salpicado part two

11 November 2007

I did not realize blogging was this difficult. Today Anina was pressuring me to continue on my treatise of why not telling a customer his salpicado was not available well into the meal was an indication of why the Philippines could not be globally competitive.

My point is based on the following, we cannot compete because
First, we do not like checklists. Attention to details is not Filipino, we like to play by ear or oido.
Second, we do not have the discipline of a systems perspective. It seems we cannot connect how things affect each other. So in a restaurant where there is no system , poor training and no supervision you get no salpicado in the middle of the meal.
I believe Bayani Fernando is successful in doing something about traffic in Metro- Manila is because he has people who see from a systems perspective. I once heard Chiz Escudero chide Bayani Fernando about changing U-turn locations so often. Too me it is because there is constant learning about traffic patterns and one keeps trying until you find the right one.
A good example are the Uturn locations along the Libis stretch of C5. Today you only have one location at both ends and traffic flows. When you had several locations you kept on hitting bottlenecks which resulted in stop and go traffic in what is basically a thruway.
I know they will start building the UTurn flyovers (first one in the Kalayaan area of C5) similar to the ones they have in Thailand and traffic will be better.

Third, we accept Puede Na. Excellence is only for the Mayabang. In our salpicado story maybe the appropriate reaction was to stand and leave and cancel everything but as my only daughter pointed out the only guy that would suffer would probably be the waiter.

Of course these are not the only reasons why we cannot compete.

At the same time the Filipino will shine in difficult situations under a lot of time pressure where getting it done is the main objective. Early in my Coca Cola career we installed a bottling line in a building without a roof (during the summer) to meet market demands. My boss then who by the way is now Chairman of the Coca Cola Company brought a group of Coca Cola technical men from Germany to show them there were other ways of doing things.(not only the German Vay)Later we bottled Coca Cola in a brewery bottling line which was a nono in the Coke world.

I guess we are great at getting things done when we are breaking rules. End of post