Team & family. What do you care, or how much?

MANILA – PEOPLE, it´s people that matters. Yesterday, 13 July, in the evening I saw and heard on TV Gilberto Duavit, COO of GMA Network saying that the Collective Bargaining Agreement, CBA just concluded with the employees´ union showed that, in so many words, the network did take good care of its people. Glad to hear that.

Also yesterday, earlier in the afternoon, I saw and heard face-to-face in my interview Francis Laurel, President and CEO of YKK Philippines saying something about more than just to take good care of your people. YKK doesn´t need a CBA; it doesn´t need a union. What´s the secret? This Laurel said, ´Mahalin mo ang tao mo.´ Love your people. GMA Network has 1,200 in its workforce (bworldonline.com); Laurel has 200. The difference lies not only in numbers.

But how do you take care, how do you love your people? After talking with this scion of the Laurels, now I know of 2 approaches: team and family. ´GMA Network´s management and the members of the union,´ GMA Network Chair, President & CEO Felipe Gozon said in a press conference, ´have always worked hand in hand in ensuring only the best for the company´s best assets – its employees´ (ANN, 14 July, bworldonline.com). Certainly, that´s teamwork and, with the company announcement of P1 Billion in net income only for January to May 2009, it shows that they´re doing an excellent job of it.

Can the team approach be improved upon? Yes. By the family approach. That was my impression while I was interviewing Laurel yesterday at his home in Cavite, for a book I am writing on distinguished graduates of the University of the Philippines´ College of Agriculture in the last 100 years, book title Contributions to Country, to be published later this year by the UP Los Baños Alumni Association.

Laurel told me that the first time, when he believed he was ready to go into business himself, he asked his father, Jose Laurel III, once Ambassador to Japan, what advice he would give, and his father gave him what his own father, Jose P Laurel, once President of the Philippines, gave him, and it was only one command: Mahalin mo ang tao mo. Which he did, and learned that it worked like a charm.

If you ask me, the injunction Love your people is more than taking good care of them as members of your team. You consider them family. If you do that, your people will love you and will go with you through thick and thin. That is important come hell and high water. Today, YKK Philippines makes and sells worldwide some 120 million zippers annually (ykk.com.ph). And yes, this YKK has been through hell and high water.

Among the Filipino UP aggies that I know, the Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, William Dar has become the most honored international leader of all the UPCA alumni. ICRISAT is one of 15 centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR. With Dar as Team Captain, ICRISAT has become the most famous team of all CGIAR. From 2000, when Dar came in, Team ICRISAT has risen from the brink of disaster, funds dwindling and morale diminishing, to the healthiest CGIAR unit financially and in most other institutional aspects. ICRISAT has been honored twice, 2006 and 2007, as the Outstanding CGIAR center. In 2004, Dar was honored with a 2nd 5-year term as DG; this year, 2009, Dar was doubly honored with an historical 3rd term, a first in CGIAR history.

Dar could not have done that if he had only treated ICRISAT as a team. On record, that´s what he did; by all the looks of it, from what I know personally, he had considered them not only as team but as family.

All that is to say, in manufacturing & marketing as well as in science & technology, the family approach to management works to advantage, very good advantage.

The Americans would probably not be able to appreciate the ´family approach´ as they are in fact averse to family – they kick the children out of the house (and their lives) when they become adults. Is that what they call independence? That´s what I call separation. We Filipinos are the naturals when it comes to family, as we value not only the nuclear but also the extended family, which includes uncles, aunts, grandparents, nephews, nieces, cousins, second cousins and other distant relations, including in-laws as well as those adopted . You show more respect and kindness to the members of your family before you do to others. Team is great; family is greater!

People
(Barbra Streisand)
People, people who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world!
We´re children needing other children
And yet letting our grown-up pride
Hide all the need inside …
But first be a person who needs people
People, people who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world.

Come to think of it, right now, the best metaphor I can think of for a team is a zipper. A simple device, as it looks now, Wikipedia tells us the modern zipper is really made up of 12 components: top-tape extension, top stop, slider, pull tab, fabric tape, chain width, bottom stop, bottom tape extension, single tape width, insertion pin, retainer box, and reinforcement film. What do you make of all that? A zipper, of course. It takes 12 to make a zipper.

The current YKK slogan makes a big thing out of the small: ´Little Parts. Big Difference.´ Being a romantic and not a marketing man, I would emphasize more the oneness and not the difference. A dozen. Now, in a baker´s dozen, there are actually 13 items. Well, if 12 make a team, someone must mind the team, to make 13. Well, some teams merely survive, some teams thrive. I rather think that a team that is really a family is the one that survives.

And how does this team that is really a family, survive the vicissitudes of business life? Think! YKK does it by being ´attached to creativity´ (ykkeurope.com). Beautiful. YKK is inspiring innovation. And so does ICRISAT, and it does that by coming up with new products and services (crop varieties, techniques, systems) to help the poor, stressed farmers of the drylands of mostly Asia and Africa weather the storm brewed by climate change and the old destructive ways. You have to think out of the box. One Team & Family shows a constructive approach to business and science. Give me creativity any day!