The good news is we’re seeing positive developments in our economic initiatives. It was early 2009 when the writer started this blog, urged by friends and family who knew about his atypical worldview – to respond to the question: why are we economic laggards if not a basket case? And what can we do? The writer talks about focus because successful enterprises, for profit or otherwise, mirror world-class athletes in their ability to focus. And when one looks at the fundamentals of our economy our meager investment levels jump out. It’s no different when we look at the financials of a publicly-listed company; we would focus on and assess its fundamentals before investing, for instance.
It is encouraging that the Aquino Administration is pushing investment. But our psyche veers to the holistic and inclusive – making execution elusive? Can we move the economy by focusing on investment, we ask? Our ambivalence may explain our problem – focus, focus, focus – and consequently an ex-NEDA chief says: ‘If the program looks familiar, discard it, it’s been tried, it failed. Look for the unfamiliar’. (He deserves praise for his courage to acknowledge our shortcomings.) But intuitively we know that investments are indispensable in an economic endeavor?
But we don’t exactly embrace foreign investments? Unwittingly we’re inward-looking and it makes us feel good to invoke nationalism or patriotism? And even tolerate oligarchy, ‘they’re one of us anyway’? And then comes a big piece of who we are: the church or religion. And our yardstick is stringent? For instance, we’re of two minds about ‘consumerism’? Between our parochial bias and stringent religion, it is not surprising innovation is not top of mind? Innovation is an imperative to move the country forward because beyond investment is innovation – and it starts with understanding the consumer. And to be able to pursue innovation we need a foundation, science and technology!
Unfortunately, we don’t have a track record in successful economic development to bank on. We’re smart people but we still have to seek the ‘unfamiliar’, which is counterintuitive? And we can use talents beyond our own – or why Bill Gates wants the US to remain a country of immigrants, something the Japanese have yet to adopt? Bill Gates is well aware that natives, like hierarchy, don’t have a monopoly on innovation. Thus, for us to develop products that will win in the global marketplace we have to tap talents wherever they may be. Even big pharmaceutical companies, with their world-class R&D, partner with small entrepreneurs, acknowledging that a college kid could develop a global winner like Facebook. We can’t limit ourselves to the local market either if we are to be a global entity!
And so this blog talks about investment, innovation, technology, talent, product and market – focusing on the key elements that will drive our economy and move the country forward. A third of Filipinos have lost their human dignity. That’s the crux of the matter! The blog is not an academic discourse or an intellectual exercise – and it is anonymous, open for anyone to build upon, i.e., innovation thrives in an open environment. As much as he can the writer shares ‘best practice’, an instinct valued by MNCs in order to raise the performance bar. Our failings over the last 40-50 years can’t be pinned on the poor but the ‘elite and the intelligentsia’ – they have run the country? And they include industry, the government, the school, the church, i.e., all of us; and must now heed Lee Kaun Yew’s challenge that we’re two different societies (from his Singapore story: From third world to first)?
When the writer first met his Eastern European friends, they were looking for the unfamiliar: to compete in the EU market. Yet they struggled to accept unfamiliar ideas – people who supposedly wanted to move from socialism to the free market were, like people, a product of their own experience! They would ask: ‘how would a Fortune 500 practice (e.g., transparency) apply to a private enterprise’? At the other extreme, they would ask for specific rules of free enterprise because in their old system hierarchy dictated the rules. Thus the writer had to develop a mental model that starts with basic principles to introduce and explain an idea. And he had to relearn a fundamental axiom in development, ‘start with the familiar’. So he had to understand how their old system worked or didn’t work – the familiar to them!
Our challenge as Filipinos is bigger than those of the writer’s Eastern European friends: we are carrying more baggage – about economics, free enterprise, competition, etc. – and have plenty to unlearn before we could ‘look for the unfamiliar’. Fundamental to adult learning (or andragogy) is learning to ‘unfreeze’ our mindset (of 40-50 years) and make room for the unfamiliar!
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