This blog presents only one side of an issue. Issues presented in this blog are usually on governance, research, marketing and strategic management. Occasionally,other relevant issues may be presented. Unless specified, the context of the blog relates to Philippine conditions.
How do we shake off the mustiness in 2009 and get a pretty good start in 2010?
One way is to relive the good old memories in 2009 and previous years. The time I spent with the regular members of the Loboc Children’s Choir tops them all. The choir hada practice in their make shift studio. We were invited to listen in up close. That was far more special than being in the front row in an auditorium.
A secondary treat when you catch them in practice is that you get to see and listen to the second liners – the six to eight-year old kids who will carry on the tradition of top level international singing. I was able to listen to and watch the regulars perform again in October 2009. They were still awesome and oh, so grown up.
Another way is to look at the present as part of your desired future. Writer C.C. Noble says that “you must have long term goals to keep you from being frustrated with shortterm failures.” I agree. The future is our hope. And the best way to prepare for that future is to begin. Viewing the present from the perspective of a desired future gives more meaning to the challenges, difficulties, problems and mustiness of the past.
To shake off the cobwebs of 2009, I am looking forward to 2015 when Acre, Inc. is the leading online research company in the Philippines. The OR-TRACK team of Acre, Inc. crafted a roadmap to 2020.
The first attempt is through Makilahok, an online survey covering four modules – halalan, isyu, pinuno and pangarap. There will be more in 2010. Watch out for other online research products.
I like this shirt for what it stands for. Donated by Chikka, I won it in a raffle during the DigitalFilipino Club Christmas party on December 14, 2009. As I normally do, I gave it away to a colleague. Realizing later that it was something I wanted, I got it back by trading a more expensive shirt.
For Chikka, the company that generously gave away this shirt, it symbolizes many things about its services not the least of which is its being available to all users for free.
To male friends who saw it, it symbolizes male emancipation -- the chance to shine again.
To me, the message on the shirt (I.M. FREE) symbolizes radical thinking -- in marketing and management.
Many companies created tremendous value, both shareholder and customer, by providing their services for free. Yahoo is still available for free. Google created so much value by providing more services for free.
This philosophy of creating value by providing products and services for free is best synthesized in Jimmy Wales' dream that served as the thinking platform for Wikipedia. He said, "Imagine a world in which every person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we are doing."
Free knowledge. Free email services. Free VOIP. On the shirt of a friend says, Sleep with Me, Free Breakfast. Free wi-fi services. Unlimited text.
How does one create shareholder and customer value by providing services for free? This requires radical thinking. A change in the way that we conceptualize and create value. A change in the way that we interpret our balance sheet.
(For comments, email to abfontanilla@yahoo. com or nick.fontanilla@gmail.com)
Romy Martin is a friend and colleague from way back. He cracks jokes with the precision and timing of a professional comedian. He is a good friend. As a friend, he stands by you through thick and thin. When I met him, he was a mid-level corporate executive. Eventually, he rose to the top to be the president of one company based in Palawan.
I write about him not because he delivers the punch line very well. I mention his name not because of his success in the corporate world. Rather, I write about him because he was able to rise above all others with limited education and perhaps under difficult circumstances.
From what I gathered, he succeeded for two major reasons – for working hard (harder than most others) and for his loyalty to the corporate mandate. He was on the job whenever and wherever needed. He was present even on occasions and events when degreed and intelligent executives would be vacationing or playing golf. He was among the first on the scene when there was a disaster or an accident. He was literally there when the company needed him – anytime under any condition.
I salute him. This borrowed statuette is for him.
I also offer this symbolic statuette to my staff, the Romy Martins of Acre, Inc., who stood by me until December 31, 2009. Many other employees did their part and sacrificed a lot during the year. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. However, with their permission, I would like to give special mention to those employees who decided to work on the day (December 31, 2009) when everyone else was starting to celebrate the New Year. I salute them. They are shown in the picture below:
It is based on interconnectivity of communities --
• “The Community of the Future” published by The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non Profit Organization in 1998 advanced a proposition that the “The global community of the future will be at its best a series of communities that are interdependent and diverse, embracing differences, releasing energy, and building cohesion.”
• This philosophy was written before the onset of online communities and the new diaspora described by Bob Johansen which is creating millions of virtual communities with common interests and passion. Unfortunately, these communities, while connectible and connected, have short life span.
• Community is more ‘substantial and attractive than society,’ according to William Outhwaite, who also writes that community and civil society have a common origin in the late and medieval and early modern reception of Aristotle’s thought.
• Outhwaite also suggests that unity in a society or community is directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units.
Its source of strength are the individual community members
• “The Community of the Future also suggests that “The broader global community will be enhanced by the health of the many smaller communities that constitute the whole. Those living within each community define all community.”
It is more focused on values, less on material accomplishments
• More of communities, less of towns and regions
• Borrowing from John C. Bogle –
More value, less cost More investment, less speculation More simplicity, less complexity More trust, less of counting More professional conduct, less of business conduct More stewardship, less of salesmanship More of leadership, less of much management More focus on commitment, less focus on things More 18th century values, less of the 21st century values More character, less of success.
Less of the creative promises. More of definitive targets.
Less discussion on what needs to be done. More commitment on what the Philippines would be at the end of the six-year term.
Less discussion on what problems we inherited from previous presidents. More of what the new president commits to pass on to the next generation.
I will vote for the candidate who can commit to the following targets by May 2016.
1. On basic education, a ratio of one classroom to 30 students (maximum) across all towns in the country with each classroom equipped with at least one computer and all the books required.
2. On tertiary education, University of the Philippines reclaiming its ranking as among the top 10 universities in Asia.
3. On law enforcement, a ratio of one police to 300 people across all Barangays with each police fully equipped with all the tools for effective policing.
4. On health, a population growth that is 20% less than the ratio in 2009 and an average life span that is 20% more than the level in 2009.
5. On revenue generation, 200% more than the level in 2009 including revenues generated by the BIR, BOC and BID.
6. On foreign investments, 200% more than the level in 2009 particularly in critical investment areas such as energy, transportation and infrastructure.
7. On environment, a forest cover that is three times more than the present level and all rivers, esteros and water bodies in urban urban areas free of vertical structure.
8. On transportation, Bicol and Baguio interconnected by high speed, efficient train systems.
9. On roads, a national road network that is 100% longer than the level in 2009 40% of which would have an average roughness index of 4.5 (at any given time).
10. On enterprise development, an SME population that is twice that of the 2009 level. Existing SMEs (of about 1.0 million) are given assistance to generate at least three additional employees (or at least 3.0 million new jobs in six years).
October of each year is when we celebrate statistics and recall the significance of this discipline. The annual event goes by each year with just a ring of stakeholders, mostly statisticians and academicians, attending the conference that the Philippine Statistical Association and other institutions organize.
It is not surprising that the annual celebration is not as popular as other professional events such as information technology, marketing and human resource. The field of statistics has an image closely associated with cold numbers and algorithms.
Tools and procedures in statistics are made to sound very inclusive with labels such as logistic regression and discriminant analysis. Back in college, some colleagues avoided degree courses that required the subject statistics. The discipline generally attracted talents who were usually office-bound and preferred a profile that was low key.
I am quite familiar with this perception because I have had the opportunity to work with extremely talented people in the field of statistics. At the same time, I am quite involved in a business primarily driven by statistics.
It is interesting how Peter Bernstein describes the value of statistics. Bernstein is a consultant and author of six books in economics and finance including the bestselling “Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street.” He is also editor of The Portable MBA in Investment and founding editor of The Journal of Portfolio Management.
He says that“The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk.” The core of that idea is statistics, a discipline that allows decision makers to look at the past and, with the precision of a scientist, confidently manage the future.
Statistics, he says, guide us over a vast range of decision-making, from allocating wealth to safeguarding public health, from waging war to planning a family, from paying insurance premiums to wearing a seatbelt, from planting corn to marketing cornflakes.
In more developed economies, statistics, as a discipline, has been transformed into a very important engine for governance and corporate decision making.Practitioners work hand in hand with corporate decision makers. There are many proven practical applications that benefit industries and government. Three hot applications are fraud detection, credit scoring and micro-targeting.
The goal of fraud detection is to manage or prevent the commitment of fraud. Fraud is a billion dollar menace. It affects government and private banks, insurance companies and many other institutions. Fraud has a broad definition and includes money laundering. Hot money that travels from one country to another is considered fraudulent. After the 9/11 incident in America, it became a hot application to manage the unrestricted flow of dollars financing terrorism and terrorist activities.
Through a clever application of computer-aided statistics, governments and banks are able to process terabytes of transactions and identify, with a high degree of confidence, the most likely fraudulent cases. This telescoping enables intelligence units to focus on the more likely fraudulent transactions with ease and precision at the least cost.
Credit scoring is an old application but is not as extensively used in the Philippines as it is in other more developed economies including those in Asia. The use of statistics in credit scoring enables users to create a working model that predicts, with a determinate level of confidence, customers who are good, moderate or bad credit risks. Used with powerful computers, this model may be deployed to identify, at the point of contact, customers who should be approved or denied of service without the need to elevate the decision to top management.
Microtargeting is a new application. Its application as a campaign strategy started in the 2004 presidential election in the United States. Its value was fully exploited by Barack Obama when he won the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party versus Hillary Clinton. It uses the same principle in analytics and statistics.
The discipline of statistics is so important to leave the task of celebrating and promoting its value in the hands of statisticians alone. The primary beneficiaries – decision makers and government executives – must find time to partner with the practitioners to drive the widespread use of statistics in decision making.
To paraphrase Bernstein, the capacity to manage risk, and with it the appetite to take risk and make forward-looking choices using statistics, are key elements of the energy that drives the economic system forward. Let us support statistical month.
The Asia-Pacific Centre for Research (Acre), Inc. is doing its share in promoting the value of statistics in decision making by organizing this year’s SPSS Users Group Convention around the theme of Discovery. This will be held on October 22, 2009 at the Sofitel Hotel in Pasay City. To register, contact Veronica Nicolas (Veronica_Nicolas@spss-ph.com)
