All too well, everyday, and everywhere we know that the world is gripped with an economic typhoon. As Intel closes its Philippine operations, and as left and right people are let go, even from profitable companies like IBM, the world hasn’t seen this fierce challenge in decades. As much as it sounds cold and calculating, does it really come as a shock that letting people go is part of any good business tactic and that these business— even the profitable ones are doing this out of being prudent?
So amidst facing reality like @mlq3′s slowly but surely, and with Jon’s IT and electronics industries in a binary of fuzzy fate we find government putting up a brave face:
In my humble opinion— believe or not government’s opinion that this economy is “resilient”, I think is beside the point.
There’s a broader picture. So bear with me, would you?
Last week, I was listening to Apple’s Earnings Call, for Q109 Earnings Release. Apple’s press release quoted Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs:
“Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history—surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
Awesome performance coming from a company that in 1997 was near death.
This stellar performance speaks of a disciplined and extraordinary corporate culture:
▪ The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about.
▪ Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
▪ And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
▪ from Business Week, 12 October 2004, quoted Steve Jobs in “The Seed of Apple’s Innovation”
The most important part I think is that last one. Saying no to 1,000 awesome things so they won’t get on the wrong track. I’d like you to set that though aside for a bit. I’d like a conversation about bad dreams.
If anybody could doubt that Batman couldn’t frighten a criminal, they should have a look at “Batman on Gargoyle” by Keiji Iwakura. Fritz took uber-awesome snaps of his ceramic statue:
Go ahead and open a new tab and take a peak at Frit’s awesome work, but come back here, ok?
That could cast really bad dreams on superstitious criminals as we are having a living nightmare of If Bayani were Prez, and of Monsour = Obama. Then there is Patricia Evangelista’s In the Court of the Crimson King. She wrote:
More ominous is this: that this symbol of justice, of law and order, announced to all who would listen that the people should not pin their hopes on the legal system—the one bulwark at a time when there is little left to believe in—but instead pin their hopes on a moral system, on some vague notion of a moral revolution.
He talks about “character,” as “who we are when no one is watching.” Who is this man, when nobody watched? He is the man who represented the Marcos government in the martial law years with Marcos’ solicitor general Estelito Mendoza, his mentor. He is the man who defended the 1973 constitution that extended the term of Ferdinand Marcos. He acted as both solicitor general and minister of justice in Mendoza’s stead at a time when many were lost and killed in the same fashion that those he stands for now were lost and killed. He is the man who has failed to inhibit himself repeatedly in cases involving his friends, including decisions that favored his erstwhile mentor. And he was conveniently on leave during the momentous decisions on the CPR (calibrated preemptive response), Proclamation 1017, and RA 464.
Three posts that unscientifically sample what our generation think. It is a generation looking for direction and finding the short list of candidates floating ideas that they want the top job to be… wanting.
Several months back, I wrote a post on Political Triage:
Doctors are familiar with triage. In war or some disaster where there are many patients and not enough doctors and/or resources: you pick the patients that you can help the most. It is gut wrenching. it is what some people would say “evil”, but we’ve got to pick and choose which ones to fight, make the most impact.
It’s sort of like battlefield tactics: hit-strike-kill-move on.
This style also has its benefits in that as we tackle those problems that we can resolve, right here, right now: we learn new strategies and new tactics and gain new insights and strength that may help us solve the other pressing issues of our time (but more on that in subsequent posts).
This is what it means for Filipinos. Given our own limited resources, maybe it is time for us to consider, which ones are we going to choose first to accomplish. of the long myriad problems facing our nation, isn’t it the moment for us to be serious about making a dent in it? What should we prioritize? Let’s get serious: it is time for Political Triage. Given our limited resources, what issue do you think we should solve first?
Here we have a nation so griped with indecision, and a people so pulled down by the increasing and heavy weight and daunting task of nation building— they’re suffocating. Let’s not kid ourselves or have pride on “the resilience”– if any of this nation in the current economic storm.
The one thing that our Leaders can’t seem to wrap their minds is that— it shouldn’t matter. It isn’t enough. This nation needs to be on the road, on the path of growth with or without an economic downturn. It needs to do more. It needs to be better than it is, every time, like clockwork.
Oh, that reminds me, go take a look at GDP Growth and Missing Energy by Chuck. He wrote about GDP per capita and Energy Consumption per Capita.
That said, we need a vision for the future. And we need to transform our society to meet that vision. Several posts back I wrote Tomorrow On the Road to 2010, and in it I basically said we should legalize “For the Boys” and give commission to every transaction as a response to the present and growing problem of corruption.
Is that what we need?
In that same post, scroll down to the comment section and you’ll find a healthy discussion and one of them, DJB had asked, “why should we keep funding public schools?”
Is that what we need to do to raise the quality of our people’s intelligence?
If our National Life was boxing and the Filipino is Pacquiao and Hatton is the sum of all the challenges our nation has to face, then come May 2, Hatton would be in the ring and guess what? Manny Pacquiao wouldn’t be on it. Manny Pacquiao would be right out of his mind, with the right hand of Administration hitting the left hand of Opposition.
We need leaders who can decide what is the first thing that we’re going to do. There is a job at hand and that is to get more than 80 million Filipinos better lives than they were born into.
I wrote about Apple’s corporate culture and their discipline is a recipe of success. Twenty Eight Billion Dollars in the bank. That’s phenomenal! Their corporate culture comes from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. His work ethic, and his beliefs permeate everything Apple does, even when he isn’t there.
What has that got to do with the Philippines? That same thing needs to happen to our country. More than a need for Moral Compass, our people need Courage and Direction and Discipline. It needs to be certain what exactly is it that we want. It needs every resource we have firing on all cylinders. All hands on deck, and every man, woman and child onboard. Our nation needs leadership that can focus everything. Our people need someone to follow, who is honest with them and can say with sincerity, “Yes these are trying times but this is what we’ll do. And we will face these challenges.”
As businesses need to keep their costs down, in the same way we need leadership. The current crop of contenders for the throne has wowed us neither with ideas nor action to make us believe they’ll be any different.
So far.
Just like Apple, to get ahead of the game— if this country ever decides to, then it must innovate itself out poverty. First, it must decide, do we really want to? The painful reality is, that’s the broader picture, that’s the bottom line.
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Cocoy, thanks for the link! :-)
just for the sake of debate:
you used apple as a gold standard for innovation, etc…
what do you think about the problem that apple may have when it must eventually replace steve jobs?
isn’t there a management truism that one must never be too dependent on one thing 4 your success?
GabbyD,
In the short term– consensus is Apple will do just fine. They have projects in the pipeline, at least for two years.
Granted, Jobs is a superstar in the level of Bono.
I think Jobs has successfully transferred his work ethic and beliefs and character into Apple. more than knowing where Apple needs to go, it was Jobs’ function to keep Apple from doing things that isn’t part of “their story”.
Tim Cook— Apple’s COO has been instrumental in keeping their bottom line down. He’s been running the Macintosh division for years. He’s running Apple’s day to day and he’ll be good at it.
Phil Shiller, is Apple’s marketing guy and he’s not rockstar like Steve but just as familiar to millions of Apple users. So are the other members of Apple’s executive team and board.
Other members of AAPL’s team are likewise in place. From iPhone, to iPod, to manufacturing design. Clearly they have Steve’s vision of what Apple is. They’re out there to make great products.
That said, Steve Jobs didn’t make the first Mac. his co-founder, Woz did the hardware and the software and it was Steve Jobs’ brilliance as a sales, marketing and business guy that got Apple’s start.
Steve Jobs didn’t design the iPhone himself from scratch. or the iPod. He has teams of people for that. Granted the epiphany may have been Steve Jobs but the hard work, the business models, the marketing research, the design, the programming the manufacturing processes was done by Team Apple. So i have no doubt that Apple can keep on building awesome products for years to come.
Like Henry Ford or Walt Disney, I think Apple will be the same.
Oh and you should read this knowing that i use a mac, love my ipod and is an Apple fan boy.
Cocoy,
We all place great value in the idea that an educated people will almost surely be a prosperous people. If a people know how to read, write and compute, how can they go wrong in a world where almost all the new wealth being generated is in the form of some kind of intellectual property. Whether it be a product or a service, if it is not some kind of commodity like oil or gas, it will almost surely have content, features, functions that were designed, built and marketed by educated people and companies that use them.
Education is the goose that lays the golden eggs of modern life.
So why do we expect to be able to give it away for free?
Why do we pretend that by placing 90% of our youth in the aging vats of DepEd and handing them a rubber ducky at the end, that we have in fact given each one, largely for free, the Golden Goose of Education?
When most of them have never owned their own “free” textbook, or sat in a “free” classroom with decent “free” desks” and “blackboards.” And goodness, there are hardly any computers in the free public school, yet there are people who insist we should spend the whole Budget if necessary on education, because it is so indubitably a good thing.
I agree with you that Filipinos have to innovate their way out of this crisis.
My suggestion is for the government to get out of public education and give up at least the high school market to private schools.
May I point out that at the high school level, the percentage of those going to private schools is almost equal to those going to public schools. This seems to have been due to a natural process of attrition, where the public school sector just did not grow as quickly as the private schools, which are soon going to overtake the public schools. Also families deploying OFWs have known the importance of good communication skills not known to be had in public schools.
If the govt got out of high school, they would have enough budget left over to build decent schools for the elementary school kids, where the percentage of public to private is more like 90 to 10. Maybe even give each kid or pair of kids their own textbook. And fer chrissakes buy a couple of Apples or Lenovos or Whatever.
Or better yet, get out altogether of basic education, pour half of it to give free national wireless Internet service Aparri to Jolo the other half give to Univ. of the Philippines and SUCs. Let these tertiary schools be all FREE, best labs, free dorms with chefs and massage service, laptop per scholar, wireless everywhere of course, hire best teachers from abroad (like Richard Dawkins, etc) but highly competitive with tough, tough tests, and only the creme de la creme allowed to enter its portals! Strictly limited to giving a world class university education to just 100,000 Filipinos annually: scientists, doctors, lawyers, hardware and software engineers, economists and managers–but no priests, that’s strictly private sector.
We would be the world’s Highly Skilled Labor and Professional work force.
I bet u education at the elementary and high school levels would take care of themselves through private enterprise (schools are lucrative businesses!).
It’s my upside down cake approach.
It would be difficult to redirect RP’s export- and OFW remittances dependent economy. Not during this times of crisis.
Any government’s approach is to minimize the political strain from the economic debacle and be able to pick up once the global situation improves.
GMA is not about explain RP’s woes. Look, she’s going to Davos (World Economic Forum) to share to other leaders how the Philippines is successfully coping with this financial cataclysm.
So says her spin masters.
Dean,
I don’t know anything about education. Glancing around the web, there are differences between countries on how their education system works.
I think a point of agreement that we have is that our education system in its present state is broken.
I think the biggest fear is that without an intervention by the government— society degenerates into a citizenry of idiots. It may cause more problems than we actually solve.
in japan, i’ve read on wiki is that preschool kids are mostly homeschooled with programs on tv helping them along. And mostly guided by their parents.
I think a middle ground can be reached. We need an intelligent society but for the amount of money we’re spending right now— is totally a waste. We need more bang if education is such a high priority.
A basic education of reading, writing and counting should be free— but if the person wants to higher on the education level or there is something special about the child, then maybe he/she gets promoted.
I think the better answer is to decentralize education. let every city or province have their own education system from basic education to university level education, with more favors going to private schools. After all as the industry stands now, education is a money making engine. If they want their educational board to be elected, fine. if they want some other system, that’s great too.
as much as i’d like a wifi service across the country i’m so not in favor of state sponsored broadband. just look at EDSA. I think a self-healing mesh network if it ever it takes off is a better solution for a country like us.
but i agree with you, we really need to rethink education.
Phil,
There will always be some sort of crisis or excuse. we have to start sometime.