to be limited to football most times, suddenly remarked to me on our walk from the car park that he felt “the culture of the company was changing, and changing too fast.”

This was the cue that I was waiting for, in terms of probing what he actually meant by that declaration. And taking my probe as his cue, he in turn started telling me his real thoughts on what he perceived was really happening.

It turns out that he was feeling what everybody else was feeling — a sense of alienation and neglect over the things that were clearly happening for everybody to see, but yet were not discussed honestly and openly with everybody else.

Change is certainly a feature of the modern-day workplace. This is something that cannot now be reversed. Even the Japanese have now moved away from the lifetime employment practices, and the French have started to adapt to the Anglo-American way of doing things as well.

It is therefore not the change itself, but the way that it is communicated to the people within the organization, that is critical. After all, it is people who make up an organization, and it is perhaps only proper that they know exactly what is happening to them.

There is something to be said about keeping things open and transparent. Even the nuclear family itself is adapting to this reality, and it is now not uncommon for family members to vote on issues of mutual concern — with Mom’s and Dad’s votes counting just as much as Junior’s.

Organizations, however, seem to be reticent in being as open with their affairs. But then, they live with the consequences of this choice.

In the military, where we know the overriding importance of loyalty and trust under fire, soldiers consider themselves comrades-in-arms, and are therefore sworn to look after each other’s backs and to leave no one behind.

It is this sense of assurance that allows them to be a cohesive unit, with each one knowing exactly where they stand.It is not probably quite as life-and-death in most organizations as it is in the military, but the principle remains the same. When people know exactly where they stand, they will give their all, and then some. And this, of course, is the most important – secure people are productive individuals, who will eventually contribute to the achievement of the organization’s goals.

The reverse is true as well.

If an organization sends the message to its workforce that their views do not count, and that they should just sit tight waiting to be told when the next sequence of events is going to unfold, they are clearly not going to be as committed and as dedicated to the organization that does not treat them with the total honesty and openness that they deserve.

Published in The Sun Star Daily, Saturday, January 12, 2008

A Brave New 2008

2008-01-05T01:49:00.000-08:00

THERE is a comforting sense of familiarity that accompanies each passage into the New Year.

Allowing for certain local variations, people everywhere tend to celebrate it in almost the same way, invariably to the rousing revelry and merrymaking that accompany the last moments of the year past, and the first of the year just come.

2008 was welcomed with no less enthusiasm-–what with most people having been hit by crisis after crisis in 2007 desperately trying their best to get the old year out of the way as quickly as possible.

And who could blame them? No place in the world, it seems, was spared from some of last year’s most difficult moments.

The lingering uncertainty over peace in the Middle East continued to hold sway over oil prices, which during the first few days of this new year traded at historical highs of over $100 a barrel.

The ever volatile Middle East remained fractious and divided, with even the Palestinians themselves not agreeing on how to deal with its perceived common adversary-–Israel. And the Israelis themselves were no more united in their approach to solving the peace problem than the Palestinians were.

The rest of the world remains as polarized as ever regarding the issue of global security, with countries either taking the hawkish stand of the United States, or the equally belligerent attitude of those opposed to the American solution.

This lingering geopolitical uncertainty consequently spilled over into the economic arena, with record oil prices taking their toll on business costs, as well as dampening the already fragile confidence of consumers everywhere.

To say that 2007 was a very difficult year for most of us would be understating the enormity of the problem.

But will 2008 have us faring any better than the year before?

Most signs say that things are going to get worse, before they get any better.

No one knows for sure how high oil prices will still rise in the new year. Nor is anyone certain just how deep the current credit crisis—precipitated by the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market—is still likely to drag the world’s financial markets down too.

And yet as daunting as all of these sound, the sense of optimism that always accompanies the coming of each new year cannot but let us see that it is not all dark clouds ahead.

For the first time ever in our lifetime, our world is coming ever closer to a global consensus on what is perhaps the greatest problem of our age-–climate change.

People’s attitudes everywhere are changing, in ways that we would never have thought possible before.

With the impending regime change in Washington this year, we may yet be closer to solving our common concerns over global peace and security, than at any time in almost a decade.

And while economic prosperity has continued to elude our nation while everywhere else progress seems to be the fate of most of those around us, there are hopeful signs at last that we may finally benefit from the fruits of globalization that seem to have blessed everyone else but ourselves.

And so, as we always have in new years past, let us go forth with prayer on our lips, and hope in our hearts, and make this 2008 the best year yet.

Our warmest New Year greetings to all our readers!

Published in The Sun Star Daily, Saturday, January 05, 2008

Religion In Politics

2007-12-22T01:33:00.000-08:00

A RATHER interesting, and I’m sure totally strange (at least to most Filipinos) phenomenon, happened in British politics last week.

The newly elected leader of the Liberal Democrats – the third largest party in Parliament after Labour and the Conservatives – openly declared on national radio that he did not believe in God.

I could almost hear the gasps among you who are reading this part of the article. What an outrage, you say. A man who does not have any religious faith? That’s just plainly unacceptable, isn’t it? And especially coming from someone who aspires to lead one of the most powerful nations on earth?

How would he govern then, if he were elected? Would he have a firm moral foundation on which his values would be based? What will guide his actions, and make him distinguish right and wrong?

Needless to say, to the Filipino electorate, a local version of Nick Clegg would never be acceptable. Any politician who aspires to be elected to public office must profess to be a man of faith.

Any mainstream religious faith would normally suffice, but usually it is the faith of the majority, in order to ensure the majority’s vote. Openly atheist aspirants to public office just would not stand a chance at all.

And yet in the West, just the opposite is true.

Tony Blair, as it is now known, is a firmly committed Christian – a secret Catholic in the land of the Anglican communion. While it is now accepted that he will eventually embrace the Catholic faith, none of his religious convictions were publicly expressed during his long reign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. To have done so would have spelled disaster for him and his party.

For in the land of St. George, the land where the Protestant reformation first sprung, and the land that now professes to embrace people of all faiths within an open and secular society – any talk of the religious is considered out of bounds in politics.

Many people in post-modern Britain do not have any religious conviction. Thus, they regard anyone who holds any religious conviction – especially those who do so with great fervor and devotion – with a great deal of suspicion and mistrust.

While I personally do not agree with the strident, almost militant view against all religion that a lot of people here hold, it is difficult to argue vehemently against them either. Without their politicians openly professing their faith in God, and sprinkling their rhetoric with “Praise the Lord” with every turn of phrase, their society has not disintegrated, as we would assume in our local context.

Contrast this to the scene back home.

Almost to a man (and woman), all of our public servants profess to be adherents of a religious faith. More than that, many of them openly declare, and in fact advertise, their adherence to such faith. And yet, what do we get as a consequence?

It would not be fair to draw direct comparisons. After all, our society is totally different to the UK’s, and religious faith is just one of the many facets that make up our individual societies. But it would also be unfair not to make any attempt at a connection.

The Most Reverend Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when asked what he thought of Nick Clegg’s declared atheism, replied that he considers it less of an issue, than he would Mr. Clegg’s stand on secular matters such as law and order, social justice and foreign policy.

In a society where openly religious politicians are routinely discovered to be engaging in acts of corruption, isn’t it perhaps time that we took a more secular approach to our choice of public officials?

HAPPY CHRISTMAS, AND BEST WISHES FOR THE COMING YEAR TO ALL OUR READERS!

Published in The Sun Star Daily, Saturday, December 22, 2007

The Christmas Message

2007-12-15T01:28:00.000-08:00

FUEL prices at their highest level ever. An imminent credit crunch that threatens to plunge the world’s economies into a major slowdown.

The mortgage market in the United States in the worst possible shape, dragging down those in other parts of the world along with it. Unprecedented climate change that has already taken its toll with severe flooding in parts of the Indian subcontinent. And especially for England, the prospect of a summer without a team in the European Football Championships!

Surely, events and occurrences to dampen the spirits of even the most resilient of men?

2007 surely was a testing year. And on all fronts at that. The economy, global security, and for the first time in decades – a natural phenomenon that seems to be spiraling out of our control.

We had always assumed that with globalization would come increased tolerance, understanding and integration among the world’s communities.

With all of us surfing the net, visiting the same websites, and playing identical video games, the thought was that we would all eventually “get” one another.

And yet, in some ways there has never been the opportunity for more misunderstanding, at any other time than today.

While most of the simmering anti-Western tension in the Islamic world is politically motivated, a part of it is not. There is certainly a strong undercurrent of resentment against what they see as the decay and moral decadence of Western civilization. All this just adds to their already strong conviction that when they attack targets in the West, they are not only redressing political imbalances imposed by their governments, but also “cleansing” the world of evil, vice and sin.

Back in the days when communities were isolated from one another, we were blissfully ignorant of others’ ways, and were therefore more tolerant of one another by default. For how else could we dislike something we had no idea about?

Today, however, the image of Paris Hilton coming out of a New York night club drunk, half-dressed and with a coterie of drooling men in tow could as easily be viewed in Los Angeles as in Islamabad. This kind of image, when superimposed on an ultra-conservative religious template, is enough to spark revulsion, hate and contempt for everything Western. And certainly, it is more than enough to convince those already armed with a political agenda that they are in the right, and the communities they set out to damage are in the wrong.

Time to reflect perhaps, if ever there was a better time to do so, on the message of that first-ever Christmas, when a child was born among the simple folk of Bethlehem, with a powerful message for all the world.

While we think our world today is a great deal more fractious and strife-torn, it wasn’t all that different in Christ’s time. The Romans were in town, and their way of governing would probably make today’s worst dictator look decidedly benevolent. In short, life was hard —much harder than the situation most of us are faced with today.

And yet it was in those very difficult of times that he chose to come among us, to give us hope.

Christ gave himself to mankind, by being born among them. This is the message of Christmas – the message of joyous giving, just as He joyously gave himself to the world, to save it from sin.

What better message for us to take, as we go forward in these rather difficult times? If we can give joyously of our understanding, our tolerance, our appreciation for one another, and our concern for the world we live in, then perhaps we could make a difference, just as He did on that first Christmas Day.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, December 15, 2007

The Blaspheming Teddy Bear

2007-12-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

IT has probably reached Philippine ears by now, this strange, strange saga of a Liverpool schoolteacher in Sudan, who has been threatened with 40 lashes of a cane, for having allowed the children in her class to name their teddy bear Muhammad.

Sudan practices Islamic Shariah Law, where the crime of blasphemy to the Prophet Muhammad is punished rather severely. Unfortunately, naming a bear, albeit a teddy one, after the prophet is a grievous transgression – the rationale being that the bear is a “wild animal” (though a teddy bear surely isn’t, but the Sudanese don’t know that), and something “wild” is surely not in the prophet’s character.

To the West, none of this makes sense. In a society where secular humanism rules, and all religion is considered “superstition” and basically frowned upon, there is just no logic behind the Sudanese action.

Unfortunately, in the Sudanese world view, there is perhaps nothing wrong with what they have done, as far as they are concerned. After all, they are merely upholding their beliefs and traditions, and administering punishment to a Westerner who has broken their laws, just as if she was one of their own.

Echoes of Rudyard Kipling perhaps? East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet?

In more ways than we can measure the length of a twain with – yes.

Globalization has forced a convergence of sorts among different cultures and societies. Western consumerism — the new Socialism –- has conquered the world with the speed of the Internet. Trends like business process outsourcing (BPO) have allowed people of erstwhile different backgrounds to work and interact harmoniously and productively, enhancing social integration at a pace that would never have been possible previously.

Having said this, it has also emphasized certain key differences among our societies, and forced us to confront those realities that still separate us.Religion is one of those realities.

With the exception perhaps of the USA, most of Western society has shunned anything religious. Secular humanism rules all aspects of life -– from government, to education and the consequent social institutions they give rise to. Christians and Muslims alike are treated similarly –- as superstitious individuals who are not capable of rational behavior.

Not surprisingly, individuals have lost respect for all aspects religious.

The wearing of religious symbols of any kind is frowned upon in Britain, so much so that even small Christian crosses that are common ornaments for us cannot be worn to the office, at the risk of serious consequences. Even the celebration of religious festivities is downplayed. As we mentioned in this space before, holidays like Christmas have been renamed to strip away their religious connotations, and make them inclusive for everyone.

It is within this greater context that the “teddy bear” furor takes on more significance.

On the one hand, we in the West need to be more sensitive to those beliefs and values that people in other places hold dear. Our “rational” secular humanist values may make sense of the world for us, but they do not necessarily govern the world view of people elsewhere.

And for those of us in societies where the spiritual holds more sway over the temporal, perhaps we need a sense of moderation in our beliefs, especially when it comes to imposing punishment for transgressions that are more accidental than intentional, as this one surely was.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, December 08, 2007

The Indians Are Coming

2007-11-17T01:16:00.000-08:00

IN the Filipino imagination, when one hears the title being spoken, it would probably connote images of American-Indian braves riding down the hill and encircling a convoy of pioneers, shooting at them with their arrows as the settlers desperately try to defend themselves with their hunting rifles.

And then from out of the blue, to the sound of the bugles, arrive the cavalry to chase the bad guys and rescue the beleaguered pioneers to safety.

Today, however, it is Indians of the real kind who are coming.

Not the ones dressed in feathers and war paint, but those who actually come from the country of India.

They used to come to the West to work in its factories. Some arrived as health care professionals in search of greener pastures. But whatever they came as, they came for one thing—a better life. Then, India was a poor and absolutely difficult country to live in. People were escaping their poverty in droves, to the welcoming shores of the affluent West.

Today, they come with a different agenda.

No longer seeking the material comforts of faraway lands, they come to conquer. No, not conquest as in taking over countries and establishing dynasties or anything like that. They come to take over businesses, or establish their own in distant shores.

Forbes Magazine reports that the top 3 Indian billionaires are now worth more than their top 40 Chinese counterparts combined. And they go on further to say that in the world’s top 10, with the dollar going the way it is, there will soon be more Indian than American billionaires in the group.

This may not mean a lot to most people. After all, businessmen are businessmen, wherever they happen to be from.

Being Indian, American or Chinese may indicate more an accident of birth rather than anything of great significance, as they tend to share the same characteristics, drive and ambition, irrespective of where it is that they came from.

While this is partly true, it is not an entirely correct conclusion. It is significant that in today’s global economy, it is entrepreneurs from the erstwhile “Third World” who are advancing rapidly in terms of wealth and affluence.

It is even more significant for us Filipinos because the ones who are succeeding look and act more like us, than the white Westerners who used to be the ones we exclusively looked up to when it came to building and creating wealth.

When Lakshmi Mittal’s group took over France’s Arcelor, it was not unlike the braves riding down the hill and firing arrows at the hapless “les pioneers.” He came and delivered a clear and unequivocal message to France and the rest of the developed world-–our time has come, and we are here to stay.

And yet while Mittal Steel was busy snapping up France’s Arcelor, China’s Lenovo acquiring IBM’s PC business, and Reliance Industries rapidly expanding its portfolio of businesses overseas, our own Filipino conglomerates have been unusually insular, and sticking closely to the home front.

Alright, San Miguel is alive and well in Southeast Asia, Chow King now has outlets in many places in Jakarta, and the Indonesians now munch on the same Jack and Jill snack favorites that we used to enjoy as kids.

But these are nowhere near enough.

Encircling our wagons and waiting defensively for the braves to arrive does not anymore qualify as a viable and sustainable long term strategy.

In a world increasingly without borders, and in markets now devoid of nationalities, only those with truly great ambitions will succeed.

Published in Sun Star Daily, Saturday, November 17, 2007

Ten Letters (Conclusion)

2007-11-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

THE “Desperate Housewives” furor has compelled us to delay the conclusion of this series regarding our economy’s twin pillars of nursing and business process outsourcing (BPO) that we may weigh in with our views on the issue.

On reflection, the controversy that the episode generated has actually been a good opportunity to put the entire matter into perspective, and served as a reminder to our economic policy makers, just how fragile the foundations of our economy are at this present time.

As we have already discussed, cost and competence are key to maintaining our pre-eminent position, both in the export of healthcare, as well as the provision of BPO services.

Judging by our reaction to that offending line in the TV show, it seems that we are not as secure in the competence of our health workers as we ought to be.

If, for example, the criticism had been directed at the quality of say British, American or even South African health professionals, the comment would have probably passed relatively unnoticed. After all, why fret over something that is clearly untrue?

However, the fact that we collectively jumped up and down, and went to great lengths to demand a public apology from the show’s producers means we have ample reason to doubt our own true worth. We are clearly insecure, and not without good reason.

Judging by the Commission on Higher Education’s (Ched) own standards, the quality of our nursing education is greatly uneven across all providers. While there are clearly some outstanding institutions, there are also schools that are just riding the trend, and out to make a killing from the huge demand.

There is a very real danger that this could prove to be our undoing.

The scandal involving cheating during the nursing board examinations only proves that there are those nursing graduates who are not confident enough in their ability to pass the professional licensing examinations on their own merits, and had thus to resort to cheating to ensure that they do so. After all, to those who have undergone proper training, passing board examinations should not even be a major concern.

On the BPO front, though quality seems to be less of an issue, the means of ensuring it seem to be far from being the ideal solution.

In almost all call centers today, invariably most of the staff will be university degree holders, with some coming from the most prestigious of the country’s institutions. It is not uncommon, for example, for somebody coming from the University of the Philippines, De La Salle or Ateneo to be working in such places.

While this answers the need for quality in the short-term, by hiring “overqualified” staff into the industry, it is a problem in the long term.

Overqualified staff will clearly not be in it for the long-term, and will see this only as a short-term solution to a financial need, or further career advancement. Needless to say, in an industry where turnover is already high due to its nature, this creates an even higher staff turn, creating greater instability among the organizations concerned.

As for cost, call center operators with university degrees are likely not content to settle for subsistence wages for a long time.

The policy implications of these realities are clear.

Even as we need to train health professionals in even greater numbers, standards have to be better enforced than they are today, if those markets we currently serve are not to lose confidence in the skills of our exports. Today, this may be less of a concern as demand far outstrips supply, but this will not be so in the future.

As far as BPO is concerned, we have to stop relying on “over-qualification” as the means to ensure the workforce’s competence. Call center operators do not need to be university graduates (as they are not in most places around the world). Only if we strengthen our educational system across the board, can the BPO sector be assured of a constant supply of manpower that is fit for purpose, and happy to be where they are.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, November 03, 2007

Political correctness

2007-10-20T20:17:00.000-07:00

TWO months ago, there was a story that made big headlines in the United Kingdom.

A female employee of British Airways was dismissed from her job—not for poor performance, attitude, or anything else that we may associate with reasons for being fired. British Airways let her go because she insisted on wearing a small cross pendant to work.

Just last week, another British Airways man was re-admitted to work after having been suspended for a few days. The worker was not suffering from performance-related issues either. His offense? Hanging a picture of Jesus Christ on the wall of the employee staff room, which upset one of his Muslim colleagues, who then complained to management, leading to the man’s suspension.

This coming holiday season, many towns and cities will spruce up and decorate their public places, for the Winterval festival. They will put up festive trees in the town centers and hang festival lights along the main thoroughfares.

Notice the absence of something here? That’s right, Christmas isn’t in it.

Christmas is banned. Or at least the mention of it is. And why? Because according to the Birmingham City Council, which invented the term “Winterval,” Christmas is not an “inclusive” celebration. Not inclusive because it is a Christian holiday, and excludes Muslims, Jews, people of other faiths — and of course the non-believers — from participation.

And who could forget that infamous incident, sparked by a cartoon that was printed in a Danish magazine, rather misguidedly depicting the prophet Muhammad in “contemporary” images?

The incident was answered by outrage scarcely seen anywhere, eclipsing even the violent reactions to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. So serious was the fallout that it involved not only the governments of Denmark and the major Islamic states to diffuse it, even the European Union, the United States and the United Nations had to weigh in on the issue as well.

What is the common thread running through all of these incidents? PC. That’s right, PC. Political correctness or PC, as it is now more commonly referred to, is the common denominator.

Whether it is a Christian’s inability to wear vestiges of her religion, a rebuke to a young man’s desire to be constantly reminded of the image of his creator, a denial of a community’s right to celebrate a festival that it has always done for hundreds of years, or the curtailment of an editor’s freedom to publish cartoons for the education of the wider public — political correctness is behind them all.

In an increasingly diverse world, where populations mix and move freely, it is only appropriate that individuals and communities should treat each other with a certain amount of respect, and certainly with a great deal of empathy and understanding.

But there is a great danger to all this — the danger that free speech and freedom of expression — the bedrock on which our free and democratic societies are founded — will become the greatest victims.

Free societies entail give and take, and a certain amount of humor when it comes to opposing groups and interests talking about, or dealing with, each other. But this has to be two-way traffic, and not merely a one-way flow.

We are a good example of this, as a people.

Our jokes are peppered with humorous instances focusing on race, ethnicity, disability, and many other subject matters that are, by today’s standards, totally inappropriate. Michael V’s “DJ Bumbay,” a song parodying our stereotypical image of the Indian entrepreneur is a good case in point.

And yet, we have not learned to deal with situations where the joke is turned on us. That now infamous “Desperate Housewives” line comes to mind.

It would be a dull world indeed if every time we wanted to say, write, publish or sing something, we must first spend the time to think about each and every interest group that might take offense with our actions. Certainly, that would wipe out a great number of Filipino jokes that have ever been told.

And so, as we face the brave new world of ever-increasing globalization, we should perhaps go forth and be guided by the new Golden Rule of political correctness —“do not joke about others, what you do not want others to joke about you.”

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, October 20, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/10/20/bus/political.correctness.html).

A final word, in desperation...

2007-10-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

I will end my commentary on the whole issue by simply asking why we think it is perfectly alright for us to do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QusLouQhEfo

and this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDQJGIFzV1Q&mode=related&search=

and even for one of our most respected politicans to say this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBEuhLlNYTY

but when anyone dares to poke fun at a segment of our population like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYB4H0Po0A0

everyone immediately cries racism and discrimination?

Still Desperate over “Housewives”

2007-10-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

The whole issue just refuses to go quietly.

In Internet blogs, and just about every online forum imaginable, everyone seems to be expressing their views on the controversy. And of course, there is the unceasing coverage on all of the mainstream media.

Not only ordinary folk, but politicians of all persuasions have been weighing in with their views – ranging from the reasonable to the absurd.

But what is behind all this uproar? Is it even justified? Are we doing the right thing to redress the wrong that has supposedly been done to us? Or are we perhaps acting in a way that is only going to do us more harm than good in the long run?

In one of our discussion groups, I was asked by a friend to elaborate on my views. I feel that it builds on the arguments I presented in the previous column regarding the same subject, and thus I am printing it here for the benefit of a wider audience.

Here is the full text of my reply.

Hi Rolando

The whole issue goes well beyond just academic equivalence here, in my view. I think many Filipinos reacted the way they did because for the first time (and on primetime TV at that) they felt like they were not really totally accepted and welcomed in their newly adopted homeland. It was almost like "hey, why make fun of me, I am one of you" sort of thing, I believe.

Here is probably where a bigger problem with the Philippines today lies – we are so USA-oriented, it’s untrue! Almost everyone wants to be in America, whether it is by hook or by crook. And this in itself causes a lot of problems.

It used to be that in the old days, only hardworking and upstanding Filipino professionals went to the US to work. Today, in this modern-day Diaspora when it seems every Juan and his dog has already moved stateside, it is not just our "model citizens" that we are exporting, but the dregs of our society are there too! You will have heard about Filipino criminal gangs in LA, surely?

This is always a problem with migration, and I see it everywhere I go to – whether it be in the US, Britain, any country in Europe, and even in Turkey and the Middle East. Any large migrant group is always subject to a certain amount of scrutiny from the native population, who feel in some way either threatened or disturbed by such presence in their midst.

I think we have now reached critical mass in the States that we cannot anymore keep our heads below the parapet. Like it or not, we are being noticed, in good and bad ways, by the native population, as well as all the other immigrant groups.

Let me give you an example. Insurers of product warranties in the UK have singled out Filipinos for one particular thing – the unduly high return rates of products prior to the warranty expiring, to have them exchanged for new ones. I was not sure why this was, until a friend of ours told me about what seems to be a modus among many Filipinos here. In his case, he apparently was having some "problems" with his PC, so in order to have it exchanged for a new one prior to the warranty expiring, he poured orange juice on it. Clearly, enough of us here must be pouring juices on their PCs for insurers to take notice!

As immigrant groups, we need to take the rough or the smooth, and criticism – whether warranted or not – is part of this in a free and democratic society, like the US is. Free speech has its blessings, but as we found out, it can bite too. But we cannot get too overly sensitive and politically correct about it, or we become labeled as whiners and whingers. A lot of the reaction I have seen seems to be bordering on mass whining.

We cannot anymore reverse the trend, like it or not. We will be a sizeable minority in the US for years to come, and we need to be prepared to take more of these on the chin. It took a long time for the Italians and the Irish to be accepted as equals in the US, and even today jokes about them are still aplenty. Filipinos will need to be prepared for this for a long time to come yet!

Kind regards

ALLAN

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, October 13, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/10/13/bus/batuhan.still.desperate.over.housewives..html).

Desperate housewives

2007-10-06T15:56:00.000-07:00

I was going to conclude Ten Letters this week, until a rather more interesting subject for discussion surfaced in my high school batch’s e-Group in the last few days. The issue concerns a throwaway (or so the scriptwriter thought) line in a recent episode of Desperate Housewives, where the character (and this we must bear in mind) of Teri Hatcher is in effect questioning the competence of medical practitioners from the Philippines.

Thanks to the mi-racle of modern electronic technology —no sooner had the line probably been spoken, when the snippet found itself all over the Internet, fuelling heated reaction from many offended countrymen—physicians and non-physicians alike.

On first hearing (I, too, found it difficult to resist viewing the clip on YouTube), I have to admit that I was rather shocked. Here was a popular character on primetime TV, actually saying something that cast aspersions on the capability of Filipino doctors, and by extension, on the abilities of all Filipinos to hack it in today’s global economy.

Had she said India, Sri Lanka, China, or any other country for that matter, I would probably have thought it was somewhat of a bigoted line for about a minute, and then I would have forgotten about the whole thing entirely. But no, she actually uttered the word “Philippines,” and thereby lay the whole issue for all of us.

Sometime ago, I too had the same line spoken to me (not in form, but in substance) by no less than an official of the United Kingdom’s academic recognition body.

In effect, what I was told was that my post-graduate degree was not even the equivalent of a UK undergraduate course, simply because the institute where I got it from was located in the Philippines. This, notwithstanding the fact that this institute happened to be only among a few officially accredited by global standards bodies in North America and Europe, in the company of Harvard, Wharton, London Business School, etc.

In the end I was able to prove my case, but only after having educational authorities in the Philippines, and the institute’s peers in the UK itself, back up my claim. My case was precedent setting, in that any graduate from the institute now seeking official recognition in the UK automatically receives it without question.

I was irate at the UK authorities in the beginning, but after careful reflection, my anger turned to our own education policymakers back home.

Philippine education, in general, is in a shambles, and it is not up to the standards that a developing economy ought to be aspiring to. I was able to extricate myself out of trouble only after proving that I received my degree from an “international” rather than a “Philippine” institution. In winning my case, I did not win a victory for our national educational curriculum, but only for myself and for the institute.

There is a bigger battle to be fought, and unfortunately I neither have the time nor the inclination to be leading it anymore.

Most of us who are offended by the remark are feeling insulted “personally,” because we think that we are not “inferior” to anyone, anywhere in the world. But in the cold light of day — stripped of any malicious intent and racist undertones — her character is not way off the mark.

Our medical education (and our entire educational system), in general, does not compare favorably with education in the West. The fact that our system still turns out good physicians (and good nurses, managers, engineers, etc.), in spite of its limitations, is an entirely different thing altogether. And that’s something we ought to be very proud of.

If we are to take something constructive, rather than just feel personally slighted by it all, I hope our education policy makers take heed and do something about our situation.

That our countrymen still manage to survive and even do well abroad is no thanks to the education they receive at home, but all down to their excellent skills at adapting quickly, and learning on the fly in their foreign environments.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, October 06, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/10/06/bus/batuhan.desperate.housewives.html).

Ten Letters (4)

2007-09-29T16:04:00.000-07:00

LET'S get straight to the point.

As a country, we have never been that good in sustaining anything that is potentially of value. So many opportunities have been presented before us, and many more have been there for the taking. And yet, all we have managed to do is squander most of them away.

Today, the BPO industry and the export of healthcare (particularly nursing) workers to foreign markets are proving to be lifesavers for our economy, both without which we would be in even direr straits than we are at the moment.

It is perhaps a difficult thing to accept — that we as a country are either doing things that other countries find to be of little value (the whole essence of Business Process Out-sourcing), or find less rewarding to pursue (such as being a nurse in a developed economy).

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and although I am hardly labeling those in either sector as desperate, what I am really saying is that given where we are, we have really very little choice in which activities we do or do not wish to pursue. We have to, as a country, take on all comers, as they say.

The first thing to do is to admit that we have little choice in the matter, as this sets us in the right frame of mind to do whatever it is we need to do to be good in both, for as long as we can.

The second thing to realize is that we need to keep working away in being good at these things, because in an increasingly global eco-nomy, alternatives always abound, and we can be easily be substituted with very little notice.

And of course, the third fact we need to digest is that we cannot just rely on these two sectors to lead us into economic prosperity — many more answers will have to be found to the question of economic development, if we are to get anywhere.

These three “reality checks” serve as useful guides in formulating a whole host of policies, influencing such areas as education, tourism, finance, and economic development.

The first pillar is perhaps self-evident. Apart from the two sectors, we have very little to go by as a country anymore.

Bankrupted by years of inept leadership, and today still ruled by a bickering, selfish and morally corrupt political elite, nursing and BPO are opportunities that our Tagalog friends would call “kapit sa patalim.” I prefer this description to “last-ditch,” which somehow doesn’t quite describe the desperation as starkly. But you get the picture.

The second pillar is the one that needs a lot of work put into it, by everyone concerned. Two Cs determine whether we continue to be favored over other countries — cost and competence.

The first is particularly key to BPO, because by de-finition, business processes that are being outsourced, are those which are not considered by the outsourcer as being “core” to their business. For example, call centers for banks are considered necessary, but not key to their survival and success. Therefore they are willing to farm out the task to the lowest bidder.

Having said that cost is the pre-eminent consideration, competence is considered as standard — if you have it you get the business (providing you are the lowest bidder) but if you don’t have it, then you lose the business (even if you are the lowest bidder).

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, September 29, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/09/29/bus/batuhan.ten.letters.(4).html).

Ten Letters (3)

2007-09-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

I REMEMBER the days when I was an eager young man working in the financial services sector back home.

At that time, all the rage was about the furniture industry and how good we were compared to the rest of our neighbors in the Asean. Years before this, it was our sugar industry that was the darling of our economy.

What’s happened to them now, and why? Depending on your perspective — too much, and not a lot.

In the beginning, they made too much profit, but not a lot of it went into re-investment.

Flushed with our success, we made too much hype of them, but really not a lot of action.

And though there was getting to be too much competition, we never did a lot to strengthen whatever advantage we had.

As a result, although there was too much promise then, there is not a lot to show for them today.

It is a difficult thing to admit, but we need to face up to reality sometime — even in our economic policy, the “ningas cogon” syndrome is a difficult thing to shake off.

If we were athletes, we would be good sprinters, but poor marathon runners.

We get to the 100-meter line first, but once there we immediately set up our hammocks and take a long siesta. Meanwhile, everyone else, whilst seemingly jogging along at a much slower pace, will have passed us by and crossed the finish line before we wake up. When we wake up, we then realize how much ground we have already lost and decide to quit the race in desperation.

Count them with your fingers if you can — prawn farming, handicraft, garments, terra cotta, iron craft, wood working, dehydrated food, processed food, floriculture, tourism — you will run out of fingers and still the list goes on of sectors where we had shown a lot of early potential, but which never really progressed much beyond the promising stage. Or if anything did, it invariably had a meteoric climb to the top, but an equally precipitous drop to mediocrity or failure.

True, there are exceptions to be found within these sectors, but these are organizations that have survived due to their own efforts, and not because of any coherent strategy from the top.

Today, the apples in the eyes of our policy makers happen to be nursing, and the BPO (business process outsourcing) industry.

Much is being made of the successes we have attained in gaining a substantial share of the demand for healthcare workers in foreign lands. We cannot, it seems, produce enough nurses to meet the demand in overseas markets and have to open new schools year after year to fill the gap.

Call centers, too, are sprouting all over the place like mushrooms. A lot of times these days whenever I need to call a contact center from the UK, it is an American-sounding-but-quite-distinctly Filipino accent that I hear on the other line.

But what are we doing to ensure that the industries that now provide the lifeline to thousands of our countrymen continue to prosper and survive, instead of going the way our furniture and sugar potential went — with a lot of snap, crackle and pop in the beginning, somewhat of a big bang in the middle, but just total silence in the end?

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, September 22, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/09/22/bus/batuhan.ten.letters.(3).html).

Ten Letters (2)

2007-09-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

SERVICE industries are a peculiar lot.

Unlike manufacturing organizations — with their factories, equipment and stacks of inventory — many service-orientated companies have little by way of “hard” assets.

Take a restaurant, for example. Among the things of tangible value would be the furniture, kitchen equipment, some pieces of décor and possibly the building itself in which it is located. Apart from these, the refrigerator will probably contain a few days worth of food ingredients, but not much more really.

Clearly, as the Little Prince would no doubt have observed, what is of value in a restaurant business “is invisible to the eye.”

Call centers are even more spartan — just huge, open floor areas with lots of desks, computers and banks of telephones. Okay, maybe the air conditioners would be worth something, but I think you get the point by now.

In elaborating on his theory of competitive advantage, the eminent Har-vard management guru Michael Porter cites “intensive capital requirements” as one of the major barriers to enter any industry.

Automotive manufacturing, for example, is one such sector. Since it requires large capital investment which are often unavailable to would-be start-ups, those already in the sector are afforded some sort of protection from competition, at least for some time until potential entrants find a way to either raise funds, or do things differently that would require lower capital investment.

In many service businesses, “intensive capital requirements” is usually not a major barrier to entry. Almost anyone can start a restaurant, and for that matter, entering the call centre business does not seem to be such a difficult proposition. Whether the ventures succeed or not is an entirely different proposition.

As a country, we have chosen to hitch our future on the provision of services to the world. Nursing and BPO are two of our biggest revenue earners at the moment — and if we believe all the hype that surrounds them — will remain so for the foreseeable future.

As we have pointed out, this subjects us to potentially stiff competition from rival countries who wish to do the same things we are doing. And because services do not require a lot of investment, it will not be that easy for us to defend our position.

Take the case of the domestic service (domestic helper) sector, for example.

Indonesians, Sri Lankans and Africans, have undercut the going rates for our countrymen in the lucrative markets of the Middle East. As a result, these countries have managed to take a large share of our erstwhile monopoly in the region.

Nursing and business process outsourcing will not be exempt from the competitive pressures that the domestic service sector experienced. Even today, nurses from India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa continue to flock in large numbers to the same countries where our countrymen are headed, e.g. the United States and the United Kingdom.

BPO businesses likewise face stiff competition, especially from India, where the call center revolution first started.

And yet, we cannot escape the great responsibility of making sure that these service sectors survive and thrive amidst the growing foreign competition.

The lives of thousands of our countrymen, and the fortunes of thousands of others who depend on them, demand no less.

NOTE: Warmest greetings to my beloved wife, Cynthia Marie Arguelles Batuhan, who celebrates her birthday on Sept. 20.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, September 15, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/09/15/bus/batuhan.ten.letters.(2).html).

Ten Letters

2007-09-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

ALL in 10 letters.

That’s right. It seems that these days, the entire nation’s future rests on only 10 letters. Well, nine letters to be exact, but one is twice important.

B-G-I-N-O-P-R-S-U. The future of the Philippines is all there. Rearrange the order, repeat the “N” twice, and you can decipher the hope for our future.

What are they? Why BPO and NURSING, of course. Who can open a paper these days without seeing something on one or the other?

Whether to favorite destinations like the United States and the United Kingdom, or less favored ones such as Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, everyone’s ambition, it seems, is to go there and work as a nurse. So much so that in a nation where there seems to be a college or university in every street corner, we now have a shortage of institutions to meet the insatiable demand for nursing education.

Those who manage to escape the forces of the nursing magnet, or simply want to stay at home instead of roaming the world caring for the ill and infirm, end up mostly in one place — the call center. Business process outsourcing (BPO), or simply put, the export of work routines that foreign companies see as “non-core” and “non value-adding” to their organizations, has become the career of choice for our well-spoken and well-educated workforce, graduated from esteemed centers of learning like the Ateneo, La Salle and UP.

There’s nothing wrong per se to having a current competitive advantage in at least two sectors that provide mass employment for our young people. After all, the more of us are in employment, the less burden it will be for the state (and indeed for our families, relatives and friends) to provide the necessary financial support to those that would otherwise be out of work. And of course, tax revenues and remittance inflows from these sectors are becoming a larger and larger component of our gross domestic product.

For now, it seems, we at least have some answers to the all important question – “how shall we provide work for our countrymen?”

“For now,” because whether we realize it or not, nursing and BPO can only be the answers for so long. I have purposely alluded to this earlier in the piece, by saying that we have a “current” competitive advantage in both sectors.

By current, I meant the “here and now” only. Whether or not we still have this edge in years to come remains to be seen, and is something that we need to invest a lot of work into.

While both appear unrelated at first, there is a lot in common between BPO and nursing than we might think.

Both are in the service sector, with people being their most important resource.

And the nature of this resource is precisely where our future problems are likely to come from.

One thing we need to realize is that we are producing levels of these resources, OVER AND ABOVE what our local economy alone can fully utilize.

To use an old economy analogy, these are “export-orientated” sectors that need foreign demand, otherwise we will have excess production that our domestic requirements alone can never hope to utilize.

It is clear then that this “foreign demand” has to constantly be there, or we will have an excess of resources with little use for our own consumption.

But how robust and reliable is this foreign demand that we are talking about?

Can we rely on this to continue well into the future?

NOTE: Warm Greetings to my brother, Atty. Aristotle “Totol” Batuhan, who celebrated his birthday yesterday.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, September 08, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/09/08/bus/batuhan.ten.letters.html).

Faith tourism (the not so good side)

2007-09-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

IT was a very fulfilling experience — having visited some of the holiest sites of the faith that I was born into.

A few years ago, while working in Turkey, my family also had the opportunity to see many of the places that feature prominently in the history of the Church, among them the church in the Byzantine city of Nicaea, where the wording of the Apostle’s Creed as we know it today was agreed upon; the Seven Churches of the Revelation; the Basilica of the Hagia Sophia — the ancient world’s rival to the St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome; the city of Ca-ppadocia; the House of Mary (one of the sites believed to be where the Blessed Mother spent her last days under the care of the apostle John); and the ancient city of Ephesus, where the apostles Paul and John continued their work of evangelization following the death of Jesus Christ.

There is something about actually being in places that are mentioned frequently in our prayers, where some of the Bible’s most famous passages were written, or where the first Christians went about preaching the good news to people outside the faith, that can strengthen the belief of even the most shaky adherents like myself.

Taking in the majestic grandeur of a place like Cappadocia, the tranquility of a lakeside summer city as Nicaea or the rugged landscape of the churches of Sardis and Laodicea, it is difficult not to feel strengthened by the resolve of the first converts to make it through, despite all the obstacles that stood in their way. For me therefore, personal pilgrimages are faith enhancing, and useful to believers of a faith — any faith for that matter.

This is where I also noted the other side of faith tourism — the one that is as less desirable as the spiritual elements are spiritually enriching — the business side of it. For I have never found commercialism and naked capitalism to be as rife and rampant as in the places where people of faith congregate and visit.

Never have I paid so much for a simple breakfast of egg omelette, toasted bread and coffee, for example, as I had in Lourdes — a princely sum of P1,500 for the privilege. This was no Shangril-La in the Pyrenees either — just a simple café staffed by some surly looking Frenchmen, who looked like the last time a smile crossed their faces was when the Virgin Mother appeared before St. Bernadette.

In Italy, the smiles were much more welcoming but the mark-ups were no less exorbitant. Around the area of the St. Peter’s Basilica, a bottle of water was selling for P300, and this was out of one of the roadside mobile food sellers, not in some fancy Roman bistro. No wonder the Italians always say the water in their many outdoor fountains tastes good — seems like they have no choice but to convince themselves of this, otherwise they would be spending all their disposable income just on drinking water!

I guess in the end, business will spring where an opportunity exists, whether it is to cater to the simply curious — such as the Moulin Rouge, or the fervently faithful like the Cathedral of the Sacre Cour (Sacred Heart) in nearby Montmartre.

The only thing that we can do, as the faithful devoted who flock to these sites in our thousands, is to be more discerning in how we part with our money. Like for a start, not paying P2,000 for a small statue of the pieta, which clearly looks like it was made in China.

Only then may we actually see a modern-day miracle coming out from some of these sacred places — the miracle of mass price reduction forced upon profiteering businessmen to win back customers boycotting their overpriced merchandise.

CONGRATULATIONS. Our congratulations to JM Batuhan, who won second place in the Essay Category, English Division of the 57th Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Awarding takes places on Sept. 1 at the Manila Peninsula Hotel. Also our warmest felicitations to my son, Jacob Anthony Batuhan, whose work “Spartan War” was judged among the winners and chosen for publication in the Young Writers Writing Competitions for Secondary School Pupils, in the United Kingdom.

Published in theSun Star Daily, Saturday, September 01, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/09/01/bus/batuhan.faith.tourism.(the.not.so.good.side).html)

Faith Tourism

2007-08-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

OVER the best part of the last week and a half, my family — along with my parents-in-law — spent our summer “holiday” in France and Italy.

It was not much by way of a typical holiday, I have to say. None of those long days lazing by the swimming pool with a cold bottle of beer in hand situations at all. Yes, there were still sight-seeing visits to the attractions, but not to the usual ones like theatres and shopping centers.

Due to the special request of my wife Cynthia, we decided that this year’s vacation was going to be a different one in every sense. First off, she wanted it to be with her mom and dad, whom she loves most dearly. Second, instead of the amusement parks, she wanted to take a pilgrimage of sorts to some of our faith’s most revered sites. On the year when she turns the age that most of us consider to be a turning point in our lives, she wanted to have time for reflection, rather than just relaxation.

So off we went; first stop — Paris, the City of Lights. Although known mainly for its romantic draw, Paris — unknown to me until now – is home to a good number of religiously significant destinations, among them the Church of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre and the Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Rue du Bac.

As a young boy growing up, the Sacred Heart School as well as the Asilo de la Medalla Milagrosa were familiar associations to me. Thus, actually visiting the places where these schools took their names from is really quite a fascinating experience.

Next, it was off to the mountains of the Pyrenees, to the small town of Lourdes where Our Lady appeared to a young French shepherd girl at the turn of the last century. I have to say that visiting the place was an experience quite like no other that I have ever had.

Nowhere have I ever been to before where I have seen so many people from so many countries, races and backgrounds than in that small town up in the French Alps.

Every country in the Christian world (and even many from those that are not) must have been represented there. There were so many people with all manners of disability, in crutches, walking canes, wheelchairs and even stretchers — all there in the fervent belief that they may yet be cured from the illnesses that afflict them.

After coming down from Lourdes, it was just a quick stop in Paris to recharge, and then we were off again, this time to the home of Catholicism — Rome.

Of course, no visit to the city would be complete without a stop at the Vatican.

The only drawback was that this time of the year, the pope was not around, preferring his summer home up in the hills of Castel Gandolfo to the simmering heat of the Italian capital. So we went up there too, to catch a glimpse of the Holy Father as he was delivering his usual Sunday message to the faithful.

The last stop in our Italian itinerary was to the little town of Lanciano, some three hours away from Rome. A small church there is home to what is acknowledged to be the first and greatest Eucharistic miracle the world has ever witnessed — that of the host and wine actually turning into flesh and blood during consecration in the Holy Mass. Documented by many scientists as actually being of human flesh and blood, the relics are still there for the faithful to behold — perfectly preserved all these years, though exposed to the elements, and free from artificial preservatives of any kind.
More next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, August 18, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/08/18/bus/batuhan.cebu.coop.eyes.berry.market.html)

Tipping the balance...finally

2007-08-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

WE have covered a lot of ground on the subject of Business Performance Management over the last few weeks.

Our basic premise was that in most organizations today, it is very difficult to get all the parts working together as a coordinated whole. This is true especially in large and “professionally-run” organizations. While the people who work in them know their individual roles and responsibilities, not all have the entrepreneurial vision to understand what it takes to manage a total business.

We introduced the metaphor of an orchestra, complete with skilled and talented musicians, which without the presence of an experienced and competent conductor will not be able to produce melodious music.

Applying this to business organizations, we then explored the ill effects of the over-reliance on the “one version of the truth” from our accountants, which many still use to measure and manage the performance of organizations.

But as we took pains to point out, financial numbers show us only the effects of our past actions. They tell us precious little about what we need to be doing in the present, and even much even less of where we ought to be focusing our efforts on in the future.

One of the recent and most significant advances in management that has come about to address this major shortcoming in business performance management (BPM) is the introduction by Kaplan and Norton of the Balanced Scorecard.

Although both finance professionals by background, they realized the folly of relying on financial statements alone to run a business, and wisely pointed out that to both gauge ongoing performance and guide future action, a much broader perspective is required.

Today, at least on paper, many organizations seem to be using balanced scorecards in their BPM processes. In fact, a number claim to be employing it as their main BPM tool. And yet it is apparent that this seemingly widespread acceptance is nowhere near enough to redress the imbalance.

As the story told by my friend the Finance Director illustrates, old habits die hard.

Business organizations, despite their pretensions to having embraced the merits of balanced BPM measures, are still predominantly judged by their financial results. Whether such financial success was obtained at the expense of the business’ future viability, seems to matter little in the equation.

This happens despite the fact that over the years, many companies have been found to have “massaged” their numbers in various ways, to make it appear that their organizations have performed well, when in truth they were already in dire straits. When it comes to the crunch, financial numbers still take precedence over everything else.

It is difficult to work successfully toward a goal, unless a business knew exactly which goal it was wants to achieve.

Perhaps it is with this preceding statement that we can conclude our entire series on the Balanced Scorecard.

If we are to finally tip the scales towards having a BPM system that tells us the whole story about our businesses — we need to stop relying on financial numbers alone as the main criteria for determining which ones in our organizations deserve rewards, and which ones require punishment for their actions.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, August 11, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/08/11/bus/batuhan.tipping.the.balance...finally.html)

A balance of truths

2007-08-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

EVER heard of Rashomon?

This acclaimed piece of work, from the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, explores the relativity of truth, i.e. the premise that there is no single version of what is “true” — this being subject to whichever point of view one happens to take on an event or incident.

If Kaplan and Norton were fans of Japanese cinema, I would not have had any doubt that their inspiration for the balanced scorecard came from Kurosawa himself.

Accountants often speak of “the one version” of the truth, appropriating this authoritative mantle for the “one set of numbers” that they produce. Many organizations still believe this claim, and continue to base their decisions on what this “truth” is telling them. In fact — and pardon the obvious pun — nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, let us take the event of an organization meeting or exceeding its planned budget. One of my friends who happens to be a finance director for a well-known consumer goods organization, told me that they had just made budget for the year. Consequently, they are all going to get rewarded with handsome bonuses. Under his “truth,” they have done very well.

After a lengthier conversation with him, however, it became painfully apparent that despite making their bonuses, they were perhaps no different from Nero, sitting back and relaxing while their business was rapidly going down in flames.

A major component of their budget achievement came from “cost-cutting,” an exercise that by now is as ubiquitous as the computer in any organization. For example, to ensure that they pushed maximum volume out the door, they re-allocated their advertising and media spending to consumer and trade promotions, enticing short-term purchases and filling the distribution pipeline in the process. Overall, they spent less, and seemed to have been able to sell more for their money.

However, looking at the other indicators for their business, things were not looking quite as rosy. Their flagship brands were under threat by the major multinationals.

Market shares, which only a few years back were in the double digits, had dwindled to single figures. Their distribution system, which in the past used to be their differentiating competitive advantage, was becoming less potent, with lower cost third party distribution vastly improving over time.

From another vantage point, this business could not have been any sicker. And from this version of the truth, management should have been reprimanded, not rewarded. The problem is, no one is looking at things from any other perspective, but the financial one.

Balanced scorecards, whatever connotations it may have on managers of organizations, are nothing more than the Business Performance Management (BPM) equivalent of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The set of measures that it attempts to capture are so designed, that at any point in time they are able to capture the many version of truth that exist — covering the past (financial indicators), the present (operational indicators) and the future (marketing, research and development, strategic indicators, etc.).

Problem is, organizations still have to make the mental leap that is needed to make balanced scorecards work as intended — that accounting numbers are but one version — among many — of the real truth.

Invariably, even among those actively using balanced scorecards in their organizations, their performance and reward systems are still heavily focused on financial results, clearly exposing which “truth” they consider to be more truthful than the others.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, August 04, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/08/04/bus/batuhan.a.balance.of.truths.html)

For Auld Lang Syne

2007-07-28T04:31:00.000-07:00

WITH the gentle rhythm of the ocean waves lapping against the white-sand shore, the soft amber glow of the garden lights warmly bathing the lush surrounding greenery in a velvety hue, and the balmy breeze of a dreamily moonlit tropical night all conspiring to create the picture-perfect venue — the stage was set at last for the long-awaited event.

Twenty five years in the making, and logistically as challenging to coordinate as any of NASA’s space shuttle missions, all roads led to this place that night — the Ocean Pavilion of Shangri-la’s Mactan Island Resort and Spa.

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Many came from lands far away to be there.

From Connecticut, South Carolina and Flo-rida in the East, and Arizona and California in the West — those who now call the United States home made the long pilgrimage across the Pacific to be there. Those now settled in Canada came too.

On the other side, across the Atlantic, from Cheshire in the United Kingdom, via Jakarta, Indonesia — I made my own way back. Interrupting his official tour of Thailand, another one of us flew in just in-time — in true military precision — to join in the festivities. And while those residents of Cebu and other places in the Philippines may not have covered as much physical distance, all of them unselfishly set their important commitments and obligations aside, to be one with the rest of us that evening.

For the members of the University of the Philippines College Cebu’s High School Class of 1982, this was a momentous event that no one wanted to miss. It was 25 years and four something months ago, when we marched up on that stage to receive our hard-earned high school diplomas — and accepted the challenge from our teachers, friends, families and ourselves — to be the best that we can be. And to a man and woman, each of us has responded splendidly, in our own unique and individual ways.

Among our ranks we now count numerous doctors, lawyers, managers, scientists, engineers, businessmen and women, journalists, nurses, members of the clergy, as well as military officers — and whatever the career persuasion — responsible parents and individuals all.

Across the globe we have touched and improved the lives of many — treated the ill and infirm at home and beyond, engineered the success of countless businesses across a number of continents, ministered to the spiritual needs of our brothers and sisters, and defended the lives and liberties of the men and women of our country – whether in courts of law, or in dangerous battlefields without any law.

The diversity of our endeavors is perhaps only a logical outcome of our origins — after all, we are molded by the university renowned for producing exceptional leaders of men.

Yet there was something extraordinary in the way all of us made good account of ourselves, and this we can only attribute with gratitude to the mentoring and guidance we received from our beloved professors, many of whom were there that night to share the special celebration with us.

Far from being a pompous occasion attended by middle-aged men and women who, by the nature of their accomplishments we would perhaps expect to be preoccupied with their own sense of self-importance — it was a night without egos, just a magnificently joyous communion — a journey back into the gentler, kinder times of our youth — when for an evening everyone was young and 15 again.

Even our ageless teachers seemed to regain that extra spring in their steps, aided no doubt by the pride in their hearts at seeing their erstwhile young charges blossom into mature and responsible individuals.

I cannot quite remember how it all ended — and that’s probably because for me, and for many of us, it really never has.

As I journey back to the other side of the world — at once inspired and humbled by the reminder of where I came from 25 years ago — I take with me the wonderful memory of that perfect evening, with the famous words from the immortal song by the Scots bard Robert Burns still loudly ringing in my ears:

And there’s a hand my trusty fiere,
And gie’s a hand o thine
And we’ll tak a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syne

To all my friends and teachers, let there not be any goodbyes this time around, just a fond farewell, and ‘til we all meet again.

NOTE: Special thanks go to the organizing committee (Marcelo, Randy, Virgil, Joy, Carlyn, Emi, Alma, Rex, Leslie and Naresa) for their kind generosity and indefatigable energy in putting together the perfect event. The series on the Balanced Scorecard will conclude next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily. Saturday, July 28, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/07/28/bus/batuhan.for.auld.lang.syne..html)

Balancing your scorecard (part 3)

2007-07-21T20:27:00.000-07:00

THEY say that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. However, while this may be true, those who know only the past are damned many times over.

Certainly, in business we know this to be the case. That’s why commercial success stories are often called visionaries – they seem to literally be able to see what their consumers of the future desire — and hence they are able to modify themselves well beforehand to ensure that they have, and they are, what it is that their consumers desire.

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This must therefore be a dilemma for business organizations. For most of them, all that they can see is their past. Nothing at all about their present. And more importantly, not a thing about what their actions in the past and the present are doing to their future.

All because of the way they measure their own performance.

Accounting numbers, which is what most organizations rely on for gauging the effectiveness of their actions, are nothing but historical facts. Period-end financial statements like balance sheets are snapshots at certain points in time, and flow statements like profit and loss accounts are simply aggregations of past activity.

While financial statements may look impressive and important, in reality — by themselves — they are of limited use for management information.

It’s like driving a car by looking only at your side and rear view mirrors, with the windshield blacked out. While you know that up to a point you have managed to avoid a crash, there is no way of telling if a disaster is just about to happen.

So if driving this way is no good for traffic safety, then why should managing with only financial information be good enough for business?

The answer is — it is not. Enter balanced scorecards.

While not a totally new invention, as versions of the idea have existed in various forms at different stages in the past, Norton and Kaplan were the first to have their innovation gain widespread acceptance within the business community.

In a sense, a number of factors have conspired to make this happen, such as, for example, the increasing sophistication with which we can now obtain information about our organizations. Powerful IT (information technology) systems and large data warehouses present us with opportunities that business leaders in the past did not have at their disposal.

And yet, most organizations employing the tool have not really done themselves justice. But rather than the tool being at fault, it is the users who are to blame.

For so many years, effective management has been premised on the belief that specialization is the only way to run a business. While at a certain stage in our industrial development this has made possible the rapid progress and advancement of commercial organizations, the approach has also placed a severe limitation on the capacity of companies to work as unified units, and hindering their capability to move in a common direction.

Funnily enough, it is the function commonly entrusted with measuring and controlling performance that perhaps shares most of the blame.

Accounting and finance organizations have increasingly appropriated for themselves the task of telling businesses how well they are doing, and making everyone else believe that this is the “correct” way of judging performance.

Nothing short of a fundamental rethink of our current models of effective business management, therefore, is imperative if we are to finally accept that the way to our future is not found by blindly focusing solely on the events of our past.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Best wishes to the members of the UP College Cebu High School Class of 1982, who will be having their Silver Jubilee Anniversary Reunion starting at 6 p.m. today at the Shangri-la’s Mactan Island Resort and Spa, Cebu. Alumni who have yet to make up their minds are warmly encouraged to come and see their old friends. All past and present faculty members associated with Class ‘82 are likewise cordially invited to participate in the festivities. For further details please contact Virgil Urgel (09204039138), Joy Go (09178515601), Carlyn Relampagos (09-209005970) or Randy Cabahug (09173229923).

Published in the Suns Star Daily, Saturday, July 21, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/07/21/bus/batuhan.balancing.your.scorecard.(part.3).html)

Balancing your scorecard (2)

2007-07-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

WATCHING the British Grand Prix over the weekend was a visual demonstration in total coordination. Traveling at speeds well above what many normal drivers can even imagine, the competitors race with very little room for error – with the slightest lapse of concentration potentially costing them their own lives.

With business being the way it is these days, running companies is almost like driving Formula One racing machines. A wrong turn and somebody else could be in the lead. Similarly, an opening spotted before others have noticed it could put an organization very quickly in the forefront.

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The problem is – very few CEOs drive their companies like Lewis Hamilton pilots his McLaren.

Most large organizations are uncoordinated, lumbering, and slow to adapt to change. In the context of Formula One racing, many would have collapsed a long time ago, if not for the fact that their competitors are likewise velocity-challenged.

Rather than the high speed sport of motor racing, looking at companies operate is mostly like watching a game of lawn bowling – and played in slow motion at that.

Without a doubt, the way they are organized has got a lot to do with it. And of course, the way their performance is measured only makes the problem even worse.

Last week, we introduced the metaphor of multiple drivers controlling one vehicle, with neither of them knowing how to drive a car on their own. There cannot be a more appropriate way to describe how many companies are run these days.

Specialization, for all the benefits that it brings, is a major culprit in promoting fragmented thinking. Each division, department or section does its own thing, often with very little understanding of how they affect the total organization.

Invariably, they view their colleagues with suspicion, even contempt, for doing “unnecessary” things, and not understanding their own points of view.

How often do we see marketing at odds with production, with both disagreeing with finance? Possibly enough times to convince ourselves that this is actually how things should be.

The conflict is all a matter of perspective – time perspective that is.

Marketing thinks in the future, production deals mainly with the present, and finance mostly dwells in the past. This to me best illustrates what the whole problem is about.

Most of us non-marketing individuals often think that our marketing colleagues just waste company money, with campaigns that do not seem to produce tangible benefits that we can accurately measure. Those of us who have never stepped on a factory floor will have no appreciation for the day-to-day problems our production colleagues face to get our products out the door.

Why does this happen?

Well, think about it carefully. Most companies measure performance by the numbers that their accounting systems produce. Therefore all we see are historical costs – consequences of actions that have already taken place – without regard to the future benefit that they could bring, or otherwise the potential harm that they could cause.

Clearly therefore, any measurement system that focuses mainly only on the past, must be consigned to remain there.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The UP Cebu High School Class of 1982 will be having its Silver Jubilee Anniversary Reunion at the Shangri-la Hotel, Mactan, Cebu on the 22nd of July 2007. All alumni are encouraged to attend. For details please contact Virgil Urgel (09204039138), Joy Go (09178515601), Carlyn Relampagos (09209005970) or Randy Cabahug (09173229923).

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, July 14, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/07/14/bus/batuhan.balancing.your.scorecard.(2).html)

Balancing your scorecard

2007-07-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

THESE days, the use of the balanced scorecard as a business performance management tool is so commonplace, it has almost become the management equivalent of British cuisine’s ubiquitous chip, or in local parlance, our daily bowl of rice.

Pioneered by Harvard Professor Robert Kaplan and leading management consultant David Norton in the late 90s, it is considered a breakthrough in management thinking, integrating the different parts of a business and aligning their energies towards realizing their common corporate objective.

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All of this sounds intuitively simple. After all, why should a business not work toward a common objective? This is almost a question that would certainly elicit a response of “duh” from most of our American friends. It seems so obvious that it should be the case, but the reality is not quite as straightforward.

From years of working in corporate management, I have often wondered about this myself, and I am constantly amazed at how disorganized management seems to be in most large businesses.

The entrepreneurs among us would probably laugh at this scenario. After all, small businesses are always very clear about what it is they want to do. They want to have a product or service that is very attractive to a market that they have identified, and they want to be able to deliver this product or service at an economic cost that allows them to make an acceptable return over what their customers are willing to pay for the product or service.

But this is the truth, and it is no laughing matter.

It is all a question of scale. From experience, I know that as companies get larger, the more they seem to be less and less certain about what it is they really want to be doing. There are those that are the exceptions, and invariably they are the ones that go on and become successful in what they do.

The crucial difference between an entrepreneurial organization and a large corporation is always the person at the top. With the former, the driving force is the person’s original vision for the organization, which is clearly communicated throughout the rest of the business. Everyone knows what they are all about, especially in family corporations where the main players tend to wake up together in the same house.

In a large organization, we tend to have a collection of managers from different backgrounds and persuasions, with different beliefs and value systems, and varying degrees of identification with the company’s set of values and principles.

The result is what you would expect from an orchestra — melodious and sweet when under the baton of a skilled conductor, but totally chaotic and cacophonous when under the control of someone who does not know how to harmoniously blend all the instruments together.

The problem is that people who work in companies normally, by themselves, haven’t the faintest idea how to run a complete business on their own. While they may know finance, marketing or operations as a discipline, how all of the activities fit together to complete a harmoniously working whole is not something that they always understand.

Imagine having a group of people drive a car collectively, which none of them can control on their own. Whoever is doing the directing must make sure each individual controls the steering wheel, brake, clutch etc. in a coordinated fashion, or an accident would surely be the most likely outcome.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The UP Cebu High School Class of 1982 will be having its Silver Jubilee Anniversary Reunion at the Shangri-la’s Mactan Island Resort and Spa on July 22, 2007. All jubilarians are encouraged to attend. For details please contact Virgil Urgel (09204039138), Joy Go (09178515601), Carlyn Relampagos (09209005970) or Randy Cabahug (09173229923).

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, July 07, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/07/07/bus/batuhan.balancing.your.scorecard.html)

Changing of the guard

2007-06-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

MOST of us who have been to London will have seen, or at least, heard of it.

The changing of the Queen’s guard at Bucking-ham Palace is probably one of the most British of institutions, and a spectacle that people think of first whenever they hear the word “London.”

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Last week, however, a much more significant changing of the guard took place, not too far from Buckingham. By the banks of the River Thames, and under the shadow of the venerable Big Ben, an era in British politics finally came to pass.

Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for the last decade, had — true to his word —finally stepped down as leader of the Labor Party, and in so doing gave up the post of head of the government of the United Kingdom to his successor, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.

Spanning the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George Bush, Tony Blair’s long tenure in office —mostly coinciding at a time of relative prosperity in the United Kingdom —is eclipsed only by the reign of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who led the Tory government of the 80s and early 90s for 13 long years, just four short of former President Marcos’ 17-year grip on Philippine politics.

The Blair years will hopefully be remembered as one of Britain’s finest moments. The UK economy is one of the strongest in the European Union today, a testament to the former prime minister’s faith in the power of the free market, as opposed to his Labor predecessor’s disdain for the ideals of laissez faire economics.

He has also succeeded in finally solving the sectarian strife that haunted Northern Ireland for as long as anyone in British politics today can remember.

Had it not been for one single decision which many in the UK think was the wrong thing to do – Tony Blair would certainly have secured a prominent place for himself in British politics as soon as he stepped out of 10 Downing Street. As it is, he will have to wait until history has passed its judgment on his legacy.

Iraq. Yes, that’s the word that will forever taint his image, the remaining question being only one of degree, i.e. will it be all that people will remember of him? Or will they at least have memories of the good things that he has done?

Tony Blair was a firm supporter of the war in Iraq, staunchly convinced that the effort was definitely a positive step in the fight against global terrorism. His close relationship with America’s leadership made sure that his conviction would not be in opposition to that of his trans-Atlantic allies. Unfortunately, the Iraq campaign has degenerated into a bloody quagmire that no one seems to be able to solve. Unfortunately for Blair too, this meant that his name would forever be associated with this monumental failure of foreign policy.

And yet there is one major difference between a leader like Blair, and many of ours who have governed our country less auspiciously. The man sincerely believed he was doing the right thing, and was guided by what he thought were the real interests of the British people. That his judgment turned out to be wrong in the end is another story.

This is something I cannot remember any leader of the Philippines ever possessed — a genuine passion for doing the right things, without regard for any personal gain or advancement. For most of our leaders, any decision always has to be preceded by the question — “What’s in it for me?”

Blair may yet become a man tainted by the judgment of history, but our politicians could do well to learn from his example.

Published by the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, June 30, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/06/30/bus/batuhan.changing.of.the.guard.html)

Playing Nero (conclusion)

2007-06-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

AS we in management know only too well, while it is the soldiers who fight the battles, it is the commanders who win the wars.

Winning a single encounter on the battlefield can sometimes be a matter of luck, or pure chance. However, to win an entire campaign takes strategic genius — knowing exactly when to attack, which time to retreat, what weapons to deploy, selecting the battle formations to employ, and choosing the people to do the fighting. That is why victorious leaders are often credited for being strategically brilliant.

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Often the “winningest” or most victorious generals are not the ones with the most resources at their disposal. While they may be strong in some areas, there will be others where they will be weaker than their opponents. The skill that sets them apart is their ability to tell exactly which of their strengths they can turn to superior advantage, and how they are able to reinforce their weaknesses to make them less vulnerable to counter attacks.

Less emphasized but clearly vital, victorious leaders are pragmatists and realists. They are never so proud as to deny that they or their organizations have failings and shortcomings.

Armed with this knowledge, they can then set about and conquer those that stand in the way between them and victory.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it. Well not quite. Because even the best of them sometimes falter. Perhaps egos get in the way, and the feeling of invincibility from winning too many encounters can bring about the complacency that could sometimes lead to a false sense of security.

Armies and business organizations share a lot in common — and what we have been describing in the earlier paragraphs apply equally as much to winning wars as they do to conquering markets. Leading a winning business organization in today’s global marketplace is as much a huge strategic challenge as winning a World War.

As we discussed earlier, trade-offs in critical situations need to be addressed correctly. Clearly, when an army is focused on building trenches and fortifications, it cannot, at the same time, advance and attack enemy positions. Likewise, one that prefers defensive fortifications cannot be mobile and quick on the counterattack.

As with many things, the outcomes of wars often depend on the choices commanders make.

Too many leaders in business today make too many poor choices. While the critical areas are somewhere else, they expend their valuable resources addressing those that are less significant. Either by ignorance or lack of creativity, they do the things they like to do, rather than those they have to do.

Often because of their backgrounds and skills, they are focused on areas where they feel comfortable in, rather than where the business needs in order to succeed.

Which brings me back to where I started with this series of articles.

Business leaders often do the things they feel like doing, not those that really need to be done. While the enemy outflanks them and attacks their unguarded rear, they insist on spending their time digging deeper and deeper foxholes!

Not so different really from the ones in my friend’s organization. While the demand for their products was shrinking rapidly, they turned all their efforts in making sure it costs them less to make them. Even my friend, who is an operations manager and knows little about the demand side of the business, knew only too well that their leaders were playing Nero, while their entire business was burning to the ground.

Published by the Star Daily, Saturday, June 23, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/06/23/bus/batuhan.playing.nero.(conclusion).html)

Playing Nero (part 3)

2007-06-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

WE have all heard of window-dressing. For people my age, the years of the Marcos rule chiseled a vivid mental image of its definition into our consciousness, it is impossible to ever forget what it means.

Which is probably the reason I don’t like it much!

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I remember how the old first lady used to preach about the importance of beauty in our lives, and how all the grandiose mega projects she did in its name were meant to improve the lives of our impoverished countrymen for the better. Well, they never did. The fact that they built the country on the shifting sands of beauty are today largely responsible for the dire straits that the Philippines is in.

The Marcoses were masters at it. And so are many of the politicians who have followed them since their downfall. Presenting a false facade of everything good while inside the true face of decay and poverty remains hidden. Remember the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nation) convention in Cebu?

Window dressing is easy. No effort at all. No need to address the real problems, just mask the underlying causes of the problem with an acceptable face and we are off the hook.

But only for a short time.

In the end, the fundamental issues inevitably rise to the surface. And when they do, it will be more difficult to address them properly, all we can do is windowdress them all over again.

Call it corporate raindancing. Call it snake oil salesmanship. Call it what you will. But windowdressing is a favorite activity in most business organizations.

Managers taking the easy way out and masking the real problems in their organizations with easy solutions that offer no long lasting benefits, but arguably bring about irreparable damage.

Ever notice how in kids’ football games, everyone always ends up wanting to be the striker? Even defenders who are supposed to keep their opponents from approaching their goal inevitably decide to abandon their posts and try their luck in attack. And who can blame them? Scoring goals is a lot more fun than preventing your opponents from doing the same.

Or perhaps you have seen a group of young girls baking in home economics class? Ever wonder why everyone wants to be the one to put the icing on the cake? You guessed it right. Because it is the easy thing to do. Not only that, it gives the impression of having completed the whole task from beginning to end.

Managers are no different from kids, no sir. In many ways, managers are still kids in the way they behave – doing things either because they appear to be the most interesting, or look to be the easiest. Never mind that they are not really the fundamental concerns of their organizations. Somebody else can take care of that.

Our example last week about the Toyota wanna-bees is a case in point —it is now all too easy to implement efficiency projects with all the documentation available on how to do it. But what if it is not what your company needs?

Never mind, seems to be the answer for many managers. Fundamental problem or not, they will do it anyway. Because it is easy, and it gives the appearance of actually doing something.

It is bad enough if managers fall into the trap of taking the easy or interesting way out. But what if the leaders of the business are themselves similarly inclined?

More on the subject next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, June 16, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/06/16/bus/batuhan.playing.nero.(part.3).html)

PLAYING NERO (2)

2007-06-09T02:10:00.000-07:00

All I can say is – blame it on Toyota.

Yes, blame it on that carmaker of carmakers, the company from a very small corner of the world that is now poised to take over as the world’s largest auto manufacturer for the first time since Henry Ford starting making cars.

If not for Toyota’s relentless pursuit of manufacturing excellence, if not for its single-minded drive for efficiency and zero waste, if not for its ability to sell cars that seem to run forever – then many companies today would not be in such a bind.

Yes, just as kids in the 90’s used to sing “I want to be like Mike,” so have companies been trying to emulate Toyota’s cutting-edge manufacturing systems for at least the last couple of decades, if not longer.

Kanban, Just-In-Time, Zero Defects, Quality Circles – these are just some of the concepts pioneered by the carmaker that have been zealously adopted not only by its competitors, but also from admirers in industries as diverse as consumer goods, utilities and financial services. Just as kids wanted to be “like Mike,” companies from all over the globe aimed to be “like Taichii” (Ohno, Toyota’s legendary leader during its period of rapid growth).

“Being Toyota” has taken on a strangely cult-like following in the corporate world. CEOs and corporate executives have taken to downsizing and cost cutting as young girls have to dieting and looking like their stick-figure supermodel idols. Slim is in -- as they say -- in corporate USA. And as well in many places beyond.

So what can be wrong with this? Is not a cost-conscious company also better placed to compete in its marketplace?

The problem with idols is that they never tell you why they do certain things. And for those of us who emulate them at every turn, sometimes we are unaware of the reason for what it is we are trying to copy.

Take supermodels, for example. What could be the reason why they take only lettuce leaves for lunch? Clearly not because they like to eat only lettuce leaves. And possibly not even just to look good for their friends and acquaintances. Most likely it is to land that high paying modeling contract in New York, Milan or London, for which they starve themselves almost to near-death.

Yet most young girls who wish to copy their waif-like physiques do so not necessarily for the huge financial rewards. They actually believe it makes them look good and feel accepted. They are taking the pain, without necessarily the gain that their idols are rewarded with. It’s like having no cake, and not eating it too!

Toyota’s main competitive advantage is not necessarily its operational excellence alone. Arguably, it is not even its operational excellence at all. Of course, being the very clever and consensus building Japanese company that they are, they wish to ruffle no feathers by telling everyone that they are heading for a one-way road to disaster if they blindly followed what Toyota is doing.

As a result, a management cult has been born, whose only mantra is an all-out war to re-engineer, downsize and cut costs. Every organisation in existence today has probably some kind of cost reduction exercise in place – whether it be regarding the way it makes product, sells it to its customer, or supports its business activities.
More on the subject next week.

Published by the Sun Star Daily, June 9, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/06/09/bus/batuhan.playing.nero.(part.2).html)

Playing Nero

2007-06-02T04:35:00.000-07:00

WHEN I was a young kid, my dad took me aside one day and asked me what I thought was a rather no-brainer of a question. It was—“how many senses do we have?”

Proud of what I had just recently learned from my primary grade science lessons, I quickly retorted “five” without even taking a second to think about my reply. “No son” he said. “We have six.” “Six?” I shot back in an audibly disbelieving tone. “How could we have six?”

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And then, I rattled off—“We only have our sense of sight, of smell, of taste, of hearing, and lastly, of feeling. Our teacher never taught us anything more than these, as far as I could recall.”

“Son,” my dad continued, “you forgot the most important one, and so did your teacher.” “OK, what did I forget?” “Please tell me, so I can inform my teacher that she was wrong.” After a slight pause, he said—“you forgot common sense.”

Ever the jokester of a dad that he is (when he was in his non-lawyer dad moods, of course), I never thought much about his seemingly trivial “joke.” Not until I grew up and gravitated to management practice, that is.

Today, I am of one mind with my father. Many of us management practitioners do, indeed, seem to have forgotten our sixth and most important sense.

Over a couple of beers last night, I was speaking to one of my expatriate friends in a Jakarta watering hole. We were exchanging goodbyes, since he was leaving to go to a new assignment in Africa, and I was off back to the UK, after completing an extended visit to Indonesia. He was telling me how busy he had been the last couple of months, fielding questions from his head office about costs in his factory. My friend is an operations manager of one of the large consumer goods companies in Indonesia.

Apparently, the recent “flavor of the month” in their organization is “cost saving,” not unlike the many who have staked the futures of their companies on the single-minded pursuit of efficiency.

Lowest cost per unit is their mantra, and all their efforts are focused on this single company objective.

Sensing nothing wrong with the drive to cut out waste, and after putting on my “management consultant hat,” I asked him a question. “So supply must be the constraint in your business, that’s why you are taking all these efforts to cut waste, and ensure that you can produce even more product for your customers, and make lots more profit for your business, right?”

“Not at all,” he says, “as a matter of fact, our market shares have never been smaller. For the last three years they have dropped in all but one product category, where we have just barely managed to maintain our share. And that’s what concerns me the most,” he says.

“For months now, we have been bombarded with queries coming from all directions. And it is all about costs. Add to that the fact that the accountants in my company are constantly telling me to spend what precious little time I have trying to ‘correctly’ allocate the costs of my factory to my products, and I am really now in total despair. Nothing of what we are doing makes any sense any more.”

On hearing that word “sense,” thoughts of that long-ago conversation of my dad, and his seemingly innocuous joke about our six senses suddenly seemed to make that much more sense (if that makes any sense to you?).

Maybe it is that in my friend’s company, their management is suffering from an acute shortage of our sixth sense.
More on the subject next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, June 02, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/06/02/bus/batuhan.playing.nero.html)

Warrior management

2007-05-26T02:47:00.000-07:00

OUR search for the Holy Grail of management has taken us to places we would never have expected to go.

To lands as far and away as China and Japan, and to times as ancient and mystical as those of the emperors and shoguns that ruled these far away kingdoms and fiefdoms. In order to run our organizations better, we have tried to emulate the spirit of the warrior, of great men like Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi.

But can we really know what it is to be like the great warriors of old? Is reading books about the battles that Sun Tzu won, or those that tell about Musashi’s prowess with the sword, really helpful in allowing us to understand how these men achieved great success in their time?

Our answer over the last two installments of this series has been no. The problems are two-fold, as we have examined. The first stumbling block is our insistence on learning the ways of the old, as if they were things we could pick up from modern-day convenience stores —on demand and instantaneously.

Nobody these days cares much about learning something the old-fashioned way, through sweat and hard work.

How else to explain the proliferation of on-line management schools offering MBA diplomas without one having to sit through thousands of hours of rigorous case discussions? Internet management, if I may call it that, has a lot to blame for this mentality.

Unlocking the secrets of the old means we have to go through the same path that the original holders of these secrets trod.

Which brings us to the second obstacle in our quest to learn from the masters— we want to merely experience things, not to be immersed in them.

This is best typified in the comment one of my American friends told me, when I asked him why he never ventured beyond the borders of the United States? “Why bother,” he said, “when I can see Paris in Las Vegas.” This Paris in-Las-Vegas syndrome, or in our case this Musashi-in-a-book affliction is one of the great maladies of our time. And it ails the practice of management particularly badly.

A common trait required in martial training is a true openness of mind. Zen masters often exhort their apprentices to empty their cups first, before they may be served any tea. This means getting rid of our cultural prejudices, personal preferences, preconceived notions and fixed paradigms. Anything less and true learning eludes us.

Another martial prerequisite is truthfulness to one’s self, as well as to others.

Translated in management terms, this means having total transparency in our actions, and the absence of subterfuge, scheming and manipulation in our ways.

But just think—how many managers can actually do this? Show me one who can, and I will show you hundreds who lie, scheme, connive and cheat their way to the top.

Contrary to what the name suggests, the warrior manager does not have to learn karate, aikido or kung fu to become one. As Sensei T.K. Chiba suggests, the modern day workplace itself is full of real life struggles that we must face steadfastly, and resolve with conviction.

The true warrior manager will not shirk from these challenges. But most importantly, he faces these problems with the openness of mind and the purity of heart as the warriors of old. Only then can he lead and inspire his organization to victory.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, May 26, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/05/26/bus/batuhan.warrior.management.html)

The Warrior Manager (2)

2007-05-19T02:21:00.000-07:00

Many Westerners think they are very well traveled, and know a lot about other lands and peoples. Just think of the hundreds of thousands of them who come to our shores each year. Many will have been to other countries already, apart from ours. But does this really qualify them as experts in other people’s cultures?

Experience and immersion are two very different things. To experience something is to witness things and events from one’s own point of view. But to be immersed, on the other hand, is a whole different story. It is a deeper and more meaningful experience, because it is done through the point of view of that which is being observed. As the old Indian saying goes – “to understand me is to walk a mile in my moccasins.” Experiencing is walking that mile in Nike sneakers, immersion is doing the same thing in authentic Indian moccasins.

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Most tourists merely experience the world. That’s why they usually come away with casual observations like “India is poor,” “Jakarta is so crowded,” and “Filipinos are very hospitable.” These comments are based on the relative situations in their home countries, and the places they visit. They see the world, but with their own cultural blinders on.

This to me is the reason why books on Musashi and Sun Tzu can never be fully understood by many of us who read them. One problem, especially with Western management thought, is that it forces its paradigms on situations where these same paradigms either don’t work, or do not exist. Nothing can be more contrary to the ways of the warrior, which we are trying to emulate, by studying the masters. “Enter through form, and exit from form” is how the venerable aikido founder O-sensei Morihei Ueshiba articulated martial arts learning should be. Begin with a paradigm, but then discard it as you learn new things, is perhaps the best way of describing it from a management perspective.

Let’s turn once again to what T.K Chiba Shihan, one of aikido’s most respected instructors today, has to say on the subject of total martial arts immersion.

“…if we can shift our perception into the objective situation of the world we live in today, it is not too difficult to recognize the situation as being very martial, as everyday life is full of many different forms of violence and threats - both visible and invisible. Examples are the spreading of incurable diseases; countless outbreaks of man-made disasters which take may human lives in one fell swoop, as well as natural disasters which highly advanced modern scientific technology often fails to prevent; the prevalence of organized and unorganized violent crime; increasing occurrences of local wars derived from nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism; and increasing ecological imbalance and poisoning on a global scale that mankind has never experienced before. Instead of limiting our perceptions inside of the Dojo training, it would be wise to expand our awareness into the bigger realm of everyday affairs where countless potential threats to our very existence are evident. In substance, it is a situation where we are forced to return to facing the basic question of who we really are, in our true face, thereby enabling us to face potential crises, which may become reality at any given moment, with the three principles of martial awareness: when, where, and with what - without being defensive or obsessed but with a free and open mind.”
Final installment next week.

ANNOUNCEMENT: It is with deep sorrow that I announce the passing of my great grandmother-in-law, Emma Lina Araneta del Castillo vda de Arguelles, of Bacolod City, who joined our Lord on the 4th of May 2007, at the age of 101. May we kindly request our readers to please say a prayer for her eternal repose.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, May 19, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/05/19/bus/batuhan.the.warrior.manager.(2).html)

The warrior manager

2007-05-05T04:03:00.001-07:00

SO much time has been devoted to studying the martial ways, and how they could help us modern managers in our work.

Ancient manuscripts, such as Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” or Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings,” have been the topic of countless scholarly articles and dissertations, that we are probably justified to think that we now know all we need to know about the ways of the warrior, and how we could put them to effective use in our own workplaces.

Pinoy Votes: Sun.Star Election 2007

Perhaps so, but more probably, perhaps not.

When I lived in the United States a few years back, I had the opportunity to practice with one of the Southeast’s most senior American aikido instructors.

In one of our lighter moments—and because, at the time, I was moving a lot between different cities and trying desperately to search for dojos to practice with—he told me his “method” for spotting the serious practitioners from the less-than-serious ones. And it was—“if a dojo is located in a strip mall, then it probably is not a proper one.”

It may have been light-hearted advice, but beneath the words lie a great deal of truth.

Many of the dojos that set up shop in malls are there offering a service that the rest of the businesses in the malls offer— quick, fast and convenient satisfaction of our needs and wants. And this is in direct contradiction with the way of the warrior arts.

So I get back to my earlier question on whether the countless books on Sun-Tzu and Musashi really teach us anything useful about the warrior arts and management. And my answer—perhaps it is as useful as studying the martial arts in a strip mall dojo.

Many of us who have studied the martial arts for some time will know this— they cannot be learned from a book alone.

Despite what we sometimes see in Jackie Chan movies, no one picks up a set of pictures, studies the forms on them, and in a few days becomes competent enough to challenge the neighborhood bad guy to a fight. It just does not happen like that.

More often than not, countless bruises, scrapes and skinned knees later, many of us will not even have gained the competence to scare, much less hurt, our baddie. Even just on a physical level, competence in the ways of the warrior takes a long time to learn and perfect.

And yet, gaining true insights in the relevance of Sun Tzu’s and Musashi’s thoughts require more than just experiencing the physical aspect of martial training.

Though it is certainly a start, learning to punch and kick properly is just an aspect of warrior life—a tiny, miniscule aspect at that, might I add.

So how are we then—as managers— supposed to pick up this knowledge? Is it only through actual practice of the warrior arts that we can be enlightened?

One of aikido’s most senior uchi deshi, T.K.Chiba Shihan, has this to say about his perspective on martial training.

“As martial artists, we are familiar with the term “martial” and much accustomed to using it frequently. However, I doubt if we can really understand its original meaning, in particular as our understanding is based upon the type of training, conditions and environment we have created by training in a dojo.

In my view, however hard and intense our training may be, we are still very far from the essential concept of “martial” and are barely scratching the surface. lt is unrealistic to think that, in today’s dojo environment, we can simulate a situation, like jumping off a one thousand foot high cliff or, in Zen expression, taking a step off the tip of a one hundred - foot high pole, where one is forced to face a desperate plight, and where one is able to transcend oneself beyond life and death.”

This article concludes next week.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, May 05, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/05/05/bus/batuhan.the.warrior.manager.html)

No thanks, Mr. Guingona

2007-04-28T21:42:00.000-07:00

Not a lot has changed with Philippine Airlines.

During my last visit to the country, I was once again witness to PAL’s enduring legend as a metaphor of organisational ossification. PAL embodies the old adage of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and takes its iconic status very seriously indeed. Surely the airline is as close to being broke as any business can be, but I believe it isn’t totally so, or otherwise things would start changing.

Ever the old dinosaur, PAL has remained perpetually anachronistic. The Bacolod office in particular, where I was made to bear the consequences of their tried and tested “the customer is not always right” philosophy, seems to be frozen in time – with the same set of indifferent faces, the same tired looking computer terminals, and the same long queues of people frustrated at not being able to purchase flight tickets within a humanly tolerable time.

Consider this – a simple itinerary change to my ticket – which many airlines today would allow you to do online in minutes took me over three-and-a-half days to complete. No, actually I take that back. It was not me who completed the transaction – my wife had to send their office secretary to PAL to retrieve the amended tickets, as our patience had by then already worn thin from our various trips back and forth to their ticket office.

I have to thank PAL for one thing, however, which I never would have been able to accomplish had it not been for their perfectly executed delaying tactics. Yes I was able to read the local news – from cover to cover of all the leading national publications. The delay was that bad that by the end of it, I had memorised the names of the editorial staff of most of the daily papers.

One of the things that caught my attention was an open letter from one of our elderly statesmen of Philippine politics – Citizen Teofisto Guingona – who I believe is not at this time running for public office.

His open letter started as many other open letters would at this time of the year. Extolling the heroic virtues and the valiant struggles of the Filipino people against all forms of oppression and tyranny, he then goes on to admonish us to root out a problem he singled out to be a big one for this nation – that of corruption.

Having caught my attention, however, on an issue that I am also very passionate about, he just as quickly lost my interest as he had aroused it.

In his letter, Guingona trivialises the extent of the problem by asking us to be on the lookout for the “customs man at the airport” who asks for bribes to let us through without a hassle. He also warns us about the “BIR inspector” after grease money, in order to let us get away with paying lower taxes.

For a man I had previously admired as having more principle than most, Mr. Guingona did not impress me that day in the slightest.

The customs man at the airport and the BIR inspector on the take are such peripheral players in the issue of graft they may as well not have been mentioned at all.

The big players in this high stakes game are some of our highest officials in the land, who have sold our collective national soul to the highest bidder. They are in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and every public edifice which houses anyone of sufficiently high political stature.

Our BIR and customs men are merely privates in this game of generals. If Mr. Guingona had really wanted his letter to mean something, he would have known better than to heap the blame at them.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, April 28, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/04/28/bus/batuhan.no.thanks.mr..guingona.html)

Despair in May

2007-04-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

IF there should be times I do not wish to be in the Philippines, it would have to be during May of an election year.

Unfortunately for me, there was little choice, given my work schedule and my wife’s and son’s timetables, except to pick this time of the year to spend a much needed breather back home.

On the plus side—despite the depression that set in once I saw the same recycled names vying for public office—our family was able to enjoy the fantastic attractions of Bohol Island, in the company of my brother Totol, his wife Apples and son, JM.

The experience was that memorable, I decided to devote last week’s column to sing its praises.

But whatever it is that delights me, somehow it can never fully offset the sadness I feel whenever I see my country, going yet again through the motions of a national election.

It pains me immensely because—

Candidates for public office are again from the same old names—scions of well-entrenched political dynasties that have monopolized this country for ages, and have sadly brought it very little good.

Whoever the victors happen to be, majority of them will have nothing new to offer the country, except perhaps to set in train a series of scandals, corruption allegations and political crises, that would only serve to drag our country backwards, rather than propel its progress forwards.

I know that whichever crop of leaders get into power, there will always be another group of sore losers doing their very best to ensure that those elected will never have a chance of succeeding in office.

Our people have become so jaded with the political process, they now see it not as an opportunity to usher in change, but merely as another chance to make some extra money, to ensure that next meal on their table.

Despite the frenetic pace of development that I see among our neighbors as I travel around within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) region, there is very little sign of it in the Philippines. Instead, the only thing that I can relate to in the country as far as Asean is concerned is that embarrassing scandal in Cebu, concerning the hugely overpriced lamp posts that were hastily erected along the route to the Asean convention—from Mactan airport to the North Reclamation Area.

We have an immense wealth of skill and talent from intelligent and well-educated Filipinos, who end up being tapped for the development of the Middle East, Europe and North America, but which our political leaders have no idea how to utilize.

While our health system continues to fail, and our sick countrymen die by the thousands from even the simplest and most easily curable diseases, the only thing our leaders can do is to encourage the tragic diaspora of our health workers to all corners of the globe.

Much as I would love to come back and help my country move forward, there is very little opportunity for me, and others like me here, and the only economically viable choice is to offer our globally marketable skills to the highest bidder.

As l leave my country behind, I have very little hope that things will be better the next time to come back.

When I return home at another May time, a few years down the road, as much as I would like to be writing something hopeful and triumphant then, I may yet again be composing a piece like this—so bereft of hope, so empty of promise, and so full of pain.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, April 21, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/04/21/bus/batuhan.despair.in.may.html)

A Taste of Bohol Heaven

2007-04-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

I WAS going to cap a series of pieces on corporate strategic alignment—which we had been discussing prior to the Holy Week break—when a number of events during my Easter holiday back home convinced me to defer the concluding article, in favor of more pleasant local matters.

This was our brief but very enjoyable getaway to Panglao Island in Bohol, during the first half of the Holy Week, which we took together with my brother Totol Batuhan and his family.

With all the hype and attention focused on that other Visayan island of Boracay, it is easy to forget that Bohol too has all the natural charms—and more —to rival the attractions of its more acclaimed cousin to the west. In fact, having revisited the island after last setting foot on it many years ago, I was astonished to discover that in a lot of ways, Bohol is a much better family destination than Boracay.

Unlike Boracay—which masquerades as Manila by the seaside—often frequented by drunken and rowdy college students on their summer break, Bohol is largely unspoilt, with no trace of the noisy crowds that have become mainstays of its rival vacation destinations. For families looking for some peace and quiet, as well as attractions to visit during their holiday getaway, this is a terrific advantage, which is why in my book, Bohol gets my vote over Boracay.

During our visit, which was a brief but eventful three days and two nights, we were able to pack in a gastronomic lunch cruise along the scenic Loboc river, dolphin- and whale-watching around Pamilacan island, snorkeling amongst colorful tropical fish in the Balicasag marine conservation reserve, touring historic sites like the centuries-old Baclayon Church, as well as observing tarsiers and flying lemurs in their natural habitat. Not to mention having our fill of Bohol’s delicacies, which are as numerous as there are hills of chocolate on this unique island.

Of course, the coup de grace to our total surrender to the charms of Bohol was our fantastic hideaway on Panglao Island—the boutique Amarelo Resort. Having already visited many acclaimed tourist accommodations in the Mediterranean, the United States as well as in neighboring Southeast Asian countries, I rank this one up there among the best, and definitely one to recommend to the discriminating international holiday-maker.

Owned and meticulously managed by former Baker McKenzie partner Atty. Doy Nunag—a native son of Bohol—Amarela is a tastefully furnished corner of heaven, an apt description given its vantage position overlooking the sea, with majestic views of the fiery sunsets and scenic moonrises over the idyllic island. And did I mention the food? No pot noodles in sight here, thank you very much. Instead the resort’s restaurant whips up a culinary offering comparable to the tastiest I have sampled anywhere else.

Having just opened last year, Amarela may not yet be as widely known as the older institutions on the island such as Bohol Beach Club. I have no doubt, however, that as word gets out from its many satisfied guests, it will get more and more difficult to get a booking in the near future.

Another Panglao attraction worthy of mention is this little gem of a place, simply called the Bohol Bee Farm. True to its name, it makes some of the finest honey products, as well as other goodies from ingredients organically grown and produced on its premises. With a scenic restaurant overlooking the sea, and serving original creations such as salads garnished with native flowers and herbs, this is yet another must-see for the discerning tourist.

Finally, just as it seemed our holiday could not get any better than it already was, we were given the warm Boholano hospitality by Tagbilaran Mayor Dan Lim, who graciously treated us to a wonderful meal at the Bee Farm, as well as a sampling of delectable goodies from the farm’s gift shop.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, April 14, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/04/14/bus/batuhan.a.taste.of.bohol.heaven.html)

Working Together

2007-03-31T23:43:00.000-07:00

THERE seems to be something about the sport of rowing that makes it look like an endeavor meant only for intelligent individuals.

For a start, it requires perfect motor coordination from the participants— with each stroke by every member of the team timed to exact precision—so no amount of precious energy is dissipated, and everything is channeled towards making the craft move speedily and steadily forward.

Secondly, it requires careful strategic thinking. How many times have we seen it before in Olympic races–rowers starting very fast, only to fade away in the homestretch—with the eventual winner usually the team that is able to maintain a sustained pace all the way from start to finish.

Third, team selection is of utmost importance. A bunch of muscular athletes does not a good rowing team necessarily make. Abilities have to be complementary, as well as supplementary. Each member’s contribution has to be measured in terms of its effect on overall team performance, rather than on individual brilliance alone.

Come to think of it, this is probably the reason why rowing is the sport of choice for esteemed institutions of learning like Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge. It just makes perfect sense—it is a sport for intelligent and thinking individuals.

For me, rowing is the perfect metaphor for how an effective organization ought to be intelligently run.

It has all the same elements that a business needs to have in order to be successful. Let us take each of them in turn.

PERFECT COORDINATION. We remember well the debacle of the American superstars in the last Olympic basketball championships. Despite an enormous wealth of individual talent, they were not a cohesive and coordinated team, with the acrobatic exertions of the gifted players sometimes actually getting in the way of the other members’ performance.

In rowing, there is no place for this. If one side rows faster than the other, the boat will start to spin and go around in circles. Even the slightest hint of an imbalance in effort is enough to hinder forward progress significantly.

TEAM SELECTION. As we have noted, pure brawn is no guarantee for success. In fact, it is a surefire recipe for failure. Selection is therefore geared towards making sure that team members’ strengths are properly matched to others’ weaknesses, so that any individual disadvantage is effectively neutralized.

How many times have we witnessed organizations where key individuals are constantly at each others’ throats, either vying for power supremacy or seeking economic gain?

Sometimes, this is disguised by organizations as embracing diversity, by allowing disparate-minded individuals to work together in a team. Sometimes this is true, and in certain cases beneficial. But uncontrolled diversity could easily degenerate into total chaos, and most teams are probably unaware which side of the diversity divide their own lies.

STRATEGIC THINKING. Of course, no team wins consistently without an effective strategy. The dominance of the LA Lakers and Boston Celtics in the 1980’s, and that of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990’s was no accident. It was not even due to good players primarily, though the fact that they were there helped a lot. It was mostly down to the strategic abilities of Pat Riley, KC Jones and Phil Jackson.

Without the genius that these coaches had in ensuring that their team’s skills were balanced in both attack and defense, and that they had the right complement of players to last the entire campaign to begin with, no Michael Jordan, Larry Bird or Magic Johnson would have been good enough to win as many times as they did.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, March 31, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/03/31/bus/batuhan.working.together.html)

Pulling Apart (Part 3)

2007-03-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

ISN'T it funny how the things we write about are also the ones that invariably turn up soon after in our own work situations? It almost feels a bit like imagining a song in your head, only to hear someone close to you start singing exactly the same tune.

In the last couple of weeks, we have been looking at a common problem that plagues most businesses today — that of their component parts striving to achieve improvement in their own little areas of responsibility but failing to better the plight of their entire organizations in the process.

This past week, one of the country managers of the region I look after excitedly asked me to his office. He started talking about how our costing routines don’t properly reflect the true cost of making products in our factories. Without commenting on his epiphany, I just let him continue. He went on about how the way we allocate costs to products are not applicable to our other factories in the region, and therefore we do not really know which place produces things more economically than another.

Right that instant, I heard the song I was singing in my head being loudly sung in front of me. Here was a person, looking after the commercial health and viability of an enterprise, saying exactly the same things which we said were problematic in terms of trying to better manage an organization. Here it was, and there was precious little I could do about it, at least in the short term.

There were a few things not quite right with his observations, for a start. The costing system he was talking about, though adequate for valuing the cost of inventory, never stood the chance of being remotely useful in providing comparative information that allowed for comparisons with anywhere else. For a start, the costs it produced did not even reflect the “economic value” of products made in its own factory, let alone provide any meaningful benchmarks with another business.

The factory he was referring to was still allocating non-variable costs to products by means of a single plant-wide driver — direct labor hours. How does that give any indication of value when shifting people around could easily cause such wide fluctuations in the “profitability” of products? The answer — it does not.

An even greater problem that relates to our immediate subject matter was the desire to “improve” the quality of our costing system, by looking at better allocations of costs to our products. Apparently, doing something wrong better makes it right? Or perhaps I was missing a point here?

There were no points I missed, of course. Everything I heard was consistent with what we were saying all along – the fact that many organizations believe that creating little improvements everywhere in their organization eventually translates into benefits for the whole.

Granted that the costing system was accurate — which it wasn’t — non-variable costs were still minuscule in relation to the total in any case — no more than seven percent of total product costs were “fixed.”

So why concentrate time and effort on “properly allocating” the seven percent to the rest of the 93 percent? What fvalue does this add to our understanding of the business?

Something is surely at fault here. That something is preventing (or at least not helping) organizations focus on their real issues, and spend their time and resources where the results matter most.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, March 10, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/03/10/bus/batuhan.pulling.apart.(part.3).html)

Pulling Apart

2007-02-24T00:42:00.000-08:00

YOU have probably heard the latest joke about Airbus. It’s not about its financial or management state of affairs, but about its planes — the one that goes: “an Airbus plane is a Boeing made in Europe.”

No, it doesn’t sound so funny; not unless you are European. But the jibe hits true and to the point — a large part of Airbus’ problems is related to the fact that it is made according to European ways of making things.

And just what is not right with the European way of making things? Isn’t France well known for fantastic designs, Germany for meticulous engineering, and the UK for good old world charm and elegance?

Isn’t this why we go for French haute couture, English Aston Martins and German BMWs? Yet, why is it that when the three get together to build a plane, the result leaves customers less than delighted?

It is supposed to be Airbus’ trump card on Boeing. Larger than any airliner ever built, the A380 could fly more people across continents in a way never before seen in aviation history. The new Airbus plane would be the “palace of the skies” carrying travelers to their destinations in unprecedented levels of comfort.

But the road (or, in this case, flight path) to the A380’s blue skies has been nothing but blue. Long delays in production have set back delivery dates to major airlines by more than a year in many cases, leaving executives fuming and looking for compensation from the company, to reduce their losses.

To detractors of the European way of doing things, it is easy to blame the plane’s European heritage for its problems. Many Europeans themselves believe this to be the case — that the British, French, German and Spanish makers of the plane could not, among themselves, sit down in peace long enough to make something that works well, on time and to customers’ expectations.

To a large extent, there is a lot of truth to this. Small though the continent may be, Europe is a fractious grouping of states and peoples that have never really wished to work closely together, and only less than a hundred years ago, have been actively waging war on one another on a large scale, to prove the point.

Taking it out of its geo-cultural context, however, it is easy to see the problem as the embodiment of how various parts of organizations — whether they be different departments within the same division, separate divisions within the same company or related companies within the same group — often end up working at cross purposes to one another, albeit with the best of intentions in their efforts.

How many times have we heard “Sales and Marketing” complain about “Finance” while “Manufacturing” blames “Supply Chain,” and everybody else point at “Human Resources” for causing them problems, and being the reason for their inability to deliver on their objectives? If the organizations you work for are anything like the ones I know, “too many times” would be the answer.

What’s the problem? Is this the way organizations are supposed to be working, and we are inescapably doomed to have to accept this as a way of life? Or can something be done about it, so that we could pull together and achieve our common objective?

Published in Sun Star Daily, Saturday, February 24, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/02/24/bus/batuhan.pulling.apart.html).

Racism What?

2007-01-20T00:48:00.000-08:00

THE last few days have Seen many newsworthy events that ought to have occupied the front pages of the papers, held up traffic in Internet blogs and forums, and grabbed the full attention of the public.

Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, along with the judge who sent hundreds of Shiite rebels to their deaths at the behest of Saddam Hussein, were executed in controversial circumstances a few days after the dictator was himself sent to the gallows.

Global warming and greenhouse gases were once again in the public eye, with the United Kingdom prime minister himself attacked by environmentalists for refusing to contain his long-haul international travels, both for private and public commitments.

And the Bank of England, for the third time since August, has raised interest rates another 25 basis points to 5.25 percent in the face of a three percent annual inflation rate (against the two percent target). Given that a fourth increase is again expected as early as next month, this should have merited a lot of column inches and minutes of intelligent analysis on prime time television.

None of the above, however, were newsworthy enough to occupy CNN, Sky News and BBC programs’ top billing in the last couple of days. Add to that headline billing in virtually all of the UK papers, a number of major European and Asian publications, and even the venerable New York Times, and you begin to get a sense of just how big this story has become.

So what’s the latest buzz all about? RACISM. Yes, you read it right. The “R” word. The race card. The unspeakable taboo of all taboos has reared its ugly head, and kicked up a storm of protest all the way from Birmingham to Bombay.

And this was not an employee dismissed or denied promotion on the basis of skin color and ethnic origin. Nor was this the case of a student denied admission to a prestigious university for being a minority.

This was the story of how a famous movie star from Bollywood got a rude introduction to British manners and civility when she joined “Celebrity Big Brother,” the reality show franchise that has now practically reached all corners of the globe.

Shilpa Shetty, idolized by hordes of adoring fans in her native India, got an even bigger screening than the one she had in the world’s largest film industry. And not for a blockbuster film she made, but rather for being at the receiving end of what many people perceive to be racist treatment against her by her companions in the house.

Even for a reality show known for embracing the controversial, nothing in its history so far has been bigger than this. So big that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, many members of the UK and Indian governments, plus a host of respected news personalities have had to comment on its implications.

The fallout from this episode is as yet unclear, but its outcome will probably not be trivial. Far from just affecting the fortunes of the show’s producers and the television network hosting it, it is also bound to have an impact on the futures of the protagonists involved.

But what really transpired within the confines of the house? And why has a whole British nation, plus any number of Europeans, Americans and Asians been dragged into a debate on a subject that is mostly swept under the carpet, and is only ever spoken about in hushed tones and quiet whispers?

Published in Sun Star Daily, Saturday, January 20, 2007 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2007/01/20/bus/batuhan.racism.what..html).

A very Filipino Christmas

2006-12-30T03:13:00.000-08:00

IT started as normally as many Filipino parties often do—a few “fashionably late” minutes later than scheduled.

The food was great, with an eclectic regional and international culinary selection that only Filipinos can pull off so well. Bicol express, Chinese yang chow fried rice made from Indian Basmati, Italian spaghetti and other favorites from around the country and the world over graced the table, way in overabundance for all the partygoers to consume twice over.

Oh, and there were the favorite Filipino games alright, both for the kids and the adults to enjoy. There was even a special edition of “Deal or No Deal,” complete with the Kris Aquino mannerisms and expressions that we all love so much. Prizes aplenty too for the winners, with some even for the losers as well.

And what gathering can be complete without the dancing — to the beat of Gary Valenciano and VST & Co. no less. With happy couples swinging away until the small hours, it was a Christmas party truly worthy of being called Filipino. For few can really enjoy a party as we do — just ask the occasional foreigner lucky enough to be invited to one of these soirees, and I am sure they would all wholeheartedly agree.

Typical of so many of our gatherings at this time of the year, this one could have been held anywhere in the country. The only give-away was the freezing cold and damp outside the hall, something not really typical of the Philippines at this time of the year, or the whole year for that matter.

The celebration I speak of was held in Cheshire, in the suburb of Cheadle — home to a good number of Filipino migrant families here in the United Kingdom. Many of them engaged in nursing and allied health professions, the Filipinos here are a vibrant group, proud members of a community that they call their own, at least for now.

Like a good number of Western countries today, the United Kingdom relies on foreign workers to take care of its healthcare needs, and our Filipino brothers and sisters were only too happy to respond to the challenge. As a result, most of the hospitals in the area are staffed with familiar faces, not unlike the wards of our hospitals back home.

Badly needed though their services may be, however, our brothers and sisters here face uncertain times ahead. Some in the United Kingdom (UK) medical community have voiced concerns over the fact that too many foreign workers have come, at the expense of UK and European Union (EU) nationals.

With many Eastern European countries already in the Union, their workers will soon have equal rights with UK citizens to work in the country. In the case of the health industry, this will come at the expense of non-EU nationals, including Filipinos.

With so much agitation over the issue of migration (especially the connection with the sensitive subject of foreign-sponsored terrorism), controls over immigration are only bound to get tighter.

This will not be helped by the planned exit of Tony Blair in May, and the expected strengthening of the Conservative Party— whose immigration policies can only be described as less-than-friendly to foreign workers.

And still, we party on.

Looking around the dance hall that night, no threat of immigration clampdowns or foreign worker restrictions seem to be imminent.

In terms of resiliency and stoic resolve, we Filipinos are legendary. Perhaps due to our happy go lucky nature, and certainly because of our faith in Divine Providence — adversity or not — we simply continue to live as we normally do, and party as much as we have always done.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, December 30, 2006 (http://www.medicaldaily.net/link.asp?ID=149981&Title=Batuhan:%20A%20very%20Filipino%20Christmas)

The gift of time

2006-12-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

MURDER. The investigation into the murder of five young girls in England has taken on a dramatic new turn.

This week two men were arrested and formally questioned for the killings, and just this morning one of them was released without charges. The other has been charged with the crimes, bringing with it the promise that finally the killer will be brought to justice.

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And yet, even with the capture and possible indictment of the suspected murderer, the case seems to ask even more questions than have already been answered. More so because the crimes took place during a season of celebration that is so close to all our hearts.

At the heart of the matter is the extent to which the bond of family relations has deteriorated in the West, and the attendant problems and difficulties that this brings into the society at large. Both the victims and the suspected killers seem to have been affected by this ominous development—this shared misfortune bringing them together into a destructive end.

Hearing the relatives of the young girls speak, almost to a family they echoed the same regret—that their daughters had already been “lost” to them long before they had actually died.

Most had no more contact with their kin, and all had very difficult relationships with their immediate family.

Lost because all had succumbed to the temptation of hard drugs—a habit so insidious that they seem to have surrendered all their humanity and self-respect, resorting to whatever means to fund their addiction, including selling their own bodies to virtual strangers for cash. In the end they traded even their lives for a craving too strong to resist, even potential harm mattered little in the equation.

The suspects seem to have suffered the same sad fate as the victims. From the little that we have been informed about their circumstances, it seems that they led pretty isolated lives themselves, either divorced or without loving relationships to speak of. In the end it seems that this took a heavy toll on their sanity, leading them to act in the way they did.

Victims and suspects alike were “victimized” by a phenomenon that now seems to consume most of the West, and spreading fast in our part of the world – the destruction of the family as a solid social unit, reinforcing positive behaviour on its members, and acting as a rock-solid support in terms of personal crises.

How has this happened when Christmas is as busy as it has ever been, with everyone engaged in a frenzied rush to get their loved ones the fanciest and most expensive presents? How can this be possible when it has been estimated that more and more people now go into debt every holiday season, their shopping sprees taking them a good part of the next year to pay off?

The answer, I fear, is lost in our orgy of spending—buried beneath the Playstations and Ipods, masked by the scent of Armani and Gucci perfume, and thrown away like the tons of tinsel and wrapping paper that we discard at the end of it all.

As my wife reminds me every now and then, there are three gifts we can give to one another—our time, our talent, and our treasure.

And we know of course which one is the easiest to part with, and which is the most difficult to give away.
But we need to give of our precious time.

We need time to listen to our children’s worries, address their anxieties and allay their fears.

We need to take time to praise their work and celebrate their accomplishments. And difficult as it may be to do at times, we need to spend time in firmly reminding them of the error of their ways, so they may walk on the right path again.

Our time is the most precious gift we could ever give our loved ones this Christmas.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

Published in Sun Star Daily, Saturday, December 23, 2006 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2006/12/23/bus/batuhan.the.gift.of.time.html)

When Progress Is Not

2006-12-16T03:42:00.000-08:00

WHILE Christmas should normally be a time of merrymaking for most families, sadly it will not be to five families in England this year. In a gruesome tale of murderous frenzy, not seen since the time of the infamous London killer Jack the Ripper, five women have turned up dead, killed in similar circumstances by what is most likely a single individual.

All women had one thing in common — they were all “working girls” — the term euphemistically given to females who are in the business of exchanging sexual favors with clients, for a fee.

Prostitution is technically not legal in the United Kingdom, but its existence is tolerated by the authorities. Overall estimates vary but there are thousands and thousands of females and males — often young and vulnerable individuals — who are in the trade.

Invariably, their circumstances will have certain similarities—broken homes, sexual abuse as children, and more often than not substance and alcohol abuse as adolescents and teenagers. Selling their bodies for cash is often their only means to finance the dire circumstances they are under.

The trade normally operates “under the radar” of the police. When things are under control and no crimes are committed, normally law enforcement officials look the other way and leave the workers and their customers on their own.

However, when killings of the sort that just took place occur, things really start happening.

Not since the height of the London terror bombings has such well covered police activity taken place in the country. Forensic teams from all over the UK have been brought in to bring their expertise into the case, in an effort to catch the daring murderer before he could strike again.

Such was the bravado of this individual that even when the police had already started with their investigation a week ago, he still had the audacity to kill two more women under their noses.

The irony, of course, is that with only a fraction of the resources now at the disposal of the police to solve this murder mystery, these tragedies may not have happened at all.

Men and women in the flesh trade are perhaps the most vulnerable to this kind of tragedy. Though their activities are generally tolerated, they are shunned by the communities where they live and work, and are not really given priority by the police in terms of protection.

Intervention to get them out of the trade they are in is often ineffective — by the time they go into the profession, their problems will have been too complicated to solve.

Their stories are not unlike what we have at home in the Philippines — of young children left to fend for themselves or look after others, young people led into crime and drug addiction by the misery of their circumstances, and a society too apathetic to heed their cries for help, until it is too late.

Despite the progress many societies have made, especially over the last few years of expanding globalization, many of our young people are still as vulnerable as ever to neglect and abuse.

Left on the margins of progress, there is no hope for them in terms of social mobility, and the only recourse is to crime, drugs and prostitution.

It is a very serious problem that needs to be addressed, whether in Europe, or here at home in the Philippines. For no progress can really be considered as true advancement if it leaves the weakest and most vulnerable members of society behind.

Published in the Sun Star Daily, Saturday, December 16, 2006 (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb/2006/12/16/bus/batuhan.when.progress.is.not.html).