I have been asked by a friend on Facebook what I think of the spate of propaganda in the current national election campaign in the Philippines. I thought I should share with Forum members the answer I 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 the obviously important but less easily discerned factors of competence, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness—what we might call job fit and gravitas—and 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.
