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TODAY we’re going to talk about low-cost and common-sense ideas
which are totally alien to the majority of our public servants,
because they’re from outer space. And for this matter, I’d like
to borrow from the teachings of Taiichi Ohno, the Japanese who
invented the Toyota Production System.
I’m referring to none other than the
maxim—“Use your brain, not your money” approach which is one
of the basic principles found in Masaaki Imai’s famous book called
GembaKaizen (McGraw-Hill, 1997).
Sensei Imai, who was my boss at Kaizen
Institute, told me of many good examples on how to profit (literally
and figuratively) from GembaKaizen, which means—continuous
improvement in the workplace.
That’s why I can’t shake off my frustration
with our government officials when I read news stories about the
Bureau of Immigration (BI) pulling out jammers at the Ninoy Aquino
International Airport:
“BI has pulled out telephone signal-jammers at
the NAIA Terminal 1 and Centennial Terminal 2 as the electronic
device was found to have damaged office computers and
passport-reading machines” says Jay Chua of Malaya on August 25.
On the same day, Recto Mercene of Business
Mirror reports, “the jammers were installed in response to
complaints that some Immigration officials were using their cellular
phones to help illegal travelers, including syndicates engaged in
human trafficking.
“The airport Immigration operations chief,
Ferdie Sampol, said that after the project seemed to have backfired,
officials found out that it was not necessary to have the jammer
after all.
“He said that all Immigration employees
assigned at the airport had volunteered to surrender their cellular
phones at the start of their workday and just retrieve these at the
end of their tour of duty.”
Now we wonder: What pushed them to solve this
problem without considerable planning and regard to a low-cost and
common-sense option in the first place? What would happen now to
those expensive electronic jammers which were procured with
taxpayer’s money?
I told you—we are a rich nation pretending to
be poor because our government officials do not have the cerebral
capacity to govern us.
This is another typical example of how our
officials solve a management problem. The question is— How serious
is this problem in government service? To help answer that question,
let us use a derivative from Feyneman’s Law: “Science is the
belief in the ignorance of government workers.”
As you can imagine, our government workers
including those at BI, appear to have brains, but why are they not
using them?
I was going to suggest that the cost of those
jammers is deducted from the monthly salaries of those nincompoops.
But it occurred to me that may be it is not a practical idea, and so
I’m pushing that this be deducted one time from their retirement
pay. And this presupposes that they be compulsorily retired.
Of course, you don’t believe that I’m
serious with this suggestion. And you think I’m joking again.
Well, I did some reevaluation, and you will be interested to learn
that every single word that I’m saying in this article is true
except for the phrase “I’m joking again.”
The point is that the central thrust of this
column is good governance, which gives us every reason to be
critical of anything that our bureaucrats are doing.
This is the area where we as taxpayers feel very
sensitive about while government workers tend to be extremely
callous. I’ve written about this issue many times before and I
always get emotional whenever I hear people from government throwing
good money.
Nevertheless, because I am an objective, but
sensitive and a caring kind for this government, I’d like to
inform my readers that I’m always ready to accept a contrary view
about this issue. And I promise to read them, although not
necessarily with my glasses on because I believe that they will not
be able to find any hole in my arguments.
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Rey Elbo is a business consultant specializing
in human resources and total quality management as a fused
specialty. Reader’s feedback may be sent to kairoshq@info.com.ph
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