Jose Carillo's Forum

THE LOUNGE

The Lounge is the newly expanded free-talk section of the Forum. You can post anything here about any topic outside English grammar and usage. Wide-ranging discussions and debates will be allowed in the Lounge subject only to the condition that the subjects are not unlawful, obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, and threatening. Specifically disallowed, however, are out-and-out partisan political postings and campaign materials for candidates in the 2010 Philippine national elections; any such material will be immediately removed and discarded without notice to the Forum member who posted it. As in the Forum’s sections on English grammar and usage, we expect discussants to keep the Lounge a vibrant venue for relevant, healthy, and civilized discussions, not impertinent, angry, or violent ones.

So if you have any non-grammar thought or idea you’d like to share, make the Lounge the sounding board for it now! Let your fellow Forum members help you germinate the seed of that idea if it’s a good one—or terminate it if it turns out to be otherwise.

Choosing a CEO for Philippines Inc. is actually a no-brainer

In case you didn’t notice, I actually posted this little essay inside the Forum as early as last January 24. I wrote it when a Facebook friend of mine asked what I thought of the spate of propaganda in the current Philippine national election campaign. But since the official campaign hadn’t started yet at that time, I thought it prudent to let it quietly wait in the wings inside the Forum. Now that the campaign season is now in full swing, though, I see no reason anymore why the essay shouldn’t more openly seek a wider audience for its message.

So here’s the little essay that I had originally posted on Facebook:

Propaganda is par for the course in national election campaigns, and what we are seeing right now, such as the alleged overpricing of the Hacienda Luisita and C-5 right-of-way purchases, definitely won’t be the last. But valid or not, these are actually peripheral issues. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we are in the process of finding a chief executive officer for our big company that’s called the Philippines, so we need to focus on the basics of hiring. Indeed, when I was GM of a small service company a few years back, every time I advertised to fill a job opening, I would get as many as 100-120 applicants. From their looks and résumés alone, I would whittle down the choices to, say, 10 to 12 taking into account their: (a) education and qualifications, (b) work experience and track record of success, and (c) personality. That done, I would look into these obviously important but less easily discerned factors: competence, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness—what we might call job fit and gravitas. I would then further trim down my choices to 2 to 3 of the hopefuls.

Now, by applying this same rigorous selection process to the current field of presidential candidates, we could easily narrow down the field to 2 to 3. This is because if we are wise enough to discount the partisanship and emotional factor, the rest of the choices are actually so lightweight and insubstantial—with no relevant experience, no evident record of achievement, no apparent leadership and management competence, no gravitas; some are obviously clueless, washed up, or deluded even. So, keeping in mind that we are actually choosing a chief executive officer and we want him to make our big company grow and prosper and not drive it to bankruptcy due to incompetence or mismanagement, it’s really a no-brainer whom we should hire from among the remaining 2 to 3. Go through this selection process in your mind right now to see how easy and simple it is to make an intelligent choice.

Click to read responses or post a response

View the complete list of postings in this section

 




Copyright © 2010 by Aperture Web Development. All rights reserved.

Page best viewed with:

Mozilla FirefoxGoogle Chrome

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!

Page last modified: 13 February, 2010, 12:10 a.m.