President-elect Aquino continues to be thrown fast and curve balls, and even cheap shots – are we expecting him to hit them all out of the ballpark? What is reality?
An economy producing $3,300 GDP (PPP) per person cannot address all the problems he faces, not to mention our budget deficits and rising debts. Yet while he campaigned on an anti-corruption platform he still must ask for the laundry list of problems – unemployment/poverty among them. So Clinton had an easier time – it’s the economy, stupid! But not even Obama can give jobs; so we should not expect Aquino to wave a magic wand and presto, unemployed Filipinos find themselves at work on July 2nd?
If indeed his focus is to fight corruption and poverty, he can still be innovative? But we too have a role to play: the premise we must keep as a people is he can only do a ‘couple of things’ – the rest will fall among the ‘trivial many’ as opposed to the ‘vital few’? Our culture of inclusion and compassion must take the backseat . . . lest we continue to squander whatever little resources we have – and that is our dilemma?
Innovation by definition is dynamic – thus a challenge, beyond Aquino? For example, while the Americans supported Japan to recover from WWII, America found itself falling behind in innovation and manufacturing. Yet it was a team of Americans who showed the Japanese the requisite thought processes and techniques. And thus clueless Corporate America trekked to Japan liked it was the Mecca of innovation and manufacturing.
Today Japan has lost its grip on electronics to Steve Jobs (and Taiwan and even South Korea). Because as the Americans struggled to regain lost grounds, they were rapidly developing computing and communications (or C&C and later ICT). (It’s a common sight in many parts of the world, in gatherings big and small, people are showing off their latest iPhone downloads; and how amazed they are at their relevance and uniqueness.)
But even in ICT technology continues to evolve. For instance, computing power can generate warehouses of data – and so innovation has to figure out how to pick and choose the vital few from the trivial many! For example, in driving revenues and margins models are now accessible to rapidly find the dynamic that will yield the optimum output.
When the writer first arrived in Eastern Europe, they proudly showed him the websites of the countries and their mountains of economic data. He cautioned them though not to traverse the path of analysis paralysis. (In our case we’re looking at Q1 GDP growth of 7% and celebrating; when we should be driving investment and exports to the hilt, and then we can celebrate?) And to their amazement the writer picked only three economic variables from each country; and one from the company – and developed a one-page chart showing the business potential of the region. And updating the document each year tracks how the business is progressing against a simple master plan – thus highlighting the imperatives of growth, organic and/or acquisition.
(Of course inside the company they had to learn competitive advantage – i.e., every business element must be competitive, from investments to product development to prioritizing target markets to prioritizing and developing trade channels to focusing on priority products and optimizing the dynamic between revenues and margins. In the case of the Philippines, the Joint Foreign Chambers (JFC) teed up 7 strategic industries – that would generate competitive investments thus technology and competitive products?)
The thought process in driving an economy is no different? Or why Lee Kuan Yew talked to us about discipline? For example: $18 B OFW remittances, > $100 B local economy, < $50 B exports, <>the imperatives of growth are staring us in the face, if we’ll only benchmark against our neighbors? But comparisons are unpleasant to us – thus another dilemma?
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