When friends and relations asked the writer to share his thoughts about why we’re economic laggards (basket case was their descriptor) he had to revisit how his worldview had evolved – which they knew and why they asked in the first place. How he netted: our thought process and culture are two fundamental givens that we take for granted?
In a business organization, leadership can shape a culture. For example, at Apple: “. . . Culture informs success, not the other way around. Leadership drives a culture . . . Culture drives numbers: Culture drives innovation and whatever else you are trying to accomplish within a company—innovation, execution, whatever it's going to be. And that then drives results”, reports Businessweek, June 14th. A country is more complex than a business, but if President-elect Aquino is to succeed, he has to educate us and drive a ‘success culture’?
Every country or region of the world takes their thought process and culture for granted – that’s what people are? And when the topic comes up, national pride only reinforces the instinct. The writer’s Balkan friends (that’s how they label themselves when the topic is discussed) profess to want to be members of the EU – given the advantages they’ve seen, e.g., infrastructure projects and foreign investments. And while they are critical of the inefficiency and corruption that they acknowledge are part of the system that must be addressed, still national pride allows them to tolerate a growing frustration – even coming back home because they find the outside world truly alien; though embarrassed of their state of affairs when talking to foreigners.
But given the global economic slowdown many quarters are having a field day dissecting the plights of countries – i.e., their problems are in fact to be expected? A polite way of saying: ‘deservedly so’? When we talk about the Portuguese or Italians or Greeks of Spaniards, we could see where they messed up? Of course the US and UK messed up big time – and are today seeing a drastic change in their way of life!
Whether they call themselves southerners or Mediterranean countries, the perception of others seems consistent? For example, poor Angela Merkel, the Germans are giving her grief for helping the Greeks – why are we supporting these people when they’re less hard-working than we are? Their image of Greeks: sun-loving southerners with ouzo in hand? Yet Europeans can’t imagine themselves taking as little holidays as the Americans!
The bottom line: the Philippines’ inability to generate foreign direct investment can be attributed to the general perception of foreign investors that instinctively we have a bias for local investors – e.g., crony capitalism? And when we realized that globally we’re uncompetitive our impulse was to analyze the yardsticks that rated us so? Yet staring us in bold numbers are the investment figures being posted by Vietnam, for example. In short, while global competiveness is our challenge, we are looking at internal variables? Of course red tape in processing business-venture applications is a problem, but is that the root of the problem? For instance, what enabling legislations must Aquino champion – and that we must strongly support – to make us truly attractive to foreign investments?
Do we instinctively look at ourselves as ‘bricklayers’ – instead of looking at ourselves as building a cathedral? And thus our thought process and culture are at the root – we think local/parochial and we want to preserve the patrimony? But if we turn the challenge on its head, and see ourselves as building a cathedral – i.e., a developed economy – we would be summoning the requisite plans and elements of a cathedral, i.e., enormous foreign investments and technologies from advanced economies?
Would we have generations of bricklayers or cathedral builders? We know what we want but we also recognize that our dilemma just won’t go away? No different from the writer’s Balkan friends – or north v. south Europeans?
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