Navigating turbulent waters in 2008
Woke up early this morning for a two-hour trip to Tagaytay, to observe the pilot sessions of the new training program for general managers (GMs) of electric coops. It’s organized by NEA and the Global Competitiveness Advocacy Inc., a group of former and present Ateneo professors.
Just before I left them tonight, the first batch of 30 GMs spent two hours answering 10 review questions about management principles and dynamics. The resource persons and NEA staff were impressed by the “eerie silence” in the room. “It’s harder than a board exam,” said one of the GMs as he turned in his 21-page answers.
Much of what I heard during the day were management and leadership concepts that are probably not unfamiliar to the GMs. After all, they are all veteran managers of category A-plus electric coops. I told the course manager that the lectures and exercises probably served mainly to help the GMs reflect deeper on their practice and further organize their articulation.
But I think one topic deserved even more time and emphasis – “Planning in a Turbulent Environment.” This included implications for programmed and non-programmed decisions in situations that range from relative certainty to risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity.
Ironically, it is the GMs of the better-performing electric coops who are most aware and anxious about the changes ushered in by EPIRA. Although they are more vulnerable, the poorly performing ECs are faced by more immediate and basic survival concerns, and don’t have the energy to address the larger changes and forces that face the ECs and the whole power and energy sector.
I am reminded of 1986, another time of turbulence which challenged even activists who were geared psychologically and politically for changes. Some of us tried to make a virtue of our inadequacy by quipping, “In a fluid and complex situation, if you are not confused, you are not thinking clearly!”
If the uncertain times were challenging to political analysts, how much more to political activists. They needed to act and intervene, and had to make decisions without benefit of enough time and information, toward goals that were sometimes vague and conflicting.
I wonder if GMs sometimes feel nostalgia for simpler times – when ECs had monopoly franchise areas, fixed long-term power supply contracts with NPC, and soft loans or grants for missionary electrification. Their main challenges were reducing systems loss to the allowed 14 per cent, and insuring 100 per cent collection efficiency. The hardest decisions were about disconnecting delinquent but powerful institutions and individuals, and curbing corruption.
Those challenges remain, but now they also have to deal with competitors for their customers, especially those with big loads, in a regime of open access, negotiate with corporate power suppliers, fend off take-over bids. Climate change and global warming are compelling arguments for preferring renewable energy sources, but increased power demand can not wait for the new and cleaner technologies to be economically competitive.
And of course there is Philippine politics, local and national.
Last Friday, I listened to DOE Secretary Reyes recite the litany of headaches that need to be addressed in the coming “power summit” and the subsequent regional consultations. In the course of our discussion, he exclaimed in mock surprise: “And yet so many want to be President!” We counted 11 names; could have been 12, if he didn’t play coy.
Steering the Philippines through turbulent waters demands more than what has been offered by traditional political leaders and styles of leadership. All these premature declarations of presidential ambitions give us little comfort, if at all.
