Its nice to be back writing on my blog again! More importantly its nice to sit back and reflect and re-align one's thoughts and actions to the bigger purposes intended.
I wish our companies and our government will do the same.
Being busy can be a curse. It lulls us into a false sense of gainful activity without much long term benefits. Being busy for the sake of busy merely keeps one active but not necessarily productive. I have seen that in many of my career transition (outplacement) candidates. After the initial shock of job loss dissipates, they embark on a series of actions and activities produced my their meandering thoughts. This sudden rush of activities/action gives a sense of relieve from the paralysing fear that they had felt just days or weeks before. And so, they go on being active for weeks and months and fill their daily routine with various tasks which are designed for the sole purpose of keeping them 'busy'. Then, after much coaxing, prodding and eventually through some meaningful coaching, they accept the truth that all their actions and activities have not brought them that one result they so desperately need : A job or at least an interview. When this is accepted, they open up and they are willing to consider concrete suggestions and ideas from me which are solely designed to to do one thing and one things only : To provide them with all the information that they need about themselves and the jobs that they are targeting so that they can make an informed decision.
I fear that many of our companies and our government's policy makers are behaving like my candidates in their early stages of career transition : being busy for the sake of being busy lest unpalatable thoughts and realities rise to the surface. Lets be busy...busy...busy and bury all these negative thoughts stay buried. They will disappear or at least if I can bury my self in 'work' long enough, they will soon become somebody elses problem. And so, they keep them selves busy.
One of the products of the policy makers' busyness is the rapid fire announcements of packages to retrain retrenched workers. More funds have been announced to retrain jobless college graduates. There are funds to train those who are interested in biotechnology business even if they had graduated with a social science degree. There are funds to train those who are interested in ICT business; it doesn't matter who you are. You just have to show up. May I ask, what are all these actions intended to achieve and to what end?
How is it that a graduate with four years of tertiary education and prior to that at least 11 years of basic education come out into the job market without adequate communication skills in the English language and how is it that a 3 weeks or 3 months program is going to remedy that and miraculously enable them walk into an interview room with new found confidence and land a fat paying job? Anyway, where is the job or jobs that everybody is talking about? Oh yes! The 30,000 odd government jobs. The good old public service. Yes! Lets dump all and sundry into the school system and pray to the Lord that they will somehow; maybe through divine intervention, will realize how much they love the teaching profession and dedicate their lives to years of dedicated performance as educates of our children. By the way, we could also send some into our fishery departments and task them to passionately defend and develop the rights and welfare of our army of poor fishermen. Hmm...lets see, the security forces will also be able to absorb some. You don't have to be that smart to fire a machine gun or hurl a grenade right? I hope you didn't say yes to that!
So, what will also these monetary allocation really do for our economy in the end. Probably nothing much and maybe a little bit more damage. We will have mis-fits in various sectors. We will have teachers who can't teach, we will have 'entrepreneurs' who can't do business and we will have police officers who can' police.
Now, some of our corporate organizations aren't doing that great either although many of their 'policy makers' have MBAs and DBAs. But I must say, there are those who are enligthened enough to do what is right rather than what is expedient only.
You see, nations and corporations will endure but economic crises do not. So, what we do now in this crises must take into account the repercussions that will be felt a few years down the road when the economic crisis is but a distant memory. At that time, we will feel the true weight of the consequences of what we do today. If we slash our head counts blindly and allow valuable talents walk out of the door, if we fail to take care of the myriad of worries and fear felt by those who are with us, if we behave ruthlessly for the sake of quarterly financial figures, we are doing nothing but setting up the company for failure in the future when everything is just right for the company to actually surge forward.
1 comment:
Interesting post. Especially your observation that nations and peoples endure and economic crises do not. You'd think from all of the frantic action that governments and business are engaged it that we had never been through recessions and the like. You'd think that they would have learned from the last economic slowdowns in the mid to late 1970s, the mid-1980s, and the early 1990s. Nope! Same old running around like chickens with heads cut off. No one has any memory any more of what happened last time. So they guess at solutions and act for the sake of acting - to be seen as doing SOMETHING, ANYTHING - instead of acting calmly, deliberately, and rationally. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...
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