A new soul

The corporate world is replete with experiences of failures as well as incredible successes. There are great inspiring stories of how a company on the verge of collapse was saved by the magic hand of a wise new leader who saw that the only way to save something still worth saving was to do the visceral – to do a hysterectomy, in fact. A lot of bright new entrepreneurs find inspiration and enlightenment in these stories of corporate salvation.

I was told by a friend, top-notch in the corporate world, that in most cases, corporate closures and insolvencies are avoided by the keen ability of the leader to "read the tea leaves early on" and watch for danger signs, especially, if I may add, in this extremely volatile business world of ours.

His advice to the young entrepreneur/business manager is not to wait until the enterprise is about to collapse in order to make crucial and radical changes. While you plug in, be consistently alert. A leader’s status-quo thinking can lead to an unwelcome corporate take-over.

Reading the tea leaves as you move along also requires refraining from giving your stockholders what is always a no-no in any crisis situation – any hype about what’s happening. Despite that natural temptation to dispense only the good news to media, shareholders, customers and employees, the managers must be totally candid. That great oracle, Pogo, declared once upon a time: "The certainty of misery is better than the misery of uncertainty."

Any leader, whether in the corporate or government world, better believe this. When you make a clean breast of everything, of any corporate violation or lapse, make it as clean and as frontal as possible – never camouflage what has happened, insulting the intelligence of your constituency. Do not apply a strategy of vagueness by dousing your words with an antiseptic or a deodorant to clean that bad breath or bad odor you are trying to expel. Experience teaches us this will not only aggravate the situation but can lead to the manager being banished or carried away to kingdom come.

One of the most abominable things that can be thrust and, for that matter, government constituency, is to insult their intelligence, to assume and be convinced of their collective naiveté, and then utter the plea of unity and a call to arms to change, move on and slay the dragons of disaster. This is the recipe for disaster that any business or government manager should avoid.

It is useless to sugarcoat our communications. The human being is basically intelligent. Our Creator precisely gave Man the gift of intelligence. My late father who was such a voracious reader throughout his lifetime and had an extensive library of classics, because he was in the business where honesty was primordial, loved this particular quote from that great British author, George Orwell, who wrote during the most difficult days of World War II: "The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer candor and truth, blood, toil, sweat and tears, always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to a pinch, human beings are heroic." The employees and stockholders in the Philippine corporate sector, the people of the Philippines, as the political constituency where sovereignty resides, are no exception. In a pinch, in the frightening bind the Filipino is in right now, he carries this natural basic spirit within him.

Because poverty, misgovernance and corruption affect him every day, insulting verbosity having just been inflicted on him, the Filipino, as he has proven in the past, wants change of severe dimensions so that his day-to-day existence of making do with the abysmally little he has, will end. He therefore lashes out against the business elite whose theory is consistent: Let’s unite and move on. Translation: let’s make sure we continue to make money, make the profits, increase them, and let’s continue to preserve our business empires.

There’s nothing wrong with endeavoring to make money, to earn profits, even to amass great wealth as business empires do. An enterprise exists to make money first and foremost, and, in the process, provide employment for its workforce. But this has to be earned with a strict ethos of honesty, and a great degree of idealism.

I remember the line which Lady Margaret Thatcher in her last book entitled Statecraft quoted from John Wiley: "Do not impute to money the faults of human nature." According to the former British prime minister, she would like to add to "money" the word "capitalism." The accumulation of wealth according to Thatcher is a process which is of itself "morally neutral." As Christianity teaches, riches bring temptations, but then, so does poverty.

In any case, according to her, there is no reason to attack the consciences of the wealthy which lie behind the criticisms of wealth creation through capitalism.

It is how we make that wealth, how we make the money, how we try to reach out and help the less fortunate, that renders it and us good or evil.

There are new expectations and new priorities in the world today. The fact remains that change is necessary in a global economy based on free enterprise.

I have been told a number of times that he or she who rejects change is the architect of decay, for the only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. Business must be brilliant, they say, each and every day if a company is to survive today. This is so true in the high-tech world we live in right now. IT specialists and technologists will agree with me that to miss a generation in the computer market is to be out of business.

For the Philippines to obtain a strong niche in any sector, since our human resource has been acclaimed so many times over, the world over, as excellent and exceptional, it is indeed a pity that we have a political environment besieged by lies and more lies from the highest levels in the government hierarchy. And our valuable human resource is fleeing.

For they cripple any effort to achieve. Let’s be honest to ourselves right now and acknowledge that the Filipino soul is under siege. For business progress to make a mark in the Philippines, it is a fallacy to think that we can move on, blaze that elusive trail of glory and progress unless we give ourselves a new soul. And this is the greatest change of all!

One of the paradoxes of change is that trust is hardest to establish when you need it the most. More than any other time within my living memory, in our country’s history, we are standing on a precipice, and the only thing that can prevent our business, social and political world from falling, is having a new soul.

It takes a very strong and pure soul, and sense of self to walk out of our situation today. A new soul is the condition precedent to investment achievements and the grand business progress we all seek and dream about. Right now, we are facing a crossroads: one path leads to despair and hopelessness; the other leads to deeper despair and utter hopelessness.

We simply have no choice…change is necessary…we need a new soul.

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