Finding Solutions in the Philippine Power Sector

I’m reading Ralph Waldo Emerson … again. It’s been over 35 years since I’ve visited with him.

In 1838 the Senior Class at Harvard’s Divinity School  – there was like six or seven of them in all – invited a young man, 35-years old, from Concord, with some very radical ideas, to give the commencement address.

So this handful of students and their families and some faculty (who were probably not so pleased with the students’ choice of speaker) gathered up on the 3rd floor of Divinity Hall on a June morning and heard what became known as “The Divinity School Address.”

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets.  Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also am a man.’ Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. 

Mediocrity is certainly not what I want for the sector.

Part of the trick is in finding the soul of the Philippine power sector. And I say this with eyes wide open regarding both business necessities of capital creation and preservation as well as politics. 

The answers, whatever they are, will be an intuition – not received at second hand. Ideas from others must, in the words of Emerson, be “not instruction, but provocation.”

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I wrote the above in July, 2006 when we were coming off a decade of heavy-handed influencing by multi-nationals and international funding agencies. Today we are much more left to the rough-and-tumble of our domestic decision processes. But Emerson’s admonition still holds. And as long as we are using the “soul of the Filipino power sector” as our compass, we’ll find our way and we will feel good about our direction.

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