Manila Muse

New Year, New Strategy

It is impossible to say just what I mean! — T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I suppose lazy [insert expletive here] is in order if one were to judge my blogging performance during the last six months of the year. I haven't forgotten the Muse, just that I've noticed I can compose and post more conveniently if I do this J. Alfred Prufrock style.

It saves quite a lot of time and I've been pretty busy growing a boutique consulting/web marketing business and discharging my responsibilities as a taster for San Miguel and Super Dry Evangelist. 2007 was a bit of a ride. Business growth, baby girl, nasty iTunes habit — life stuff. These days I'm still white knuckled on the steering wheel, but I'm also keen to return to musing on matters expat.

Since I'm still inclined to ramble on to my devoted readership of two, I'll be posting again here as well as on my two business focused blogs: Manila Comment & Talent Philippines. I've been learning my way around Blogger and have found it to be a big shift from Typepad (where this is hosted). More on that later.

Manila Comment (currently with a couple of posts, but needs formatting work) focuses generically on business in the Philippines, while Talent Philippines looks at staffing, training, and the whole people thing. The Muse will be more concentrated on matters of Manila lifestyle and expat living in the Philippines.

Jonesing and it Contents — American-itus at HMR

Confessions are the lifeblood of the overly personal blog — chaff endlessly spewed by the neurotic, maladjusted, and the adolescent alike. I won't descend into ruminations on the saying of things to millions of anonymous strangers.

These confessions seem to be best confined to a state of intoxication wherein inhibitions make way for discussion that should never, under any circumstances happen. The kind of state invited by mixing of too many luke-warm beers with a tasty hard liquor combo like Red Bull and Vodka before switching to a full-bore Tequila massacre, say. The kind of state that ultimately transports you to that maudlin place of hugs and affirming of things that seem terribly important at the time — like your blood brotherhood bond with the guy at the bar next to you (whoever the hell he is), say.

I make my confession hobbled by a brief moment of sobriety (I should get saccharine points for bravery) and it has to do with a uniquely American phenomenon — I call it the Sam's Club effect. It's the pleasure of roaming through rows and rows of stuff that you don't need. It's like the modern reification of the Dutch Master's fascination with abundance. Instead of tables of food we have shelves of consumer goods you didn't know you needed until presented with the opportunity to buy by the pallet-load.

For everyone who doesn't come from the land of George Bush and Kato Caitlin — it's a Kano thing, you wouldn't understand. For the rest of you (and you know who you are), I'm about to provide with the best fix for this kind of thing since PriceMart went out of business.

It's called HMR and it's just around the corner from my place, so it's unusually easy to take a few minutes to roam the isles and see what's available. It's fun, its relaxing, and I often find stuff there I never knew I needed. Actually though, I often find stuff there I knew I needed and I can find it for a reasonable price. Be careful and double check the prices since sometimes they are expensive. To me that just part of the experience though. It makes me feel like a really smart consumer if I can catch the discount place charging a premium.

It's the kind of place that buys all the furniture from hotels redecorating or buys all the copiers from a company upgrading or going out of business. They also buy in bulk from god-knows-where. Everything there is as-is and its heaven for Pentium III severs, 110-volt copiers, hotel safes stacked to the ceiling, left over Halloween décor — you get the idea.

Anyway I'm a house-proud kinda guy (another confession!), but I'm also a guy-guy. So you can just imagine what it's like without a decent grill to prepare large quantities of carcinogenic meats. The challenge has been that I also have an arbitrary number in my head for what I'll pay for a gas grill. Let's say it's more than $100 and less than $250 (and that better be a kick-ass grill). Bear in mind that it seems like all the grills must be imported and thererfore cost more by a factor of 50% over comparable models in the States. Imagine my joy at finding a proper grill at PHP9,500 at HMR (that's around $200) and pretty functional at that. Score one for HMR.

Here's the next score — last week we took a tour of the place for the sake of relaxation and cathartic joy of almost buying something. And found bar stools. Number two in as many weeks for HMR.

I've got a kind of bar island in my kitchen that has been begging for seating for well over a year. I'm slow about purchasing furniture (slurred confession #3). The fact is that guests were forced to pull a kitchen chair over to the counter and dine looking like a 6 year-old at the grown up table. I have this habit of inviting people over to eat and then just cooking the whole time, more or less imposing this indignantly on my guests (imagine now that I'm draped on your shoulder fervently chanting murmuring "I love you man"). So when I ran across some handsome stools purchased in bulk from some nameless factory in Vietnam, I jumped on the change to properly seat my dining companions and be a decent host.

If you're buying stuff (and I mean pretty much anything), especially in bulk, I recommend that you head over to HMR to have a look see. It's a visual feast of stuff of every shape and size. Think of the Finn's junk-filled nest if you are a Neuromancer fan. If you live in Manila, you are by default by the way.

Happy hunting.

A (starter) BPO Learning Manifesto for the Philippines

Education for BPO's continued. My last discussion on the vocational education situation dealt with an inspirational source for successful education in the Philippines — the marriage of an the American institution, public education, with the nuances of local culture embodied in the Thomasite experiment. Using this particular inspiration serves as a handy precedent to the odd American showing up with an educational agenda.

The contemporary situation is this: American companies (more often than not) are showing up in the Philippines to deliver voice services. The associated requirements have evolved from locating suitable agents to creating suitable agents using increasingly sophisticated pedagogical techniques.

By sophisticated, I mean we need a methodology that is up to the task of providing a tincture of acculturation, an improved ability to communicate in and process English language, and the capability to function effectively in a relatively high-velocity environment. Interestingly, how do we engage a history of American-Pinoy engagement with the commercial pressures of globalization in the practical matter of learning that supports North American business requirements?

The fact is I don't have a complete picture or a ready made declaration on the matter — I thought I did, weeks ago, but I'm reduced to an incomplete list of items to be mindful of as we create our theoretical institution:

The context for BPO expansion is a large requirement for jobs. In that light, there is a ready and willing group of people who are keenly interested in working.

Those people are not necessarily qualified beyond their desire to do the work. This desire must be a foundation for an education sufficient to create staff suitable to the tasks required — application develop, technical support, customer service, etc.

Desire is enough when supported by a modicum of English knowledge and cultural awareness.

The people teaching have to understand and value the local (Pinoy) and North American (Western) culture.

The Philippines is an estuary of both — that's why we (big honkey Kanos) are here. Forget that at our peril.

Problem solving skills and aligned interpretation are the key issues at stake. How do we turn back the Marcos era of complacency or the atrophy of Bahala Na — a kind of "God will provide" fatalism woven into Pinoy culture thanks to the vicissitudes of history and a massive dose of old-school Catholicism.

Community and personal relationships rule the roost here in the Philippines. Learning and professional development need the framework defined by these culture structures known as Utang na loob or the Padrino system as it became known during the Spanish colonial period.

These structures are handy tools for developing networks (hence the widespread adoption of social networking online). Localized learning benefits from intelligent use of these technologies.

Eclecticism or what Carlos Celdran calls the Jeepney Aesthetic adds another tool for reconciliation to the mix. The Philippines is relentlessly postmodern (as loaded as the term is). By reconciliation, I mean reconciling the commercial exigencies of the BPO beast with Pinoy cultural paradigms.

The last point is that these strands are reconcilable and can add value to one another. Jobs, commerce, and global visibility on the one hand: meet a culture defined by mélange of Catholicism, Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, Japanese imperialism, Sino mercantilism, unparalleled war destruction, Hollywood — the list goes on.

Suffice to say the purée of culture here combined with an oddly personal approach to technology adoption and deregulated telecommunications makes for the opportunity to work through the broader issues of learning to Globalize.

Shameless Self-promotion

Okay I know my posting of late has pretty much been Posting for Dummies — slap up an image, dash a few words, pause to alliterate for kicks. But that's been the light-speed pace of Mi Vida Loca recently.

Anyway, the folks at Expat Interviews were good enough to grant me virtual soapbox. Go to the site (all you expats and expat wannabes). Check it out. You might learn something.

Skarlet's New Venue

For those Makati-style sartorial swingers, feature this: Skarlet is now playing out at Nuvo. The fancy club card says something like Sulty & Sexy Jazz Music by Skarlet starts at 8:30. Apparently one can indulge in more than alliteration: red, white and sparkling wines at the open bar starting at 11pm.

Spam Fry & BBQ in Fabulous Pasig City

Come on over to my pad to cook all manner of meats. See me wear an apron that says "Kiss the Cook!". Drink mass quantities of cold San Miguels without apologies.

It might be Black Saturday, but we'll be kicking it like its the Apocalypse (but with better food). Starts at Sunset and runs until...

Thomasite-ings

You may have noticed my tendency to make sidelong comments about teaching/learning throughout my blogerizing. I toss out this kind of inchoate whining because staffing a mid-sized (1,500 seat) call center is tough.

Why? It's not a small center that can leverage personal relationships to staff up. Nor the scale make a big enough imprint (any longer) to be a brand agents aspire to (like Convergys or Accenture, say). All marketing rhetoric aside, its what people regard as simply a job. Anyway, its a lot easier to complain about your job that to actually do something about it.

But if I were going to do something meaningful, I would invent a new kind of school. Not that we have any lack of options today — a Google search of Call Center School Manila presents a wide variety of choices for the aspiring agent.

The question is though, "How well do they prepare people to enter the job market?" If you were ready to enter the wildly entertaining and lucrative field of voice services, where would you go?

Sadly, most schools dedicated to educating and or creating agents do not really provide adequate preparation for the demands of the job. Many of these operations collect tuition from students that lack much in the way of financial resources for an activity that does not produce a fast return. Recently, a crop of self-proclaimed BPO vocational schools have arisen to take advantage of the TESDA scholarship fund.

In all fairness, it is difficult to help people undertake an activity when they have little or no frame of reference for customer service or hard core sales, lack the self-confidence to weather the kind of attack on their self-esteem routinely meted out by irate American consumers that use the anonymity of the phone conversation to behave as they never would in person, nor possess a ready facility with English to allow them to pull the kind of verbal JuJitsu required to control a call to a desirable result.

So where then can I expect to find some inspiration for the kind of preparation necessary for the task at hand? One source might be the Thomasites and their role in exporting language and education to the Philippines.

Before rolling into this topic, let me provide a disclaimer: No indications for American Imperialist behavior in the last century or Thomasite collusion with the greater Manifest Destiny project will be entertained one way or the other. So don't start hammering me with hate mail for being a big-fat-ugly-American. Please get it right — I'm a big, fat, ugly, bald American.

With all that said, I'll be using the Thomasites for inspiration. They were fellow expatriates and as forerunners to the Peace Corps, a pretty damned good idea at the end of the day.

The term is derived from a group of some 500 teachers sent to the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent U.S. action to quell Philippine nationalism. On July 23, 1901, the teachers embarked on a former cattle ship, the USS Thomas to educate sail to the Philippines and bring the notion of public Education to its inhabitants.

The moniker includes another group of forty-eight teachers sent a few weeks earlier as well as a collection of soldiers who began teaching English soon after assignment here. As the Philippine government's website comments, The Thomasites successfully ... established education as one of America's major contributions to the 'Pearl of the Orient.'

So here is a group of altruistic if somewhat condescending types who came over to help reproduce a system of public education that was, at the time, unique — the concept of notion of universal education freely available without restrictions wasn't practiced outside the United States. The results are telling. In 1938-39 there were 7,500 students in the University of the Philippines. At the same time Indonesia had 128 students in Colleges of Law, Engineering, and Medicine (A Short History of South-East Asia).

Embedded in this approach to education are certain ideas of individual entitlement that were at odds with the existing, centuries-old system of oligarchic control. It should be noted that the Oligarchy won by a handy margin except for a brief period wherein Marcos managed to substitute tyrannical control for the former.

The Thomasites serve as inspiration since they brought a more far-reaching approach to education than the "let's make universities vocational schools" or "let's start a call center school even though we don't really know anything about call centers."

[To be Continued]

More 2.0 Commetary

So I never really comment on other Blogs much on this here Blog. I don't know why actually. But this week has been a life-changing experience as the ferocious hounds of karmic retribution seem to be all about helping with that ass-diet I've been planning.

So I'll take some kind of validation wherever I can find it, I'll go ahead find solidarity on a local blog called A Bugged Life where the idea of Pinoy propensity for techno-mediated social interaction (blogging) is discussed — succinctly and clearly and from the proverbial horse's mouth.

This kind of maps onto my own meditations a couple of weeks back where I was thinking along the same lines. In the end, this really boils down to my theory that a bunch of us will be sitting behind desks in Ortigas and Makati waxing on about arcane tips and tricks in blogs and white papers (link bait) for our North American clients. Journalism students from UP and UST will become elegiac, one post at a time, discussing everything from office cleaning services in New York or recruiting for that call center down the street.

You never know, we might be reduced to meta-blogging and just sit around and blog about other bloggers blogging. In that spirit may I recommend someone make a post that comments on my comments for the sake of their readers?

Expat Book List

There are several authors in the obligatory column for the expat-about-town. I won't run through all of them here but some that stand out are Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad... I'll stick with the Anglos at the moment since I have to quote Greene right now:

"If he had become young again this was the life he would have chosen to live; only this time he would not have expected any other person to share it with him, the rat upon the bath, the lizard on the wall, the tornado blowing open windows at one in the morning, and the last pink light upon laterite roads at sundown."

— The Heart of the Matter

Teledevelopment Training Conference

Last week I was privileged to speak at my friend Jon Kaplan's Call Center Training Conference hosted by his company, Teledevelopment Services. Obviously the topic of conversation was Training and how to do it more effectively and more economically. Talking about how BPO people learn seems to be the trend of late.

No wonder: Discourse on the lack of qualified candidates for BPO positions is considerable (with justification). Mushrooming call center academies and English training centers have recently created an industry paralleling the BPO scene.There is even an English-is-Cool initiative in a bid to attract hipsters and tastemakers archipelago-wide. Growth has created a real sense of urgency amongst recruiting staffs and industry pundits.

Urgency is just what the industry needs. That and with thoughtful ways to deal with the challenges that stand before us. These challenges pale compared to those faced during the early days of the industry when, for example, eTelecare secured an exemption to Article 130 of the Labor Code of the Philippines to allow women to work at night.

One way to address these obstacles is effective communication within the industry. Group-think about how we can cohesively build upon government initiatives like TESDA's recent scholarship program to provide subsidies for prospective BPO employees that require additional education to qualify for entry-level positions in the industry.

I think Jon neatly summarized this during the closing remarks for the speakers of the Philippines' first BPO training conference after-party. The notion that professionals can put aside competitive differences and openly address common concerns of learning engagement and organizational management is truly gratifying. His observations — how cooperation transpires within a group of competitors so tightly concentrated — speak well on the relative harmony of the Philippines BPO industry.