Acountry, an industry or an organization can be classified in a state of stuck if its people feel beleaguered, tired, purposeless, desperate, battle-torn, insignificant and alone. They usually do not know what next steps to take, are exhausted from the many struggles they face, making them lose sight of their road map; they have their hands full but are not getting results, enveloped by a strong sense of defeat and unappreciated work, find difficulty in functioning as a team, are no longer certain what the face of success looks like, and have lost a sense of identity or belongingness.
To be stuck is a natural occurrence. For sure you have been in such a situation at one time or another. The way to get out of a “state of stuck” involves knowing how to get out of it, and getting out of it involves three paces: acknowledging you’re stuck, analyzing why you are stuck and implementing action steps to get moving again. In essence, the process follows this mode: step back and look at the big picture, see the system within which you work as something or somebody to be fed, protected and inspired in a stuck situation, look at the symptoms, get to the root cause and master the way to get back in balance, unify the components of your system, and get innovative and strategic using tools and techniques that can help you escape from an immovable state.
Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro’s book Unstuck offers an of-the-moment tool for leaders and their teams that can stir them to take more responsibility for the health of their organizations. It is not a definitive guide but rather a convenient line of attack to breach the mental jam and get back on the road to success.
In an interview, the authors posited that the economic slump encountered by most countries over the years caused a bizarre observable fact in business. There are more stuck businesses, stuck leaders, stuck teams, and stuck individuals than ever before. In an era of stretched budgets, riskier ventures, and changing market dynamics, more and more people seem unable to move forward to achieve their goals.
Yamashita and Spataro observed, “Upper management of organizations looks down saying, ‘I could do something if my people were more capable.’ Middle managers, on the other hand, look upward, blaming senior management for not being decisive enough. And individual contributors throughout the company blame their colleagues for the poor performance of their teams. The point being, virtually no one in organizations wants to take accountability for the lack of progress.” Under such a situation the company can get stuck.
Through their work with large, complex client organizations such as Hewlett Packard, Nike, IBM, and Gap Inc., among others, the authors monitored powerful insights about the common indicators of being stuck. The most interesting observation is that successful teams and people are often the ones that get stuck most often, and ambitious teams get stuck all the time. It puts forward the thought that to get stuck is a business and life reality and affirms the principle that the difference between failure and breakthrough is perseverance.
If you want to be great you have to first erase the stigma of being stuck. The authors advise taking a cue from the doyenne of the airwaves, Oprah Winfrey, who proclaimed, “There are only two polar forces in life that really count — love and fear. When you’re operating out of love, and truly reaching out to the world, trying new things and living up to your potential— that’s when you’re most likely to get stuck, because you’re deeply challenging the status quo. You stay stuck because you’re paralyzed by fear. And getting unstuck requires staring your fear in the face and finding one sliver of opportunity to defeat that fear.”
Having more fun
Has the Philippine tourism business come unstuck? Well, it looks like it. Within hours of the early January 2012 reveal of the tourism line “It’s More Fun In The Philippines” at a press conference, it instantly became apparent that the country’s new tourism campaign had become the people’s campaign, based largely on how Pinoys reacted positively and embraced it in the digital space and social networks. Currently, the memes (image or video passed electronically from one Internet user to another) are now up to 40,140, as revealed by the Morefunmaker site.
The formal launch of the tourism campaign carrying the now-ubiquitous theme coincided with the airing of CNN’S Eye On The Philippines week-long special, and the 45th annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank board of governors held in Manila. The TV plug and CNN series were aired with special programming dedicated to Southeast Asian countries, and beamed to more than 280 million households in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North America, and will run until August this year. The government has earmarked P63 million for the campaign, yielding more than 2,000 TV spots, posters and viral videos that popped up in London and Times Square in New York.
As Tony Harris, chief executive of BBDO Guerrero, the creative agency that handles the communications program, stated, “The joy of this campaign is that it has turned 95 million Filipinos into a tourism sales force and it is a testimony to that. While everyone has a different interpretation of what fun might be, now when asked the question, ‘Why the Philippines?’ the single and universal response is that it is simply ‘more fun’ here.”
“We were inspired by the number of memes generated online, so we decided to make TVC material out of them,” Secretary of Tourism Ramon R. Jimenez Jr. added. At present, there are already 12,000 versions of the campaign. When we started, there were just three. This is an astounding response from the public, and we wanted to showcase some of the best memes in our TVC, which we felt represented both the beauty and fun in our country and people.”
“It’s More Fun in The Philippines” is now both a phenomenon and a viral success. This is largely attributed to the people who have participated in the program with their catchy and witty versions, each strengthening the belief that the country should be visited. The new TV ad, whose visuals are enhanced by Boney M’s You Gotta Go soundtrack, is but one of the initiatives that DOT is planning to roll out within the year as it targets 10 million tourist arrivals in 2016.
Based on a DOT release, visitor arrivals to the Philippines hit an all-time high of 1,148,072 during the first three months of the year (January-March 2012), posting an increase of 16.03 percent versus last year’s arrivals of 989,501 for the same period.
“We have now achieved 25 percent of our international visitor target of 4.6 million for this year,” Jimenez said. “The world is now starting to see that ‘It’s More Fun in The Philippines’ is not just a bunch of words on a streamer. It is a competitive argument for choosing the Philippines as one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Philippine tourism is poised to surge forward as we receive a steady increase of tourist arrivals, as seen in the first quarter of this year.”
This strong tourism outlook was recently highlighted during the ADB’s annual meeting in the Philippines when the DOT convened foreign and local delegates in a forum on “Harnessing the Growth Potentials of Tourism” to showcase the developments and investment opportunities in the country’s tourism industry.
In that tourism forum, Tourism Undersecretary Daniel G. Corpuz presented the recently completed National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP) highlighting the country’s growth potentials and investment opportunities available to the private sector, investors, bankers, fund managers and local government units. The NTDP is a product of the most thorough inventory of tourist attractions in the history of the Philippines. It divides the county into 20 clusters and identifies the key gateways that will be the focus of massive development in the next four years.
“This forum is just the beginning of various road shows to inform partners, as well as encourage investors and funding institutions to support the implementation of the NTDP,” Jimenez declared. “There is much more to be done to make the Philippines more fun than it is now.”
The road to the land of unstuck is full of potholes like the lack of system thinking, politicking, distorted values, and lack of credibility. Yamashita and Spatora averred that the biggest lesson from their tome is that “Getting unstuck requires a kind of levity of being. Or perhaps, more simply said: Have more fun.” And “having more fun” is indeed a call to action that works for Philippine tourism.
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