Change is never easy

(Or why Pareto’s 80-20 rule is alive)

Do we belong to the 80% that account for only 20% of the world’s wealth? With a third of our population (67-33) in poverty, we have more than proved the reality of Pareto’s.

This is not only true of countries but organizations and families too. A third of the supposed excellent companies in Tom Peter’s 1982 best-selling business book are now extinct. The same has happened with scores of Fortune 500 companies. Why? Countries, organizations and people have their blind spots.

We know about Peter Principle and companies mirror it all the time – only 20% move up the hierarchy. The writer has witnessed this reality over decades in many parts of the world yet has also felt the immense reward of seeing organizations and people develop their potentials.

The writer’s family traveled to China and Eastern Europe after they opened their borders. And realized how blessed Filipinos were. And when USAID/IESC tapped the writer to do development work in Eastern Europe, he knew that he had to dig into his reservoir of development experience to make a dent. And his core message would be: “you don’t have to be victims of circumstances; create your own circumstances, your own future instead”.

If businesses can be fixed and if people can be developed, there is the chance for companies and hopefully countries to develop as well? Friends – Filipinos and foreigners – have told the writer that the Philippines has already been cursed by Pareto’s rule. Hopefully like the good thief, we would overcome our blind spot?

Change is always uncomfortable. People get disoriented with change. The status quo is our comfort zone and we have a slew of justifications why we can’t change: tradition, culture, religion . . . and for the non-poor, “poverty is for them, but not for us; our way of life (our “senorito-muchacho culture”?) beats the rest of the world”.

This point was made (but did not register then) to the writer many years ago by a foreigner (who cared for Filipinos especially his Filipino daughter-in-law and loved to visit until his passing) who was amazed that the writer’s car had access to all the gated communities (including a military camp) from Alabang to Makati thus exempt from Metro Manila’s traffic jam: “A country cannot change if those who can influence change beat the system instead and get rewarded . . . and (the writer is now paraphrasing) everyone seems to have an answer for why things are, matter-of-factly defending the status quo – that acceptance equates to the virtue of resiliency”?

In the history of nations regimes changed either because people wanted change (e.g., our People Power, France, and Russia) or the regime wanted the change (to modernize, for example) and the opposition resisted the change because they had their own model and the people went with the latter (e.g., England).
We don’t have the chance to be like the good thief? Because it must be we, the people, that should want the change? It appears that despite all the global measures of development going against us, personified by 30 million hungry Filipinos, we remain conveniently stuck with the status quo, in one guise or another – i.e., we can’t go against our grain?

But as FDR said at the height of the Great Depression: “Nations like people make mistakes, but we must be big enough to change”.