Why They Leave Our Country
We wonder why they leave the country and transfer their investments to other countries. Then we’re left with investments that don’t address our biggest concerns such as real and authentic economic growth. Not the type that is masked by fancy terms such as those acronyms we read in publications such as GNP. Who knows what that means? How about LOL?
Isn’t LOL easier to understand?
How about this…
If you understand what GNP means and what it does for everyone in an economy, do you know what sustainability in an economy means? How about Strategic Planning and Management? How about Leadership? How about telling us what you think they mean and let’s compare notes.
I don’t know what GNP means. I only know it means Gross National Product. I don’t know what it’s for, how it’s computed and derived, where the givens and the variables to compute it comes from. Although I was made to memorize its meaning when I was younger, that’s as far as my knowledge of it goes. For I am a layman. An ordinary person who goes to a corner store to buy chips and a soda after watching a summer sports league in our neighborhood.
But I know what sustainability means. I also know what Strategic Planning and Management is about. I also know what it means in an economy. I usually think about it while doing household chores like the laundry and washing dishes. It’s a lot of fun to strategize that way.
Sustainability. Look up the technical definition in the dictionary. I won’t write it down here or even provide a link. If you can read this, then you’re capable of finding the definition.
In an economy, what is the essence of sustainability? Too much has been said about this. But not in a way that is simple and understandable by those who buy from a corner store a sachet of shampoo for that long long hair to lather and wash.
Sustainability…it’s getting by with what you have. And when you are given more, being able to make the necessary changes to adapt the changes into your current life and circumstances.
If we were a country that would stand alone, no help with anything from any other country, how would we make do with what we have and what are the changes we have to adapt to for centuries to come?
Let’s remove all external variables, meaning…other countries. Let’s produce our own food, clothing, provide homes, education, work, income, stores, recreational venues and options, transportation and roads, communication channels and devices, electricity and other forms of energy, cooking fuel, transportation fuel, healthcare insitutions and medicines, and so many other conceivable inventions, for everyone in our country. Oh and yes, the Internet and all the information it provides us on a daily basis. Then we also collect and throw our trash in our own land, do our own recycling, maintain our natural resources so we won’t run out of water and good soil for planting food for all of us, trees to absorb rain, clean air to breathe. So let’s put some figures into those needs and wants.
Population. And when I say population that means people and animals. Can we start with a population of a thousand. How much of these do a thousand people need? Let’s say we provide these to a thousand people easy peasy for a decade. Reproduction comes in. The population becomes 10,000 after a decade. What changes do we need to have to accommodate the change? How much more food, shelter, clothing, and those previously stated do we need to produce for the next decade? How much trash would these additional people have after a decade? Where would we put them or process them as either recyclables or landfill stuff?
Repeat the process of adding to the population every decade. Can we handle the increase in needs and wants? Will we be able to maintain our current supply and demand curve? If our population became a million, can we still make the necessary changes to adapt to the increased demand for goods and services as they say in technical words?
And that’s only for our own country’s people.
But wait there’s more!
You want to interact with other countries. You know, try to get some investments flowing into the country. Moolah!!!!!
Here’s the catch. You want their moolah, you better make sure you can provide them what I previously stated above to make them even consider investing here. Why? Because there are other countries that can give it to them with lesser hassles, less cost, less stress, and more gain.
Then comes the essence of Strategic Planning and Management which goes hand in hand with the most dreaded and heaviest word ever…Leadership.
If you are a leader you cannot focus on just one aspect of your country. You have to have a hand in all pies. That’s Strategic Planning and Management.
All the statistics tools are there. The best minds are available to ask help from with the right fees and proper addressing. But this is not possible without Leadership.
It’s just like doing group work in school, only difference is your grade isn’t shown in a report card. It’s shown in the news. In group work, when you are chosen to be the leader, you decide who gets to do what. You base that on what you know that particular person is capable of doing well. You’re given a deadline where you are told, finished or unfinished, pass your papers. On the day of the deadline, if the results are acceptable you give them another chance to continue. If not, then let them go and find another to replace them. Why? Because there will be more group work handed out in the next years. And if you’re stuck with the same people who didn’t perform well and dragged your grades down, then they who we want to invest in our country, eventually leave us and look for other places to bring their moolah to. That simple.
And each year they don’t perform well, the interests of our loans increase exponentially, or is that called compounded interest? And we are not the only ones with the loans. Those whom we asked to invest here have loans also they are paying for while waiting for us to finish deadlines we promised them we would meet. The longer it takes us to meet our deadlines, the more interest they pay for their loans.
Imagine if one of them built a whole compound of towers to start the newest business district in our country. But they can’t have the grand opening happen because we didn’t get to finish the roads towards it on time for their scheduled grand opening. The energy requirements they needed we couldn’t meet because we weren’t able to finish the promised electric plant in that district on time. Their water requirements couldn’t be met either because the pipes that are supposed to bring water to their compound are still underway as the roads are still not finished yet either. And we delay finishing these for one whole year. Then the imagine phrase would turn into “imagine them enraged that they would have to pay one year’s interests in their loans because we didn’t finish our part in the arrangement on time”.
Strategic planning means planning for a future that is in increments of at least half a century. If a corporation in our country has an initial life span of half a century, then we should have our planning in these increments too. And implementation should be strict and fully monitored.
If I owned a corporation, I would plan for the next half century. Get the best minds to plan with me. Get the best implementors to implement our plans. And make sure we get the best return on investment within those years. So that when we pass it on to those who will lead our company after the first half of the century, they won’t be cleaning up our mess or starting from scratch because we messed it up.
But then again, that’s my private self thinking and planning. I’m not in service. I don’t plan to serve that way. Or maybe we should admit that we were not meant to serve in the real sense of the word, then give way to those who really want to serve.
That’s the difference with service and private people. When you’re in service, your decisions and choices affect everyone. When you’re a private person, your decisions and choices affect you and only those who work for you.
And another difference is this…
As a private person, I can be the one who would leave.
But as a person in service, I can be the reason why they left.
As for me…I’ll just return to my normal life of being one of those who have no idea what the effect of GNP and every other technical acronym is to my life. Life is easier that way. Soooooo much easier to be normal and ignorant of the complexities of economies.
Visit the "Unusual Subscriptions" page for details.
Strike or Spare?
I only know of two sports that uses the word strike. That’s bowling and baseball. In bowling getting a strike is a good thing. In baseball getting a strike is not a good thing.
In our country, the word strike doesn’t have a sports-related retention in our minds. It has a complaint-related memory trigger. Is that a good thing? I don’t know…how many strikes do we have in a decade? If anyone can collect those statistics then we can derive that they are the reason why strikes in our country are considered a “household name”.
Today I got to read some pages on a book about Business Communication at Work. It said there that to send the same correspondence to more than one person, you have to use memo format. So let’s try that. Let’s pretend I am the one writing the memo to be distributed to many people at work. Here goes…
—- Memo starts here —-
To: Decision Makers
From: Me
Subject: Public Transportation Providers and Policies
In my younger years as a decision-maker, I was privileged enough to prepare and view a master plan for our country. This master plan included a 20 to 30 year plan for development of our country’s infrastructure, policies, and general economy. I, young as I was, was very impressed with the content of that master plan. For it included a future that was based on a holistic approach to development that involved a lot of planning, preparation and implementation as opposed to a temporary fix to appease frantic nerves. The master plan was not restricted by the number of years a certain official would hold office. It was designed to be planned, prepared and implemented regardless of who was and is in office. However, this master plan was thrown away with the change of leadership during the revolution in one of the areas where the issue we shall discuss is most prominent.
The transport strike we have experienced today is one of many that we have gone through for the past decade alone. Such an occurrence should and could have been avoided if addressed in the proper manner. The methods which we use to communicate with each other to reach a compromise or a method of arbitration should be our concern. For without such methods of communication, this incident shall recur and have accumulated repercussions on the public and the private sectors.
As decision makers, we should put together teams of problem solvers that would discuss the issue for a more holistic approach to problem solving, preferably with these people having a copy of the original 20 to 30 year master plan to read and refer to;
1) Team A: Those that do not have any financial attachments to those who are in government and those who are in the private sector with regards to this issue, with the following qualities:
a) knowledgeable of all main and side streets in the different congested cities and towns, most especially the alternate roads that may be used to reach any destination. Navigation and Driving Apps assistance may be used but only as confirmation of knowledge of person(s) in this team. They shall devise a nationwide time-sensitive route to decongest and/or manage traffic flow to and from the areas that are frequented on specific times of the day, e.g. schools, government buildings, big commercial centers ;
b) knowledgeable of fluctuation of prices of fuel and energy used by the public transport sector, the effects on their profits wherein all the costs of owning a public utility vehicle are reflected;
c) content writers that can simplify the most technical of terminologies for laymen to understand, to aid in the passing of messages between teams and other decision makers;
d) representatives of the legal sector for the laying out of all the policies that had affected, is affecting and would affect public transport vehicles, wherein they would make sure that there are no loopholes in the rules that are existing and to be written;
e) representatives of the science and technology sector for the laying out of existing and potential infrastructure, optimized routes for the purpose of fuel and maintenance savings, collection of statistical data on the various methods used before to address the traffic congestion problems and their results, statistical data on the existing and projected population of certain areas with regards to residence and work for a 20 to 30 year span, statistical data on the growth of residential, industrial and commercial sectors for a 20 to 30 year span. Such data shall be used to determine a projected traffic flow and increase in public utility vehicle supply within a 20 to 30 year span ;
f) a group of researchers that would look into other countries’ approach to solving their public transport issues to help determine which solutions are realistically adaptable and/or applicable to our country;
g) a group of people who would do the computations for P & L , development costing of the various needs of this approach and possible research on sources of funding for the approved solutions for implementation;
h) a group of people who are able to identify which existing officials are fit for the position of decision maker and leader for the various aspects of planning, preparation and implementation
2) Team B: Those that have any financial attachments to those who are in government and those who are in the private sector with regards to this issue, with the same qualities as above:
3) Team C: A group of people proven to be objective in their decision making that would collaborate Team A and Team B’s reports. The collaborative report would be used as a basis on which has a more realistic approach to solving the issue. This is with regards to a 20 to 30 year planning-to-implementation plan. They shall use the previously created 20 to 30 year master plan, derive parallelisms, then prepare and present a 20 to 30 year master plan for approval of implementation by existing officials;
These are the approaches to our development of solutions for the current public transport issues. I personally do not believe that throwing away the concept of entrepreneurship by forcing the creation of fleets is a long-term solution beneficial to our country. We should continue to uphold the balance between encouraging and protecting entrepreneurial ventures in the same way we encourage the growth and protection of the corporate sector. These approaches are not solely for those who have held the transport strike today. These approaches should be a precedent and eventually a standard in developing public transportation policies whatever kind of public transportation vehicle it is.
Nominations to these positions should be made before the end of this month by both the government and private sectors. These teams should be put together before the end of the next month, November. Briefing should begin before the end of the year and planning and actual implementation of the planning phase should be made by the first quarter of next year and preferably completed by the end of next year.
We shall work towards building a future that is best for our country and people using the current structure that we have. We shall not change our country’s structures without the proper planning and transparency that our people deserve. We shall not destroy our roots to create a new country. We shall improve on what we already have and continuously work towards more improvements over time regardless of who sits in office. By planning for the long-term, we would be better able to provide a future that relies on collaborative intelligence and effort for the development of our country.
Sincerely,
MSB
—- Memo ends here —-
Visit the "Unusual Subscriptions" page for details.