Wanted: A new Filipino! (Strong sense of urgency)

By: David L. Balangue
Philippine Daily Inquirer

In the corporate world, a company that is moribund, a laggard, and unable to deal with competition and manages to just coast along is bound to eventually collapse. In such a situation, the company could survive by undertaking a complete or significant makeover, re-engineering itself by whatever means possible to cope with competition. Oftentimes, this will be a painful process, with layoffs, sacrifices, and anxiety on the part of everyone concerned. These are unavoidable, but for the company to succeed, it has to take the bitter pills that would rid itself of its ills. Any change, a major change at that, is uncomfortable to say the least, but just as a cancer patient needs to undergo painful treatment, including chemotherapy, it needs to be done. The painful process is needed to put the patient on a healthy track.

We as a nation and as Filipinos have many good traits but also a lot of bad ones. We could opt to coast along and still move up but such upward movement may only be primarily due to the rising tide. For us to make substantive improvements, we need to go through the painful process of transforming ourselves, getting rid of bad traits and adopting new ones that are founded on the basic positive virtues of hard work, honesty, integrity, fairness, accountability, passion for excellence and sense of urgency. We need to go back to the basics and adopt these virtues that would hopefully identify us as a nation. To promote these virtues, the government and the people should embrace these virtues and reward those who exemplify them so that they will serve as role models for others to follow. These would be defining moments in our history as a Filipino nation.

If there is one trait that we as Filipinos badly need, it is a strong sense of urgency. We need to adopt a sense of urgency, a bias for action, as a defining Filipino trait, for it would address many of the ills that pervade in the country. This lack of urgency results in the courts being clogged with hundreds of thousands of pending cases that take 10, 20 or even more years to resolve. And these cases keep piling up. Consequently, in many instances, the perpetrators remain free and continue with their ill ways. And we Filipinos seem to have accepted this as a fact of life and it has become part of the culture that now defines our nation.

This lack of, or at best inadequate, sense of urgency has made us accept long delays in completion of projects, getting stuck for hours in traffic, waiting long for services, and dealing with problems that take years and years to solve. This acceptance of delays has made us scale down our standards of expectations and accountability.

This has to change. We Filipinos should demand high levels of performance and excellence and not accept mediocrity.

What is sense of urgency?

Sense of urgency should be defined as being results-oriented but not measured simply in terms of the period of time it takes to get results, but also observing due process and having excellent results or outputs. It is not taking shortcuts that result in sloppy work or products. Applied to our judicial system, it is characterized by speedy resolution of cases while totally observing due process. Due process has almost always been used as a pretext or excuse for delays. This is wrong. Due process could be achieved even without delays. We simply need to look at the process to identify causes of the delays, correct them, and then put in the necessary passionate effort to get our desired results.

Inculcating as a culture the right sense of urgency as defined above will require other virtues that should define our character as Filipinos and serve as the foundations for our sense of urgency and being results-oriented. These virtues include striving to be the best we can be as individuals by improving and developing the skills needed to carry out our tasks: hard work, industriousness, integrity, honesty, fairness, transparency and accountability by not taking shortcuts and accepting responsibility for the outcome of our work, and a passion for excellence in putting our very best effort toward a quality output.

With this sense of urgency defining our culture, character and behavior, we should not accept sloppy work and long delays in the resolution of problems. We should be demanding of our government, our co-workers, our family members and relatives and friends of timely and quality results in every facet of our activities. We should not accept, among other things, long delays in the resolution of the Maguindanao massacre and the prosecution of corrupt officials, or the long lines and waiting time to get rides in very crowded LRT/MRT trains, and the long delays in the evaluation, approval and completion of vital infrastructure projects.

The P-Noy administration should play a key role in this transformation. P-Noy should provide us a vision of the Filipino that this country needs. He should provide us the path, leadership and inspiration that will make the vision a reality. P-Noy’s moral ascendancy makes him the ideal leader to lead us in the journey. But to achieve this, he needs to act with a strong sense of urgency. In this regard, he will have to transform himself and serve as our role model in this initiative.

David L. Balangue is a former chairman and country managing partner of SGV & Co., chairman of the Coalition Against Corruption and founder of the Tita Cory Movement.