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Crisis
Management
By Michael Alan Hamlin
August 4, 2003
Vacationing in Australia's Yarra
Valley wine country last week, I missed out on all the commotion
a week ago yesterday, when several hundred allegedly pure-hearted
military officers and their enlisted charges took it upon themselves
to speak for 80 million Filipinos. While there are many who share
their sense of outrage - assuming their outrage over military and
government corruption is sincere - they were horribly misguided
in their effort to bring about change.
Just how wrong is in part explained
by a photograph I took of my wife while reading the Melbourne papers
Monday morning. The headlines screamed the news of the latest Philippine
debacle, with one paper carrying a front-page editorial by its foreign
news editor predicting a dramatic fall in foreign investment, resulting
in the further economic isolation of the Philippines. While those
claims, I feel having just returned to Manila, are exaggerated,
that perception will have an effect.
How much of an effect depends on
how well the administration of Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo manages
this latest crisis. If the cover of the Philippine edition of Time
magazine is a reasonable indication, one might be led to believe
that the administration has the upper hand. The cover headlines
blared "Crisis Management," with a subtitle, "Philippine
President Gloria Arroyo Stares Down a Mutiny." A defiant Ms.
Arroyo was pictured.
But that's a far different version
of the story than Time readers most everywhere else read. In the
edition I picked up on Singapore Airlines last Friday, the cover
had to do with the increasing popularity of meditation. That's right.
The global trend toward managing anxiety through meditation beat
out Ms. Arroyo's mini-crisis. More telling, the table of contents
provided a much less flattering photograph of Ms. Arroyo with the
caption, "Arroyo is on the ropes. (The photograph and caption
also ran in the Philippines edition.)."
I'm more than a little surprised
that Time was so helpful to the administration with the Arroyo cover
photo (I'm not sure if it was used in other Southeast Asian or Asian
editions.) in the Philippine edition, especially considering the
story inside, where Michael Schuman writes, "Arroyo needs all
the divine intervention she can get. (She) was supposed to usher
in a younger, cleaner, smarter administration, but found herself
dogged by legitimacy issues.
"In response, her handlers came
up with often laughable attempts to bolster her image, such as placing
her on a magazine cover dressed in Men in Black-style shades and
suit in an effort to portray her as tough on terrorism. 'You felt
like saying: Will the real Gloria please stand up?' says one former
Cabinet minister." In the aftermath of the latest insurgency,
this and other published reports suggest that the administration
is still not getting it when it comes to crisis management.
The most obvious indication is Ms.
Arroyo's widely reported admission that the "coup isn't over
yet." While that may be true, that's probably not what either
Filipinos or investors want to hear. They want reassurance.
And that reassurance shouldn't come
from the administration, but from credible sources that support
the administration, or at least democratic processes, and believe
that those processes are firmly in place. This begs the obvious
question, "What credible sources?" Well, when it comes
to foreign investors, there's no more credible source than foreign
investors, at least in this case.
So here are some recommendations.
First, organize a news conference that will "feature"
five to seven top investors in the Philippines from a variety of
industries, such as semiconductors (Texas Instruments (TI), Intel),
contact centers (Sykes, PeopleSupport), and software development
(TrendMicro, Canon, NEC, Fujitsu). Ask each of these representatives
to make brief statements about their experience in the Philippines,
and why they continue to believe that the Philippines is the right
place for their investments.
The Intel and TI stories are compelling
because these companies have been here for three decades, through
thick and thin, and benefited as a result. Sykes is a global powerhouse,
and PeopleSupport is a fast-growing leader in its industry. TrendMicro,
Canon, NEC, and Fujitsu do absolutely remarkable, very high value-added
things here. A Canon executive told me recently that the company's
Philippine software development center is the most reliable one
they have anywhere.
Second, follow up with a series of
straight-forward advertisements in major broadcast and print media
targeting senior business executives. That would include CNN, The
Asian Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek,
and Forbes. Each advertisement will focus on just one of the executives
that agree to help out the Philippines with their personal endorsements.
They will talk about the business environment, the people, and the
lifestyle in the Philippines.
Third, start sending video clips,
transcripts, and copies of the news conference and the advertisements
to every rainmaker the administration can think of: investment bankers,
journalists, key staff members of key government officials in the
U.S., Japan, the EU, and other key sources of investment. Follow
up those communications with visits to their offices by knowledgeable,
dedicated industry experts from the Department of Trade & Industry.
As in other crises, the administration
in the aftermath of the latest is displaying a distressing myopia
and reliance on reactive behavior. The only way to control the agenda
- and perceptions - is to go out and control it.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001), and he is
currently at work on High Visibility: The Making and Marketing
of Asian Professionals into Celebrities. Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2003 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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