My wife and I are building a home for my wife's mother and her kids. It is on a large lot where we will soon build our own home. But Mama goes first, as she has never had a real home of her own. My wife has a soft spot in her heart about that. “What are your dreams?”, I asked, when we first met several years ago. “Have a real life” was answer number one. “Get a house for my mother” was number two. Kids were not in the top five, as I recall, but somehow we got the order of things mixed up, and Junior America moved up front. Come to think of it, he is a rather headstrong, pushy kid. That's what you get when you combine a Filipino and an American.
Mama has lived here and there over her middle-aged life, putting out close to the requisite number of kids, six at last count. When you are born deep in the heart of poverty, you find your home where you can, and the kids just come with having a husband. Two of the kids are responsible, three are not, and one is mentally retarded, going on age 13, with the intellectual and emotional framework of a three-year old. But her heart is huge, just huge.
But Mama is not the subject of this article. It's deep background.
I asked my wife to take charge of supervising the building of Mama's house. First of all, my wife is a sharp cookie and this is good for her personal development. Second, I have a hard time working with Filipinos because everything is reactive and loosey goosey with trimming of corners here and there. My disciplined mind goes nuts. So letting the little lady deal with things keeps my chronically high blood pressure in check. She is bearing up well in the squeeze between Filipino and American ways.
And then there are the people who seek to charge foreigners way above market. We dumped two builders who proposed a mark-up in the millions.
We have gone directly to the workers, hiring a mason for P350 a day and letting him introduce us to other workers for electricity, plumbing, and plan/permit work. He'll get a big bonus at the end if quality is good. So far, with foundations and framing in, the house is a solid bonework of cement and steel.
But that is not the subject of this article, either. It's background.
The subject is the value you put on time, and if you put a high value to it, how your priorities change.
The wife had a meeting scheduled with the electricians today. I was on the property where they were to meet, but my wife got there late, so when the electricians arrived, she wasn't there, and so they left. They moseyed into the barangay proper to enjoy the fiesta. I was irked because my wife had not set a time to meet. When the electricians wandered back later in the day, they met with my wife for about an hour on a deal that seemed to me should have been 10 minutes at most. More irk for the hard-driving American.
I told my wife, “Babe, you need to see your time as more valuable. Consider it worth P1,000 per hour. And figure the electricians time at the same rate.”
She listened to my point, but did not really subscribe to it. I get that a lot of that here, in one ear and out the other.
But if everyone's time were worth P1,000 per hour, you better believe precise appointments would be set and meetings would be short. Do you know how much income you have to produce in one hour to value your own time at P1,000 per hour?
This lack of time-value is typical of business and government practices in the Philippines. Doctors don't set appointments, government offices and hospitals make you wait forever for simple services, attorneys provide low-value notary services, and sales workers greet you with a snarl and generally are not excited about speedily getting you through the cash register to collect your money. And what is this bit about opening all the packages and testing the electronic goods, taking up excruciatingly long minutes of my own P10,000 per hour time?
People appear to see no connection between crisp, productive behavior and the well-being of the economy. The wealth of the nation and number of jobs is a sum of all the diligent, disciplined work of millions. But if that work is not diligent and disciplined, you get the Philippines.
If a doctor complained about the economy, my response would be, “Uh, okay, do you set appointments to value your client's time highly? If not, you are a part of the problem.”
Until there is a fire in the productive belly and a value to time, the Philippines will not be competitive globally.
You don't get there by relentlessly missing appointments or sloppy meetings or lousy customer service.
Now, I think poor work disciplines have nothing to do with inherent lack of capability, because I see in my wife capability untapped. In a different place, she would have made a better manager than me, and I was good. All she missed was opportunity. Poverty does not generate a lot of opportunity.
Therein lies the real point of this article.
If the Philippines is to become a dynamic, progressive state, it needs to figure out how to tap the capability that is here. How to open up opportunities. How to stoke ambition and aspiration. How to value time and use it productively.
That takes a plan. A tangible, specific plan with those ends directly in the aiming sight.
If I were Mr. Aquino, I'd appoint the best cabinet I could – based on skills, not family relationship or favor pay-back. And then I'd ask, what can your department do to release the potential for excellence that is here? You have six weeks to get me your seven best ideas, properly sized for implementation steps, expense and result.
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