A future daughter in law visited her fiance’s English family. In return, she got a scathing email from Carolyn Bourne, her future mother in law.  Unfortunately, she forwarded it to friends (another faux pax and bad judgment, in my opinion) and it went viral.  As you see, not only chinese mothers in law are tiger moms (grin)…  Here’s the email. Some of the points I agree…
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It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.

Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you. It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.

If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste. There are plenty of finishing schools around.
 
Please, for your own good, for Freddie’s sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.

Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:

When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat - unless you are positively allergic to something. You do not remark that you do not have enough food. You do not start before everyone else.

 
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.

When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early—you fall in line with house norms.

 You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.

 You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed.

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.

 No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behavior.

I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)

If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.

I have been working and writing on a book about the potentials and pitfalls of the Philippine Economy the last few months.

My working title of the book is " Back to Square 1: Reinventing Philippines Inc., "

I am now done with the first chapter.  The title is " 16 statement of beliefs on the Philippine Economy."  I have posted it on the website ( www.Philippines-inc.com) . I would like to  present you the working titles and the links, and would dearly appreciate your comments.  The sites will take comments.  Many thanks!

  16 Statement of Beliefs about the Philippine Economy

1. The role of government is to create wealth, not redistribute wealth
2. Trade and Technology is a Positive Sum Game
3. Government intervention is a zero sum game
4. The Government cannot spend its way to Prosperity
5. No Country ever became prosperous because of aid
6. Too much Jam today. No more jam tomorrow
7. The way to lower population growth is to give jobs and security to women
8. Having Rich Resources can be a Curse
9. Make people’s self interest work for the country
10. Don’t count on other people to look after your interest
11. A Skilled Immigrant or Expat is not your enemy, but your friend.
12. Sending your best people overseas is the Lousiest way to earn dollars
13. Productivity is what improves income and standard of living
14. The way to Prosperity is by working harder, not having more holidays
15. A country can never have too much Investments
16. Competition is Stressful, but there is no Other Choice

I am writing a series of articles on my analysis of Philippines Inc., and hopefully this will be compiled in a book at a later date.  Here is one of my observations on Philippine social norms and practices.

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If you are a single parent with small children whose kids may need to spend a few hours with the other parent, or a parent who brings children to stay with their grandparents for a couple of hours, you will understand what I mean…. The kids come back stuffed with chocolate, chips ,ice cream, and toys.

You understand that the long term cost of doing such is that the children becomes fat, unhealthy, undisciplined, and refuses to eat wholesome food.  Their teeth will rot, and their education ignored. Worse, you know you cannot push them too hard to work or study ( things that are good for them) , because they will tell ‘ lolo’ about it, the lolo who seem to have endless supplies of candies and soda, and who never says its bad for you.   In the eyes of the child, he is his knight on shining armor.

Such can be your dilemma in managing corporations and being a leader.  There are interim leaders who don’t subscribe to long term thinking, but in short term popularity.  I feel the tragedy of Philippines politics as it was developed, is that there are too many well meaning lolos and padrinos. They don’t do much when there is work to do ( but you like them, because they don’t ask much from you either, unlike your parents!) , but do come by occasionally to show that they care by

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My article as printed in the Cebu daily News.

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From 2001 to 2008, the Philippines only had $12 billion in foreign direct investments, which is less than Vietnam’s $36 billion for the same period.

 I am not an economist. However, for the last 20 or so years, my passion has been in management and technology, and along the way, I have written over a thousand articles and talks on making management and technology more understandable to everyone.  Over the last few months, I have heard a lot of discussions about the economy, and I sincerely feel some of them were knocking on the wrong direction.  I would like to humbly present my own understanding and simplification, for those of you who may want to understand a little bit of what I believe is a very crucial point in our nation’s development.

 I might be oversimplifying certain things, but hopefully this analysis will give a better idea of what I believe we should focus on.

 GDP  and  GDP per capita.  

 GDP or Gross Domestic Product refers to all the goods and services produced within the nation in a given year.    This is one of the standard by which a nation’s economy is gauged vis a vis how it is performing against its neighbors. 

 For the periods from 1980 to 2009, the country’s GDP grew from 32 billion dollars to 158 billion dollars.  That’s five times!  On paper, that looks good.  But wait a minute!  It’s not good, because during that period of time, we also almost doubled our population, from 48 million to over 92 million in 2009.  That means that while output grew almost five times, there were twice as many people to share or output that, so at the end, per person, you are only about 2.5 times better off!

 If you glean the country’s per capita GDP, you will note that our GDP  (adjusted for purchasing power parity or PPP) actually grew from $1247 per capita in 1980 to $3437 in 2009.  That’s only about 2.7 times in almost 30 years. 

 That might seems impressive until you see what China has accomplished.  For the period of 1980 to 2009, China grew GDP from $309 billion to $4.757 trillion.  That’s a growth of about 15 times.  But it gets even better because in that period of time, their population grew from around 987 million to 1.334 billion.  That’s a growth of only 35% over 30 or so years. 

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The first two days of Winter Olympics coverage in Vancouver was watched by about 97 million people in the U.S., the most since 1994 when interest in the Lillehammer Games was boosted by an off-ice incident involving U.S. figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
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Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan said the government will start debate on overhauling the sales tax next month, indicating it may consider increasing the 5 percent levy to help repair the country’s finances.
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The Age of Tablets will give print media one last bite at the apple - and publishing companies that are able to make the transition could one day thrive again.
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What becomes of the printed word? What’s the fate of companies that produce periodicals and books? Here’s what 10 media and tech luminaries think.
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