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Every failure looked like a winner
Michael Alan Hamlin
Intuit founder and former chairman Scott Cook once said, “For every one of our failures, we had awesome spreadsheets,” explaining that what looks good on paper doesn’t always work in reality. If fact, “nine out of 10 companies that succeed start out following the wrong strategy,” according to Innosite Ventures managing director Scott D. Anthony. “New businesses can’t be forecast,” he told a group of Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) members last week.
Anthony was in town for a series of meetings, and agreed to speak over lunch with MAP members. He has coauthored or authored three books on innovation, his first with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen is a leading thinker on innovation, and Anthony’s original mentor, it seems. He was Christensen’s senior researcher before joining Innosight. Anthony’s latest book is The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times (Harvard Business Press, 2009).
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Posted
3/24/2010 2:57:06 PM |
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A harsh reality
Michael Alan Hamlin
In 1999, the Philippines had a poverty rate of about 30%, compared to close to 70% in Vietnam and nearly 60% in Indonesia. China had a poverty rate of about 45%. Thailand had already managed to reduce the incidence of poverty to less than 10% of its population, and in Malaysia, the incidence of poverty was less than five percent. Consider the case today. The incidence of poverty in the Philippines is still about 30%. But its rivals have fared far better in their efforts to reduce poverty.
Vietnam and Indonesia have at least halved the incidence of poverty in a little more than a decade, and the incidence of poverty in China has dropped below 20%. Poverty in Thailand and Malaysia-defined as the proportion of the population with a per capita income of less than $1.25 a day-is so low it appears to be almost negligible when illustrated in chart form in comparison to the Philippines.
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Posted
3/17/2010 5:12:45 PM |
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Country brand matters to BPO investors
Michael Alan Hamlin
Hopefully, whoever is elected president in May will understand why
Executives in the business process outsourcing industry (BPO) are naturally curious about how presidential candidates in the looming May national election view their industry, and what they will do to sustain its growth if elected. But the executives understand why the candidates seldom make public statements about the industry, or the Philippines’ appeal to investors in general. To the voters who will elect the president-mostly desperately poor Filipinos mired in the D and E socio-economic classes-a job in the BPO industry is way too aspirational to matter to them.
Whether elections are conducted efficiently and an orderly transfer of power takes place are the more immediate concerns of executives in the Philippines’ most efficient and productive job-generating industry. According to preliminary results of a just-concluded industry survey conducted by TeamAsia for Outsource2Philippines (O2P) and the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P), BPO executives overwhelmingly believe that credible elections are an important factor shaping investors’ perception of the country. (Disclosure: I work for TeamAsia and I am a director of O2P. BPA/P is a client.)
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Posted
3/11/2010 10:53:48 AM |
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Did Gutenberg make us stupid?
Michael Alan Hamlin
When I was a much younger man in graduate school, my MBA classmates and I were prohibited from using calculators in finance classes. The reasoning was that we would not be able to calculate present value if our calculators broke down and we were forced to make calculations manually. By the time I received an advanced degree-several years later at another institution-calculators were as common as pencils and erasers used to be.
All my children used calculators in school, and did their homework on desktop computers at home. By the time they entered college, they required laptops as well, which enabled them to complete assignments and work on papers and theses anytime, anywhere, but also kept them connected on campus to their then budding online social networks, which evolved from messaging and chat to Friendster, Multiply, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Posted
3/5/2010 10:50:14 AM |
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