Even as the blogosphere was heating up with the election bug, I was too busy with my other hobby – business development. My entrepreneurial sister and I had a Vulcan mind-meld as we lay down the blueprint for a series of e-commerce site roll-outs that will cater to the Mindanao market in the last quarter of 2009. That was until I came across these two paragraphs from de Quiros.
The job at hand is not CEO of a company, it is janitor of a building. What this country needs today is not someone to manage things, it is someone to clean up things. What we need today is not someone to make a business flourish, it is someone to make a dwelling place habitable, one whose previous tenant left it in a condition only cockroaches, rats, and real-estate speculators, in ascending order of predation, can appreciate. Who better to do this than Noynoy?
Or if you persist in using the CEO image, the job at hand is CEO, but only of a company that has been bankrupted by a bunch of crooks. Whom would you hire to revive it? An efficiency freak with a long résumé but who has business interests that compete with the company, who is a known tirador or beholden to people who are, and who therefore can only be trusted to efficiently pillage some more? Or someone you can trust?
Halo halo metaphors
De Quiros prefers the janitor metaphor. I prefer the turnaround master or the transformative CEO and not the plain-jane vanilla CEO.
A turnaround or turnabout is defined as:
- A complete change or reversal: a prompt economic turnaround
- The act or an instance of turning about and facing or moving in the opposite direction; a reversal.
- A shift or change in opinion, loyalty, or allegiance.
- A sharp, positive reversal in the performance of a company or the overall market.
- Positive, sustained reversal of hitherto prevailing negative conditions, or in the performance of an economy, firm, industry, or market.
Janitors clean up, period. After the janitor cleans up, what next?
Transformative CEOs and turnaround masters not only clean up shop, but they make the shop thrive by introducing innovation that fosters positive growth.
Why settle for a janitor when you can have a transformative CEO?
Why settle for just a clean-up when you can clean-up AND flourish, thrive, prosper?
Why aim your sights low, when for the same amount of effort and the same amount of time, you can aim high and hit the mark.
De Quiros went further to say that
A CEO is accountable only to the stockholders, not to the hundreds of men and women employed by the company. The hundreds of men and women he can order around and fire as he pleases. Its political equivalent is that the president is accountable only to the taipans and coniotics who spent for his campaign, not to the citizens of the country. The citizens he can bully around and screw as he pleases.
This is where Conrado lost me. His metaphor likened the citizens to employees. I say, de Quiros is WRONG. Nothing can be further from the truth.
De Quiros, messed up and mixed up his metaphors. The correct “template” is government officers and staff are employees, and the citizens are the shareholders. Shareholders have the power to make or break a CEO. What can be be gleaned from from the previous paragraph however, is that Filipino voters have forgotten that they are shareholders – and the government officials and staffs have forgotten that they are employees whose main role is to serve the shareholders.
When shareholders put a CEO who is already a known thief or arsonist, the shareholders should not be surprised that the company’s funds were bamboozled or that the company’s facilities were burned down. The shareholders were wined and dined by the wannabe-CEOs. They chose the candidate with the most honest smile and pedigree. Yes, the CEO was honest – but he was also indecisive, leading the company to ruin. The CEO chosen by the shareholders didn’t steal from the company but led the compnay downhill just the same.
In financial terms, $1,000,000 lost from theft versus $1,000,000 lost from inefficiency is still the same $1,000,000 down the drain.
We need to set our sights higher than a janitor or a plain-jane CEO – and reverse the downhill slide from mediocracy to idiocracy.
The Question of Trust
Even as De Quiros makes a litany and swipes at the various candidates on the issue of trust, the Aquino scion is automatically given the presumption of trustworthiness because he is the son of Cory and Ninoy.
Really? How about this for trust? What do you trust him to do?
If you were a tenant living in Hacienda Luisita, will you trust the son of the lord of Hacienda Luisita to make good their promises that you will have your own piece of land? For all the rhetoric of being the voice of the oppressed, the tenants of Hacienda Luisita were served bullets, bullied to receive a stock certificate instead of a tangible piece of fertile soil that can be sifted through with their bare hands.
I trust that Noynoy will do more Hacienda Luisitas.
I trust that Noynoy will scuttle CARP some more.
I trust that Noynoy will keep the constitution chained to the rent-capture interests of the landlords and oligarchs that have held the Philippine nation’s economic development a hostage.
Which puts this issue of trust in Noynoy akin to a used Trust condom
- best thrown in the trash can.
Popularity: 1% [?]
I am confident . . . I trust, I should say . . . that your venture will be highly successful. Rather like carborundum rather than a condom.
The Philippines does not need a janitor, for sure.
Joe
hey joe:
crossing my fingers it will be a carborundum :)
in retrospect, since I was able to vote: all i have heard (in chronological order)is :
In the process of “clean up” pingpong, the tax coffers are cleaned up by Kamaganak, Inc., Pinoy Mafia, Kabit en company, stuffed shirts and company, bonehead and company, etcetera in a game of musical chairs.
So when I hear the word “clean up” as being the primary theme – uhmmmm.. clean up is good, but it’s not enough.
We need a real Doer, with a vision. Not a talker with long rhetorics.
“Masakit na sa tainga ang mga speeches”. “Wala din nangyari.”.
I fully agree with you bong on your discussion of this so-called crown jewel – the Hacienda Luisita of the Aquinos.
Will Noynoy now please answer this valid question raised by our friend bongV here – without having to go on a ‘retreat’?