Work hard at working smart

A former boss, to whom I was not popular, often said (not to me) 'work smart, not hard'. Maybe it is just the only thing we agree about.

Many workers work hard, very hard. Not only work hard, but work hard for long hours. Never mind if mindless chatter intersperse the hours. Aside from chatter, many workers often work hard because they do not know exactly what they are doing, or the best way to do it, hence the inability to respond to the tasks accordingly. Some equate long hours with working hard. Of course, putting in long hours is hard work. Mahirap yun ha? However, if one has the option of working hard or smart, which would he rather do?

I've been working most of my life now. Majority of the working years were spent in government. One general problem in the bureaucracy is the tendency of management to equate long hours with working hard. In local labor lingo, the government bureaucracy works 'arawan', per day. Private business on the other hand, work 'pakyawan'. The irony there is whenever bureaucrats were to have something fixed in their house or car, for example, they invariably would want 'pakyaw' job orders.

Those coming from the private sector would find work in the layered bureaucracy sluggish, tedious and circuitous. The bureaucratic process trumps efficiency. Productivity is still unquestionably the desired outcome but efficiency is neglected. The bureaucracy will complete a job in 2 months if it can be completed in 2 weeks. That is the law of government planning. For example, the government projects an activity can be completed in X days, the government will then make plans and targets to complete the activity in X weeks, and then actually finish it in X months. Same X, longer unit. So, the next time you hear of a government output delivered in 3 months, more likely it was planned to be completed in 3 weeks, and could actually have been completed in 3 days.

A CEO blogs that the basic rule for success is responsiveness. This morning at the flag ceremony, our big boss talked of further improving our work. For starters, the government should start the crackdown on unresponsive units. It is time to get the bureaucracy out of its inertia.

Sedentary lifestyle in the Grindhouse

The other day, the office was having fun browsing over old photos, chiding someone who claims he's losing weight but whose pictures say otherwise. Indeed, most have gained a lot of weight the past year. No surprise there, I commented about the group's passion for eating before.

That passion for mastication and the sedentary lifestyle conspired to add love handles to my midsection. Though I'm not really a poster-boy for physical fitness before, I'm fast becoming a model for unhealthy. Atrophied muscles, graying hair, flab around the middle, crouching gait. Looks like I aged twice as fast in the last 15 years.

But I intend to do something about it. One of my new year's resolutions is to lose the flab and get some abs.

May the Lord bless the brittle bones.

Why do I want a PhD?

A Doctor of Philosophy degree is the highest academic degree anyone can earn. They used to say a Ph.D. requires such extended study and intense intellectual effort, that less than one percent of the population gets the degree. People show respect for a someone who has a Ph.D. by addressing him with the title "Doctor".

They say that to earn a Ph.D., one must master a specific subject completely and he must extend the body of knowledge about that subject. A Ph.D. student is expected to pursue structured, supervised research. He will also needs to write an extended thesis, demonstrating evidence of the capacity to pursue scholarly research. The results of that research should make an original contribution to knowledge and be of a standard appropriate for publication.

Sounds daunting, doesn't it. Today it seems there is a surfeit of Ph.D.s. In my youth, very few have post-graduate degrees in the circles I move in. Ph.D. holders then really look and act the part. At present, many universities offer Ph.D. courses and many obtain the degree. But often you will hear people whisper "hoy, may PhD yun!." "Ha? yun? hindi halata" is whispered back often in disbelief. Stereotypes are distorted, images cheapened.

I breezed through my masters degree, hardly worked a sweat. The solid undergrad plus the extensive work experience helped a lot. By the time I hit the momentum to learn more, the game was over. I got my post-grad in record time. It's been a year since and I still feel the challenge. Besides, a Ph.D. sounds right for me - 'Perry Hugo - Doctor'. What can I say? I hate stereotypes and I'm cheap.

All hoping it'll be a better year.

I share the optimism of 91% of Filipinos that 2008 year will be a better year. How low can we go anyway? There’s no way but up. My personal emotional roller-coaster ride in 2007 scraped nadir right on Christmas week when I learned my name was mentioned in a contract mess. I hope the culprits will be judged guilty in the cases filed against them because that’s what they are, guilty.

For a better year, I resolve to:

• Start pursuing my Phd
• Work smart not hard, or better yet, work hard at working smart
• Give more time to tutoring my sons
• Lose the flab, and get some abs
• Be more discerning, as somebody maybe advising me cryptically when he set my password to 'trustno1'.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

It's the last day of the year and yet this is my first post for the year. Why do I blog at all? Others find blogging cathartic, some blog to document their lives, some do it to shout out their opinions, a few make money off their blogs. Except for the profit angle I could say I blog for the same reasons as others but I do primarily because it's an IT thing. I just have to know how to do it.

I was on an emotional roller-coaster ride this year. My father died. I did well in my masters class and I got my post-graduate degree. An uncle died. The job challenge went from exciting to ho-hum. The wife went on official travel, making me a solo parent for a week. The comatose company that my friends and I put up years ago had a De Niro-style Awakenings only to revert back to deep sleep. These are enough fodder for blog posts, but i posted nada.

Then on Christmas eve I received info that my name was mentioned negatively in online newspapers. I checked it and sure, there was not just one but at least two references to me. The fact that it's negative and appears on search engines (Google this or this) make me doubly mad because it means it won't go away easily no matter how untrue. The news can give the impression that either I'm in the scam and/or an incompetent analyst.

It is reported that a rich electric cooperative whose billing system I helped revise, entered into an anomalous contract with an IT company. The contract was onerous, the IT company failed to deliver despite receiving full payment. The coop's new board and employees sued the old board that approved the contract. An audit showed that the old board approved the contract based on the mere recommendation of a certain Perfecto Hugo. But wait, I never evaluated any proposal for them. I never recommended anything regarding any project. The job I did was billing system revision, nothing else. Clearly there is some misrepresentation here, and falsification. Documents were fabricated and antedated to suit the board and in effect attribute something to me. My beef is now that anybody who searches for me online will be led to the untrue, unsavory, unflattering news reports.

I talked to the current president of the coop and the current GM. They are shocked that the supposed recommendation I made was a fake. They thought all along that it was real albeit biased recommendation to favor the winning contractor. Maybe be they even thought the recommender was part of the scam. On paper it looks like, as they say 'malinis ang pagkagawa'. The decision was covered by proper evaluation/recommendation. The winning company appears legit, although undercapitalized and registered just days earlier before receiving the contract.

How could a board of directors completely unknown to me use me? They didn't even know my full name. I signed their logbook as Perry Hugo. They didn't know my affiliation with e-novention. My only connection to them was their IT consultant who got me to do the billing system. He was the computerization consultant. But he has denied being part of the scam. Does that mean he didn't know why they gave the contract to the days-old company? He swears he'll never use me that way. He admits though now, when confronted regarding the fake recommendation, to getting most of the budget for the billing system. What will I believe now? Occam's razor should be used, I think. All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Improving stats and otherwise

It's been a while since my last post. Tiger Woods won another major slam, putting him closer to Jack Nicklaus' record. Hindi yata talaga tao.
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Manny Pacquiao again won convincingly. As a tribute to the great event, I posted round 3 of his fight versus Morales on YouTube. They shot it down after 106 views, acting on a complaint from HBO saying it is copyright infringement. The last time I checked YouTube, there were still 1,248 videos of the same fight, some with more than 4,000 views. Just my luck to be singled out and threatened with a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
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Philippine life has not improved since. But this delusional government believes otherwise. It says unemployment is down. The government brought unemployment down not by creating more jobs but by not counting the unemployed properly. So if you see lots of tambays on the streets, they may be not working but they are not unemployed. It is a very imaginative unemployment reduction. Unemployment is down by more than 2 pts on a sub-par economic growth (compared to our neighbors) and a very high population growth (again compared to neighbors). How did GMA do with her promise of a million jobs a year, anyway? They are silent on that while they gladly report the new unemployment figures. Perhaps we should ask the government to reveal also the number of 'discouraged' workers who are left out in the counting of the unemployed.

In a zone and SONA

Tiger Woods at 30 won his 11th major (in less than 10 years of tournament play). Nicklaus won his record 18th and last (in 24 years of tournament play) when he was 46. At this rate, Tiger will double Nicklaus’ majors haul before he retires. Tiger once again proves his super human golfing talent. He is an alien. He is not human.
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For a change, this cute government acted fast in declaring no classes and office due to weather conditions on the day of the SONA. I wish they also act this fast on other non-SONA days.
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Hearing the latest SONA, we realize the true state of the nation today and that is - the president doesn’t have anything really good to say about our state today. She cannot embellish the truth more than they have done the past months, as in the redefinition of unemployed and underestimation of imports/balance of trade. So instead of getting flak for lying again through official statistics, she did not present the state of the nation at all. In lieu of the SONA, she presented her plans for the rest of her term.

What’s wrong with plans? All great accomplishments start with good plans, don’t they? Sure they do. But in presenting plans instead of the true state of the nation in a SONA is reveals several things: 1) the true state of the nation is not something to brag about in a SONA; 2) after 5 years in office, she is just starting to plan, we are still in the planning stage; 3) she is in denial about the true state of the nation; 4) she is still in dream state.

In her first SONA, she first articulated her plans through her ‘bangkang papel’ dramatics. Trabaho, edukasyon, sariling tahanan, pagkain. Succeeding SONAs should have mentioned where we have gone from those plans. Had she done that, she would have reported that unemployment is down because she redefined unemployment. More are being educated because she packed each classroom with more than 100 students per day. Hunger/poverty is easing because her statisticians say the basic caloric requirement is available via an unpalatable but cheap diet. More houses are being built not by her but by NGOs.

She cannot ascribe any positive development to her governance without getting criticism from all sectors. And next year is an election year, so even this early she goes on campaign mode, promising infrastructures. Talk is cheap and she can dream, can’t she?