The Asian Way - by Gaby Mendoza

THERE are some management books that simply stick to one's mind. This is one of them. Mendoza has plenty of nuggets of information that are priceless in terms of management wisdom and practicality. Grab as many as your mind can hold because you will never know when you will need them.
I BEGAN reading the Introduction and the blurb on the back cover. Surely,
this must be another one of those many management books one can find on
the bookshelves, I thought. Probably written by another self-proclaimed
pompous management windbag pontificating on yet another theory, supposedly
a panacea for corporate ills.
Halfway through the book, that tiny crack of interest widened into an
open window. This is no ordinary management material. In fact, it does not
really read like a management text. It has the Reader's Digest flavour
which I happen to like very much. The writer drops tiny pearls of
knowledge into the readers lap.
To begin with, Gaby Mendoza is eminently qualified for this subject. His
credentials are impeccable. This 30-year veteran of boardroom management
and corporate politics is a professor who was also the president of the
Asian Institute of Management from 1978 to 1986. He is also a member of
the Executive Committee of Interman, the global management development
network, and columnist and chairman of World Executives Digest.
The Asian Way is a collection of Mendoza's articles written through the
years. His wit is razor-sharp, his humour contagious, and his wealth of
experience just short of awesome.
Mendoza's message is that management practices must constantly evolve to
keep pace with the changing times. There is another way, he tells us all,
to run Asian companies and affairs. And that is the Asian Way.
Western ways work fine in the Western context, perhaps worked better in
their heyday. But the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese and Singaporeans have
proved that they too have their own answers as the world approaches what
is popularly known as the Pacific Century.
Mendoza's crisp homilies on management draw deeply from the well of
ancient knowledge. He quotes Confucius and Gandhi, highlights the military
campaigns of Genghis Khan, and makes passing mention of Sun Tzu and
Musashi. These strategems of the past and others are incorporated into his
lessons.
There are the occasional jabs at incompetent governments run by bungling
bureaucrats. We the people are reminded that our concerns are best served
by the intelligent and diligent who only have our best interests at heart.
In this case, Mendoza sinks his teeth into a burger-like substance that
many Asians are familiar with - the businessman who masquerades as a
politician. The comparison is drawn between a scheming politician and a
wheeling and dealing businessman.
The subject matter is just so much curry for some of us, either you
swallow it with great relish or you spit it out. For those of us who like
it, Mendoza's sharply-focused analogies bring to mind some of our own
home-grown politician-scum-businessmen. The demarcation line is, in some
instances, blurred, sometimes by design.
According to this Filipino professor, the politician connives and
contrives to engineer events to his own advantage. His is a complex game
of winning the hearts and minds of the electorate. The length of his
office depends on how long he can keep the smile on the faces of his
constituents.
The businessman's task is much simpler and straight-forward. His mission
is to push up profits with a given amount of resources and funds. If the
returns are slow and low, the businessman would be wise to scan the
horizon for a more suitable calling.
Thus, says Mendoza, the traders eye is always on the scorecard. He has
very little time for fault-finding and self-pity because if these faults
are allowed to degenerate, they could very well prove to be his death
knell.
Mendozas strength in language is borne out by the charm and ease of his
expression. After several chapters, reading the book is like like
listening to an old familiar uncle.
For those who may have, on occasion, bumped into courses like time
management, quality control circles, stress management, management by
objectives, these are covered adequately in The Asian Way.
Gurus like Frederick Taylor, Father of Modern Management, Henri Fayol,
Drucker, Masaru Ibuka of Sony, Hattori of Seiko, J.P. Morgan of the
American railroad, are also mentioned. The good professor knows his
subject matter and his subjects very well.
The homilies he delivers from the rostrum of the boardroom are each
laced with a moral, not unlike Aesops Fables. There are in all, 207 of
these capsule-like essays.
In an article published in June 1990, Mendoza's courage shines through.
He scrutinises Cory Aquinos track record as President of the Philippines.
It takes a brave Filipino to lambast his own people about their faults and
weaknesses - their propensity towards personal power and greed, nepotism,
and a shameful lack of compassion for the poor and hungry.
This is not the only instance where he turns the spotlight on his own
kind. Among the many pieces, Cory Aquino as manager: A success or failure
could be considered the piece de resistance.
The Asian Way revolves around Asian values like fatherly benevolence,
filial piety and even paternalism. In the past 40 years, Mendoza says, "we
have been trying to fit our well-rounded Asian souls and sensibilities
into the square hole of the Western mind. And it has been a clumsy fit."
Our problems, management or otherwise, are unique. We are well advised
not to seek solutions to our problems from the West. Their agonies can be
solved by their own methods. Asians must look to their past, their
cultures, their philosophies, and their own brand of common sense.
As we approach the dawn of the 21st Century, Mendoza says, "There is too
much secrecy among Asian managers. We keep things to ourselves; we
distrust one another; we refuse to help and to learn from one another. We
read books from the West and attempt to apply our situation the principles
that Western managers and academics have developed from their experience
with Western workers in Western organisations. And then, we bemoan the
fact that their rules of thumb, their current practices, their surefire
prescriptions usually dont work for us; that somehow, the results they
bring dont quite fit our needs, circumstance, and culture. When will we
ever learn?"
Amen.