Ellery's Essays

Why We Should Ask More Questions

Photo Courtesy of the Manila Police District (MPD)/ MANILA BULLETIN

Eight (8) utility posts fell on a busy street at Manila’s Binondo Chinatown district. The posts damaged cars and caused a power failure to commercial establishments. The power utility company, MERALCO, however, immediately removed and replaced the fallen posts. Power was restored within hours. Business on the street returned to normal.

That wasn’t enough for a Manila city councilor, however. The councilor suggested a feasibility study to phase out electric posts in Manila’s Chinatown and replace them with underground cables. A Philippine lawmaker also proposed the laying of underground cables all over the country. “This multiyear undertaking is, I believe, the appropriate solution to end the repeated isolation of coastal towns and remote islands often in the path of typhoons,” the lawmaker said.

We, not only politicians, have a penchant for proposing quick solutions whenever an issue crops up. We then suggest experts, such as engineers, study and carry out whatever the solution would be.

We as humans have two (2) common tendencies:

We immediately find answers to questions or solutions to problems, never mind if we didn’t really examine the question or problem thoroughly beforehand.
We justify our answers and push our solutions but we delegate other people, like engineers, to make whatever the idea into reality.

We don’t ask enough questions when an issue arises or whenever we think we have a good idea. The idea is ‘good’ because we think it’s so. It makes sense. It’s creative and innovative. We should do it.

But does the so-called ‘good’ idea resonate with your criteria or priorities, or with what are important for the people the good idea is supposedly for?

The Philippine Department of Natural Resources (DENR) led construction of an artificial beach on Manila Bay on August 2020. From the Cebu island hundreds of kilometres away, the DENR dumped sand & crushed dolomite by the bay’s seawall. The beach was opened briefly on September 2020 but the DENR delayed completion until the end of the year. Typhoon and trash kept the DENR busy working on the beach for months after. Tourists visiting the beach are not allowed to swim, only to stand on the beach. The DENR argued that the beach was meant to be part of a coastal defence and environmental restoration project. Critics say it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money, not to mention the damage done to the environment where the dolomite was mined from.

The dolomite project is an example of a solution that didn’t solve a defined problem especially one which would be consistent with the government’s priorities. The proponents apparently didn’t give enough study to what the environmental problems of Manila Bay, instead implementing ideas which turned out to be questionable.

The dolomite controversy is an example of why it doesn’t hurt to ask more questions whenever we face an issue or we start work on a problem. The problem-solving process starts with understanding what the problem really is about. What are we experiencing from this problem? Where is it coming from? What’s causing the symptoms we are observing? What data should we collect? What does our analysis say?

Understanding a problem leads us to better defining what we believe would be the true problem. We can define a problem by posing it as a question, such as, for examples:

‘In what way can we prevent utility posts from collapsing without warning?’
‘In what way can we mitigate the symptoms of this disease?’
‘How can we better secure and protect vehicles on city streets?’
‘How can we respond faster to accidents in our city?’
‘How can we improve the environment of Manila Bay?’

We need to remind ourselves, however, that whatever definition we make of a problem, we should be prepared to edit it as we gather more information and weigh it versus our criteria, as well as that of who would most benefit, if not would be most affected, from it.

We also don’t delegate solutions to experts, like engineers. Engineers are not executioners, they are problem-solvers. If we are to seek help from engineers, we must enrol them at the very first stage of the problem-solving process: understanding the issues.

We engineers work best when we participate in any problem-solving process from the beginning. That’s what we engineers do, after all; we solve problems. As much as anyone can have a good idea, we utilise a fraction of our talents when we simply are asked to make any idea into reality.

We engineers study problems first before entertaining ideas as possible solutions. We ask questions, we assess, we understand, and we define the problem. We check if the problem has bearing with the criteria and priorities of stakeholders or clients. And only after all these, do we begin seeking and examining ideas.

We all have what we believe are good ideas. We see a few entrepreneurs succeed and make lots of money from their ideas. We want to be like them so we try to promote our ideas too. Because we think our ideas are good, we push them for acceptance and when we think we have it, we delegate them to experts like engineers to execute them.

For every so-called good idea that succeeds, there are likely many that have never gotten off the ground or failed at a later stage. And this is because:

We didn’t ask enough questions to define clearly what problems we are solving and what would be their worth solving them.
We don’t involve experts, like we engineers, at the very start of the problem-solving process.

Let’s not be afraid to ask more questions. And let’s not hesitate to enrol the expertise of others at the very beginning of solving a problem.

About Ellery’s Essays

Why We Need to Ask More (Right) Questions

We ask a lot of questions. But which questions do we choose to answer? Which questions do we delve into? Which questions become the bases of our lifetime quests?

Both words, ‘Questions’ and ‘quests,’ have a similar origin: quaerere, to ask, seek.

What we seek depends on what we ask.

And the first things we should ask are:

Have we asked questions relevant to what we seek?
Have we asked questions relevant to what our audience, customers, clients, superiors, subordinates, and peers are seeking?

How we proceed in our quests count on the answers to these two (2) questions.

We have ‘Aha!’ moments every day. The ‘Ahas’ are insights to our observations or experiences. These insights lead us to answers to questions we have been thinking about.

Then again, some may not. We sometimes have insights which we have no questions to match. We end up looking for the questions these insights answer.

Nevertheless, we try to cultivate some of our insights into reality. We like to think some insights are inspirations toward new designs or inventions, which we could reap rewards from. We build products and offer services which we advertise as innovative and which we count on to boost our wealth and esteem.

Many inventions from insights, however, end up as failures because we did not connect them to problems relevant to our priorities.

But we don’t accept failure at once. As one insight fails, we look for another. We try again, only to fail once more to connect the insight to a problem that’s related to our quests. We don’t realise that it’s futile to work with solutions which don’t address issues that are of interest to us. It’s like putting the cart before the horse; the solution either goes nowhere or remains motionless, no matter how much we push it.

Sometimes, however, we get lucky; an insight we make into reality somehow prospers. We find a connection which we or our audience didn’t see at first but realised was there all along.

An example is Velcro®, invented by Swiss engineer, George de Mestral. Mr. Mestral invented Velcro’s® multiple hook & loop fasteners after wondering how cockleburs got caught on his pants while he was on a hike. He introduced the product, and it became immensely popular. Most people at the time didn’t realise they needed Velcro®, until they saw the benefit of a fastener that could easily stick & unstick things like pockets together. Velcro® became a solution to fastening things together where buttons & clasps would be more cumbersome or difficult to use. Velcro® was fortunate to succeed even though it didn’t have an obvious problem to solve when it made its debut.

The example of Velcro®, however, should not be a reason to pursue insights without first asking questions. As much as we seek ‘Aha!’ insights, we should also ask ‘Aha!’ questions. Velcro® motivated Mr. Mestral and its users to ask what it can be used for. They experienced their ‘Ahas!’ when they discovered the questions Velcro® answered, as in how to easily stick and unstick things where a button, clasp, or glue wouldn’t be feasible (e.g. inside pockets of bags, roll-up straps)

Would we create & innovate better if we first asked the questions before finding the answers?

The following is an example where this might be the case:

Mosquitoes infect thousands of people with deadly diseases (e.g., dengue, zika, encephalitis, malaria). Epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases cost communities millions of dollars in health care annually, not to mention they sicken & kill many people. Communities and governments have conducted numerous programs to rid their environs of mosquitoes, which consisted mostly of spraying pesticides, laying traps, and cleaning sewers & waterways.

Since 2016, the World Mosquito Program had been initiating a drive to infect mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a bacteria that inhibits the dengue virus. It was found that dengue illnesses were 77% lower in Wolbachia-treated communities than in others. The bacteria also showed promise in inhibiting other mosquito-borne viruses.

The WMP figured out that the problem with mosquito-borne diseases wasn’t the mosquitoes; it was the pathogens. They directed their efforts towards on how to defeat the pathogens, not the mosquito populations. The organisation, as a result, came up with Wolbachia, which targeted the virus behind dengue and discovered its efficacy can potentially extend to a wide range of pathogens. The WMP is on a long-term campaign to introduce Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in communities around the world.

We welcome insights like Velcro® and find the questions where we can apply them to. But we should also be asking questions so that we can formulate answers which hit what we’re targeting. These include questions such as the World Mosquito Program’s asking how to eliminate the pathogens and not the carriers, the mosquitoes.

By our nature, we don’t ask too many questions as much as we come up with too many answers. Chalk it up to peer pressure or the daily constant rush that comes with our work ethics or cultures. Whenever we face a problem or a question, we try to answer them immediately. We don’t like to leave things hanging. We don’t like to have too many things on our plate. We don’t like unsolved mysteries. We brainstorm ideas so we’d have options and then we choose which looks best as a solution so that we can move on.

We see this mindset in many organisations. A manager raises a problem; the boss calls a meeting. The problem dominates the meeting’s discussion, the attendees throw ideas on the table, and the boss proposes, decides, & approves a solution. The boss assigns persons to draft action plans and approves resources for the solution. The meeting adjourns. A few months later, another (possibly similar) problem emerges, and the process repeats itself: another meeting, another discussion, another solution, another hit & miss set of action plans.

We strive to find answers, despite not asking enough questions, more specifically, the right questions, the ones which would lead to answers that matter to our goals and our priorities. Instead, because we work on so many ideas as answers, we often don’t clarify what we are truly seeking. We don’t find the best answers because we didn’t bother to ask the right questions.

We pursue ideas and insights rather than ask questions because we believe that the latter will follow as soon as we innovate and invent via the former. We don’t like asking too many questions because we don’t want to be anxious to answer them all. Dwelling on questions makes us uncomfortable and insecure as we fear not finding the answers.

We, however, can look at asking questions as an exploration, a journey of discovery. The more questions we ask, the more informed we become as we gather and analyse data. When we ask, we seek to understand, to appreciate the scale and scope of what lies behind the questions. The more we seek to know, the more things become clearer, the more we can focus on root causes, the more we can relate to what we’re asking to what are important for us. Asking questions and not being afraid to ask lead us to more ‘Aha!’ moments, even if these lead to more questions than answers.

Asking questions opens doors which lead us to more doors. We can either worry about all the doors to open or we can delight with the discoveries we will find from opening them.

“When one door closes, another door opens; but we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.” –Alexander Graham Bell

We need to ask the right questions if we are to find the right answers, the ones that will determine how we progress in our quests.

This is my 200^th essay. It is, therefore, fitting that I ask:

Have I asked as many questions as I’ve offered answers in the two hundred (200) essays I’ve published?

I submit that I did not. I confess I offered more answers and insights that not necessarily had questions to match.

We all have roles to play, causes to champion, and jobs to do. In my case, on top of my responsibilities, I have more essays to write. And in so doing, I should discover more questions to ask, and see where they lead, hopefully to answers which not only make sense, but also will help us.

About Ellery’s Essays

Enforcement is Not Necessarily a Solution

City traffic in Manila, the Philippines, is downright horrible. Driving a car in Manila is an adventure in patience and civility. It’s hard to be a nice person when we compete for road space in this city’s congested streets.

Metropolitan Manila, formally known as the National Capital Region, is the urban centre and capital of the Republic of the Philippines. It includes the old city of Manila itself and surrounding cities & towns. Many private and public organisations base their headquarters, offices, and operations in the NCR. Thus, it comes to no surprise that Metro Manila has a daytime population estimated of up to fifteen (15) million people. Metro Manila’s urban density is estimated at 42,857 people per square kilometre, much higher than that of Mumbai (23,000/sq km), Paris (20,150/sq km), and Tokyo. (10,100/sq km). (ref: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/manila-population)

Over the years, those of us who are Manila’s denizens have seen countless ideas put into play to solve the city’s traffic problem:

The national government built new roads & bridges, and installed traffic lights, closed-circuit television cameras (CCTVs), & flood control equipment.
The government’s lead agency, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), introduced one scheme after another, consisting of ordinances & regulations, to enforce discipline among motorists. These include:
- a number coding law which banned private vehicles one day every week based on the last digit of their license plate number
- a ban on heavy trucks during morning & evening rush hours
- a ban on the use of mobile phones while driving
- Exclusive lanes for public buses at main roads and dedicated lanes for motorcycles & bicycles
- Deployment of hordes of traffic cops at busy intersections, who also were given authority to flag down & ticket motorists.

While politicians trumpeted these initiatives, they hardly made a dent on traffic. We still find ourselves spending up to four (4) hours a day driving an average of ten (10) kilometres to and from work. For those who take public transport, a commute that would take an hour or less would be negated by up to another hour of waiting in line at bus and train stations.

Traffic goes from inconvenience to nightmare when streets get flooded from heavy rains, lights fail due to power outages or glitches, or when enforcers simply give up directing traffic at busy intersections. The gridlocks that ensue result in we motorists getting stuck for more hours on the road and commuters stranded at stations or ending up walking up home.

Many of us believe enforcement is the best solution to Manila’s traffic problem. We point to undisciplined drivers for the cause of traffic. We get annoyed seeing cars parked where they’re not supposed to. We are irritated at motorists running through red lights. We shake our heads at drivers not stopping to allow pedestrians to cross. We scream at cars who block the flow of traffic at crossings. If only traffic cops would flag down these errant drivers, if only there would be enforcement of rules, we would be able to solve the traffic problem.

But somehow enforcement, no matter how much the politicians and the police try, does not seem to work. No matter how many enforcers are there, no matter how many tickets are served, the traffic gridlocks fester. We remain in despair that we will get stuck for hours whenever we foray into the city.

Authorities blame us for the traffic woes. We motorists are stubborn, undisciplined, disobedient, and disrespectful. We are accused of corrupting traffic cops and violating rules for our own ends. Those of us who are public transport drivers don’t follow road signs or stop at stations.

We should be threatened with higher penalties. Enforcement is too lax; it should be stricter and we should be punished whenever we violate the rules. More enforcement is therefore the answer, many pundits say.

And so it has been for Manila as traffic continues to worse, the MMDA enacts and applies more rules, more penalties, and more limits to discipline we ‘bad’ drivers.

As much as the national government has built new freeways & bridges and expanded train lines & river ferries, the traffic remains a mess. I’ve heard so-called self-proclaimed traffic experts agree with government leaders and authorities and label Manila’s motorists uneducated and immature. We point fingers at each other for the problem. Enforcement is very much needed.

Saying that enforcement is an ultimate fix to Manila’s traffic is an example of how misguided we are in solving problems. Solving problems doesn’t start with outright solutions. Problem solving is a process. It entails the following steps:

Gathering information & understanding the issues
Identifying root causes
Establishing criteria to choose which root causes to address first
Identifying the problem from the chosen root causes
Laying out options as candidates for solutions
Evaluating the candidate solutions via our established criteria
Selecting the solution
Developing the solution as in formulating strategies, plans, & roadmaps
Designing the program or prototype
Experimenting by running a pilot program or building a prototype
Implementing the solution (‘going live’)

Because we clamour for fast outcomes to complaints, we tend to look for quick and simple fixes without first studying what’s going on and pinpointing what to prioritise. (Politicians, for instance, insist on making master plans without determining root causes and what the master plan will address). We can’t solve problems without first defining what they are and in the first place, deciding whether they’re the ones we should be addressing.

We can trace Manila’s traffic to numerous root causes:

Overpopulation
Too many private cars; inadequate public transport
Not enough infrastructure (i.e., roads, bridges, sewage)
Poorly trained or too few enforcers
No formal zoning of urban districts
Overlapping authority from too many government agencies
Lack of road signs & traffic lights
Too many undisciplined & unqualified drivers

And these are just a few. We can probably name more.

Enforcement, as much as it is a possible solution, should not be considered until we first clarify which root causes we want to address.

The problem we will define and solve is not necessarily the same as a root cause. Root causes are our jump-off point to gather & study data and as we get to understand what’s going on and evaluate versus our priorities, we sharpen our definition of the problem we intend to solve.

Defining the problem brings us almost halfway to finding the solution. When we have clarity as to the problem we want to solve, we find ourselves more creative and able to bring out ideas. We develop our solution from those ideas, again from our criteria. We experiment and invent. And we make our solution into reality.

We who drive and commute in Manila have become very impatient in seeking solutions. But we need to realise that solving the traffic problem requires stepping back, gathering information, and identifying & prioritising root causes to address before we can even study & evaluate ideas to mitigate the traffic mess.

Unfortunately, every problem-solving process takes time. We can surely insist that for the meantime, whoever is in authority should just work harder to enforce existing laws. But we need to understand that existing methods won’t likely lead to significant improvements. It would be better if we undertake a problem-solving process than to simply complain & demand for quick-fix solutions that won’t probably work.

And we who have lived in Manila for most of our lives know that quick-fix solutions never do really work. A problem-solving process would no doubt be the best way to untangle the traffic mess, if not other problems we also encounter every day.

About Ellery’s Essays

The Basic Tasks of Management vs. The Basic Tasks of Engineering

Management is the predominant means in how we run our organisations. It’s been like that since the late 19^th century, when we adopted capitalism into our society to cultivate the prosperity & wealth resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Business was getting more complex when it came to all the money we were earning. We needed to learn to manage the growing complexity.

We sharpened the meaning of management over time. Management is essentially the administration of people & resources to achieve the goals of the enterprise. Managers represented the ownership of enterprises, whether they were the stockholders of corporations, partners of firms, or the proprietors of small businesses. Whereas the role of the owners is to lead, or at least provide direction, managers do the job of planning, organising, directing, & controlling. Managers are the procurers of resources, the representative negotiators, the disciplinarians, and the planners & implementors of strategy.

We’ve applied management to our supply chains in the same way we applied it to all other business functions. We set goals, defined performance standards, and ran after our people to accomplish & comply with them.

We learned, however, that we could do only so much in managing supply chains. We can only do so much with existing supply chain structures & systems. If we are to improve supply chains, we needed to re-engineer them, as in either replace parts of them, or rebuild all of them.

We engage engineers for projects which require scientific & technical prowess. It’s been argued that we as managers don’t have the expertise to change systems or structures.

Many of us who are managers have degrees in engineering, and those of us who do have exercised our engineering talents in our day-to-day jobs. But our scopes of work as managers, what with all the pressures and distractions, make it difficult for us to double as engineers.

Yet, we try. Not only because we have the educational backgrounds, but because our superiors expect us to do so. As much as management is about planning, organising, directing, & controlling, our superiors also expect us to improve the systems & structures we oversee. It doesn’t matter if it’s not exactly specified in our contracts or job descriptions, our superiors expect us to initiate & make better what we manage.

Engineering is the application of scientific & technical knowledge to the design, development, & establishment of systems & structures. In short, engineers are problem solvers and builders.

There are a multitude of engineering disciplines. Civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, industrial, nuclear, environmental, petroleum, software, aeronautical, just to name a few.

Most, if not all, engineering disciplines take off from the natural sciences. And all engineers apply a lot of mathematics in their work. Mechanical, civil, & electrical engineers apply the principles of Physics. Chemical, petroleum, & metallurgical engineers build from the science of chemistry. Environmental & biomedical engineers take off from biology and the medical sciences.

For many of us, who are engineers by degree, we try to apply our engineering education when we became managers. We try to apply science in how we improve our operations. We try to be scientific in solving problems, especially supply chain problems.

And we learned that we can’t. And why we can’t is because our roles as managers require us to spend much of our time in:

Planning: e.g., developing strategies, defining objectives;
Organising: e.g., listing priorities, making & filing reports, ensuring proper housekeeping;
Directing: e.g. communicating & delegating assignments, clarifying roles, setting work pace targets;
Controlling: e.g., addressing deviations, enforcing discipline.

Doing these basic tasks of management doesn’t give us much time to solve problems. And that is also because problem solving is a big task. We can try to be engineers, but we learn by experience that it’s not simply part of our scope.

Problem solving is the engineer’s job. And engineers do it by the following basic tasks:

Designing: i.e., defining the problem, establishing criteria, identifying candidates as options for the solution;
Development: e.g., drafting the design, building & testing prototypes, experimenting with options, determining costs & benefits, selecting & proposing the solution;
Installation: e.g., drafting the detailed design specifications, scheduling & executing trials, troubleshooting, deployment, go live, writing the manual;

Engineering by itself is a full time job much different from management. Even as much as we want to be both managers and engineers, we can’t.

Managers plan, organise, direct, & control. Engineers design, develop, & install. Managers oversee and administer. Engineers solve problems.

We can be engineers by education but we can’t manage & engineer at the same time.

About Ellery’s Essays

We Need Engineers to Solve Supply Chain Problems, Not Managers

We encounter lots of problems with supply chains.

Customers complain about late and incomplete deliveries;
Vendors charge higher prices for materials;
Some products turned out defective;
Manufacturing didn’t follow the production plan;
Trucks didn’t show up to load for delivery;
Expenses are running over budget;
We don’t have enough skilled people for our operations.

But how serious are these problems? How do we as managers prioritise which problems we will put most of our time and resources into?

When the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020, governments immediately restricted the movements of people and merchandise. Supply chains went into standstill. Consumers rushed to buy and stock groceries & basic household items, which resulted in empty store shelves everywhere. Factories and offices were shut. Ports were closed. Perishable items and food got stuck in storage facilities and many products ended up undelivered and wasted.

We saw the pandemic problem as a health crisis. We sought ways to protect ourselves. We bought masks and stocked up on disinfectants, toilet paper, and soap. We stopped visiting relatives, cancelled attendance to parties & get-togethers, and even avoided going out for walks around our neighbourhoods.

At the same time, we struggled to continue making a living to support and feed our families. We figured out how to work from home, set up e-commerce websites to sell our products, and meet with business contacts via videoconferences & online chat rooms.

For the critical factories and facilities that needed to stay open, we bought and distributed to our employees all the personal protective equipment (PPE) we could find. We installed hand-washing stations at entrances and at workplaces. We separated workers as much as we could via dividers and staggered shifts. We mandated regular coronavirus tests for everyone and asked any employee who exhibited any hint of coronavirus symptoms to go on leave.

As much as we treated the coronavirus pandemic as a health crisis, we did not recognise it as a supply chain crisis.

Supply chains from their sources to their end-users employ millions of people around the world. Yet, they remain an untapped potential for enterprise growth and competitive advantage. More so for nations and countries seeking continuous revenues from global trade. There are lots at stake and much to reap from supply chains.

We, however, are hardly moving to improve supply chains. We failed to respond to the disruptions of the pandemic. We never had really put that much effort into improving our supply chains, before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and after the pandemic.

One reason for this is we simply didn’t treat supply chain problems with much urgency and importance.

Many corporations don’t have chief supply chain officers (CSCO’s). Many don’t even have supply chain managers in their organisations. Some enterprises, especially large multi-national corporations, separate their purchasing, manufacturing, & logistics departments in which each end up with conflicting priorities. And many executives push down many supply chain concerns to middle level managers, who end up doing more day-to-day troubleshooting than improving.

Supply chains became a hot-button issue during the pandemic. Media coverage had put supply chains on the limelight thanks to global shortages and runaway prices of products. We as enterprise executives promised better results. Resilience became the most popular supply chain buzzword.

Many of us who are supply chain managers are nothing more than daily fire-fighters. We sometimes have no time to think supply chain problems through when we face them. We fight them like fires, fighting to mitigate them before they become bigger problems.

Real fire-fighters work just as hard preventing fires & minimising risks as much as they work hard in putting them out and rescuing people. Fire-fighters audit & inspect facilities, train fire brigades, hold seminars, and conduct drills.

Fire-fighters, however, can do only so much. They communicate that the best way to avoid problems is for enterprise stakeholders to take the lead in making their enterprises’ systems & structures more risk-free.

The same goes for us as supply chain managers. We try to solve problems before they become fires (i.e., burning platforms). We formulate strategies & roadmaps. We hire & assign talented people to handle key operations. We bolster our resources, build inventories, and add capacities.

Sometimes, these measures work. But problems and their disruptions still inevitably pop up and we’d find ourselves once again fighting fires.

We often make the same promise at the aftermath of a supply chain crisis: it won’t happen again. But we don’t say how we’ll make sure it does not happen again.

We don’t say how we’ll make sure we won’t have future ‘fires’ because often, we don’t really know what the problems were and how important & urgent they were.

We will always encounter supply chain problems. They are inevitable. They may not be identical to past problems (hence, we are somewhat right they don’t happen again) but they’ll come sooner or later, whether we anticipate them or not.

Fire-fighters don’t solve problems. They fight them, mitigate them, and help us prevent them.

Likewise, we as supply chain managers don’t solve problems. As much as we may want to and spend much time trying to, we really do more fighting “fires,” mitigating them, and preparing for the next one.

Solving supply chain problems is the job of supply chain engineers. As supply chain managers work to fix problems to mitigate their adverse effects, supply chain engineers identify, define, and solve the problems.

Supply chain problems will always be there and won’t stop coming. We as supply chain managers don’t solve supply chain problems. We do quick fixes, stop them from getting worse, and try as much as possible to minimise the risks of disruptions.

Supply chain engineers solve supply chain problems. And the first step to solve supply chain problems is to recognise we need an engineer to do it, not a manager.

About Ellery’s Essays

Value Chains, Supply Chains, & Our Wrong Mindsets

Michael Porter introduced the Value Chain model in his seminal book, Competitive Advantage,¹ in 1985. The value chain broke down activities of the firm (the enterprise) and how they collectively contribute to the value of products & services.

How well activities perform and interrelate would manifest in the margins, which are the difference between value (what customers are willing to pay) and the cost to create that value.

The key words are ‘perform’ and ‘interrelate.’ How functions or departments perform and work together determine the value of the enterprise’s products & services.

It isn’t something new. Porter devised the value chain model in the 1980s and we have learned and improvised from the model since. The value chain brought to light the importance of our individual roles & responsibilities to the enterprise. At the same time, it emphasised interdependency in the organisation and between organisations.

Michael Porter, however, also brought to our attention to the value system. He shared that value chains of enterprises are linked. We connect, for example, with the value chains of our vendors, our customers, our channels (e.g. distributors, dealers) and 3^rd party service providers. We also interact with the value chains of our enterprise’s business units, such as with the other product lines of our business.

We are interdependent not only via the functions & departments within our enterprise but also with the enterprises we buy from, deliver to, engage for services, and share time, talent, & resources.

The value chains collectively put together as the value system influenced the margins of each chain’s products & services. Vendors and service providers impacted our enterprise’s margins as much as we impacted our customers.’ At the same time, our interactions with other business units also influenced their margins.

Michael Porter’s value chain and value system reinforced the supply chain model which we have come to espouse. Although value chains are broader in coverage and stress maximising margins via competitive strategy, both value chain & supply chain emphasise the importance of performance & relationships within and between enterprises.

Thanks to the value chain and supply chain, we have managed to develop & implement strategies that have brought our enterprises to new heights. Our businesses have grown in leaps and bounds as we have been able to competitively deliver our products & services to markets around the world. Via cutting edge innovative technologies and via aggressive organisational development & teambuilding, we have integrated our operations into networks of interdependent activities with the common goal of making available merchandise at the lowest cost and best service. As a result, many of our enterprises have accumulated greater wealth, gained better than expected competitive advantage, become better corporate citizens, and seen our businesses prosper beyond our wildest dreams.

The value chain and the supply chain are models that have revolutionised the way we manage our business operations.

Why, then, however, are we complaining about supply chains? Why are we pinpointing them as causes of chronic disruptions to our overall strategies? And why are we often saying there’s a supply chain crisis? What are we missing?

We can speculate that over the more than 40 years since the supply chain was introduced, we have run into the following wrong mindsets :

Wrong Mindset #1: We didn’t accept supply chains in the executive suite

The value chain is a model to illustrate how we can better manage our enterprises to gain competitive advantage via increased margins in our products & services. We have used it to persuade our people to perform and interact together towards an aligned strategy.

The supply chain is a model for operations management in which we integrate the activities underlying the flow of merchandise & services toward higher productivity and added value for our customers.

Many of us, however, don’t see supply chain management as a top-level responsibility. We didn’t see the validity of integrating key operations under one leader. Whereas we’d have maybe executive positions for manufacturing, quality, or purchasing, we hesitated or avoided granting one that would cover all the operations that were essential to the flow of products & services.

And for some of us who did establish supply chain management positions, we limited their scopes. We would give supply chain managers authority over some functions like procurement, planning, and logistics but would not give them any power over purchasing and manufacturing. We rationalised that supply chain management positions would cover too much ground or would be too powerful to tame.

We, instead, relegated supply chain management to the middle of management hierarchies. Middle-level managers mostly, and frequently informally, ended up handling the issues that arose in supply chains. Logistics supervisors constantly followed up manufacturing for finished products so that pending orders would be served, production managers sought raw & packing materials from the inbound materials department, and the inbound logistics people would fight with quality assurance inspectors to release just delivered but badly needed materials.

As more and more supply chains became global in scope, disruptions intensified to the point of alarming executives. New enterprise upstarts, fickle international trade laws, a worldwide pandemic, military conflicts, and politically based economic sanctions became too much for middle management to handle. We eventually embraced supply chain management into our enterprises’ board rooms and executive suites.

Wrong Mindset #2: We treated supply chains as a given, not something we can change

We supply chain managers finally got our seats on the executive and board room tables, but many of us still had preconceived notions of what supply chains are and how they are to be managed.

One common preconceived notion is that supply chains are a given. We work with what systems & structures are available and we don’t think of changing them. The existing production lines, the warehouses, the systems our people use, the transportation modes, the shipping ports, the vendors, and the 3^rd party service providers are rigid. We don’t try to, or even think, of changing them for whatever illogical reasons, the number one of which is fear. We’re afraid we won’t find alternatives to what are already existing (e.g. international transport routes), we fear we’d be uprooting from locations (e.g. moving factories from places they’ve been for many years), or we just don’t want to face the resistance (e.g. labour unions refusing to consider automation).

The good news is that we can change supply chains. But it’s not only fear we’d have to overcome. We’d have to change another mindset in doing so.

Wrong Mindset #3: We believe we can improve supply chains by managing them.

We have employed supply chain management talent in the hopes that the new hires would effect significant changes that would mitigate risks and head off disruptions.

That’s not going to happen. Because supply chain managers work with what they have and don’t have the full-fledged expertise to change systems & structures.

An analogy is city traffic. In Manila, Philippines, where I live & work, traffic is a daily problem, if not crisis. City politicians and their police departments manage their respective traffic snarls by assigning enforcers at intersections, enacting ordinances (e.g. prohibiting cars on weekdays via their license plate numbers), revising road flow (e.g. making streets one-way instead of two-way), installing more traffic lights, and painting lines & putting up signs. In short, they manage traffic within existing the infrastructure of roads, traffic enforcement, public transport, & local politics.

Traffic management can do only so much, however. If the systems & structures remains the same, the traffic mess will continue. And in Manila, despite all the efforts of past decades, it has.

What’s needed to improve traffic in cities like Manila is not management but engineering. Managers manage what’s in the infrastructure; engineers change them. Engineers offer the problem-solving game-changing expertise that lead to new & better systems & structures. Manila’s traffic mess can only change when we design & build new road networks, reset & introduce new public transport systems, and overhaul & replace the governing hierarchy.

We can’t manage our problems towards solutions. But we can engineer solutions to our problems.

Michael Porter introduced the value chain in 1985 and it has helped to highlight the importance of supply chains in operations management. We have adopted both value chains and supply chains into our strategic portfolios, but we need to overcome wrong mindsets if we are to progress. These include the following fixes:

Accepting supply chain management as an equal in the high-executive echelons of our organisations;
Not treating supply chains as a given, but as an avenue for change;
Engineering, not management, will bring that change.

In effect, for supply chain management to work, we’d need to bring in the engineering talent to solve our problems and head off future crises.

The sooner we accept that engineering can be a partner for management in solving our supply chain crises, the earlier we can get things done.

About Ellery’s Essays

¹Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage (New York, New York: The Free Press, 1985) pp. 33-61

²Ibid. Figure 2-2, p. 37 (arrows provided by writer of this essay)

³Ibid. Figure 2-1., p. 35

Negotiations Won’t Solve Our Supply Chain Crisis

During a Philippine Senate hearing conducted on June 21, 2023, the chief commercial officer of Cebu Pacific Airlines apologised for recent passenger service disruptions in which he added:

“We recognize that global supply chain issues are further worsening the situation and causing additional delays in aircraft deliveries. As a result, we have experienced delays ranging from anywhere 2 to 5 months for our scheduled deliveries in 2023,”

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1791237/cebu-pacific-sorry-for-disruptions-vows-to-resolve-challenges

Philippine Airlines likewise issued a statement:

“We sincerely apologize to our passengers affected by several flight cancellations that we experienced this week. Several aircraft had to undergo maintenance due to ongoing supply chain delays and unexpected technical issues that developed.”

https://www.rappler.com/business/airlines-say-spare-parts-shortage-maintenance-problems-cause-canceled-flights/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20sincerely%20apologize,issues%20that%20developed.%E2%80%9D

It’s not just airlines that are blaming supply chains for their woes.

Many enterprises in most industries such as online sellers, supermarkets, automotive dealers, hospitals, and construction hardware retailers are blaming supply chains for any shortage or failure of service.

We have managed supply chains since the term was first coined in the 1970’s. Supply chains have become the model for how merchandise and services flow from their sources (e.g. raw materials) through our enterprises and finally to end-users.

We as managers or executives have always had our work cut out for us in managing supply chains. We managed inventories, planned production, negotiated contracts with vendors, optimised transportation, and set up systems to serve orders.

We always had challenges to deal with such as undelivered pending orders, customer complaints about product quality, lack of transport vehicles, factory shutdowns, surges in demand, pilferages, and scrapping obsolete items.

But we never encountered what we experienced in March 2020 when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the coronavirus pandemic. Almost overnight, nations closed their borders, offices & facilities shut down, and transportation slowed, if not stopped. Shortages occurred and basic items like toilet paper & soap were rationed. We shifted to online selling & buying to survive and get the things we needed. It was a traumatic event that caught us and our supply chains off-guard.

Ever though pandemic fears faded three (3) years later, we have elevated supply chain problems to that of crises. We have not shaken off our bad experiences of product shortages and service disruptions stemming from the pandemic. And as economies picked up, we have come to demand better from supply chains to the point that managing them has become our number one priority in business.

Supply chains exist because of the relationships we have not only between the varying functions within our enterprises but also between the vendors, customers, & 3^rd party providers we engage with. Our relationships supposedly have one (1) common purpose: to move & deliver merchandise & services productively from their sources to their users.

But because we are individuals with differing views and visions, we don’t entirely share the same interpretation towards that one common purpose. We have our own interests and priorities in how we manage our supply chains. Hence, much of our work in supply chains involve much negotiation amid conflict and dispute. We jostle to justify and convince others to see things our way as much as they try to make us see theirs.

And that’s what we mostly have been doing with supply chains long before and through the pandemic. We’ve been predominantly negotiating our way out of supply chain problems.

We outsourced operations from the 1990’s to the early turn of the 21^st century. We set up information networks to communicate better and faster with vendors & customers. We engaged 3^rd party providers to handle our storage & transportation logistics. As our businesses have become complex and global, we honed our negotiation prowess as we worked with more people within and outside our enterprises and established contracts with 3^rd parties from various countries.

We have invested a lot in information technology (IT) hardware & software to not only integrate the flow of data within our enterprises but also to better communicate, negotiate, and execute deals we make with our vendors, customers, and 3^rd party providers. We continue to spend money to support development of automated & artificially intelligent systems so that we can work faster with the people we relate with and optimise our engagements with them (aside from reducing redundancy in head counts as well as shrinking the number of 3^rd party service contracts).

Being better negotiators and having more sophisticated IT tools to do it, however, had apparently not been enough to stem the stigma that supply chains are in crises. The shortages still occur, the service disruptions still happen, and the customers are complaining ever so louder to the extent they have garnered the attention of not only business chiefs but also political leaders & media outlets.

Negotiation is not enough to solve today’s supply chain crises.

What’s needed is a problem-solving approach and subsequent changes in systems & structures.

In other words: engineering.

Cebu Pacific and Philippine Airlines were trying to negotiate their way out of the crisis they were in with their customers, suppliers, government, & the public. Both airlines insisted their issues are caused by shortages of spare parts and maintenance services. They implied their vendors & service providers are the problem and not them. As if the crisis they’re in would be fixed by finger-pointing and apologies (other than by giving out travel vouchers & discounts).

It’s obvious that both airlines simply had not come up with better systems & structures to improve the productivity of their operations. And because they are in a quandary, their problems had become a raging crisis, a burning platform which are costing them not only loss of income but also goodwill from their passengers.

And this same reasoning applies to the firms and industries who continue to try to negotiate their way out of whatever supply chain crisis they’re in. We as stakeholders or customers pay the price when enterprise managers don’t have a clue to fixing their supply chain crisis other than via negotiations, if not laying blame on others.

We solve a crisis by first assessing and understanding it. We gather data. We analyse. We lay out our criteria and brainstorm our options. We select an option and formulate a solution. This is the gist of problem-solving, the basics of engineering. We need not be intimidated by the myth that engineering is only for rocket scientists or the highly technical.

It is from what we present as solutions that we partner with negotiation to push what we believe would be the best means to address any crisis. Negotiation gets better with credible and logical information.

Supply chains do tend to mend themselves. They bounce back often without our intervention. As pandemic limits lifted in 2022, transportation normalised and merchandise flowed close to volumes before the virus sowed fear around the world.

We had seen our businesses revive but we learned that supply chains are vital to our success, if not survival. Hence, we see problems with our supply chains as crises deserving top-management priority rather than as challenges relegated to middle management.

But we cannot work with the same methodologies and approaches we did pre-pandemic. We cannot negotiate or manage our way out of future supply chain crises. If we are to progress, if we are to become more productive, we need to apply engineering expertise to our supply chains.

Supply chain management offers no quick-fix silver bullets to supply chain crises. The solutions lie in the problem-solving approach exercised via the engineering field.

About Ellery’s Essays

Challenges & Crises: The Two Types of Problems We Tackle in Business

We encounter all kinds of problems every day. And they go by different names, such as:

Dilemmas
Situations
Emergencies
Obstacles
Opportunities
Illnesses
Chaos
Curiosities
Puzzles
Conflicts
Projects
Competitions
Controversies
Complaints
Burning Platforms

These problems, especially while managing our enterprises, end up as either of two types:

Challenges
Crises

We categorise the issues clamouring for our attention as crises or challenges depending on how urgent and important either one is.

A crisis demands our immediate attention and response. If we don’t address a crisis, serious adversities would result. Running low on cash to pay bills, for example, is a crisis that can (and will) lead to the shutting down of the business.

A challenge is a problem which we resolve to make progress towards our goals. Challenges emerge whenever we plan strategies and set targets. We need to overcome challenges to get whatever we want and reach wherever we want to go. How to price products competitively, for instance, is a challenge as the enterprise has profit goals to attain.

A crisis can be a looming threat or the aftermath of a catastrophe. It can be a risk that manifested itself or a probable danger in the very near future. Whenever we face a crisis, we put priority to alleviate or mitigate it. We don’t stop until we at least have tamped down the effects of the crisis. A fire in the building is a crisis and even if we put it out, we’d have to deal with the impact of the damage afterward. A crisis is not over until we are back on our feet.

A challenge can either be a roadblock, or simply a requirement. Challenges are either foreseeable or unanticipated but when we tackle them, we work to get around them or beat them. We don’t grow or meet our goals unless we hurdle challenges. We, therefore, take challenges seriously as we work to accomplish our objectives. We, for instance, plan the employment of skilled people needed for our businesses and we lay out a strategy to offer & negotiate attractive compensation packages to hire & retain the best employees we can find.

In crises, we go into survival or defensive mode. We confront a crisis now otherwise we will suffer potentially irreversible damage or significant setbacks to our business. We don’t review roadmaps or long-term visions because in a crisis, we are under threat or busy doing damage control. In a crisis, our immediate task is to end it before it ends us. If we’re on a boat and we see a storm coming, for example, we batten down the hatches. We don’t dilly-dally otherwise our boat sinks.

With challenges, we review our present states versus our future states. We assess a challenge’s impact to our roadmaps and timelines, and we plan how to hurdle them. When we buy a house, for instance, we foresee how we’ll be living in it in the next twenty (20) years versus today. Do we allow for future expansion or do we plan to move out when our children grow up? How much would it cost to live in the house over time?

Crises demand our urgent attention.

Challenges demand planning based on what are important for us.

The problems we face as professionals stem from crises and challenges. How well we solve our problems starts with determining whether one is a crisis or a challenge. Sometimes (if not most of the time), however, we make the mistake of mixing up one with the other.

And making that mistake can be dangerous.

The treasurer of a commercial building association noticed from the property’s annual financial statements that there was a cash-flow discrepancy of PhP 6 million ($USD 107,000). The treasurer could not trace where the cash went and requested the building’s property management to immediately find the money. The property management contractor, however, took more than a year to make a report, despite continued urgent follow-ups and complaints from the treasurer. Exasperated, the treasurer asked an external auditor to take over the investigation. The external auditor, however, also took so long to report, which left the treasurer very frustrated.

The missing cash caused delays in investments in building improvements. An elevator broke down and was not fixed. The building’s fire protection system had sprinklers that did not work. Worse, as time passed, it got harder to trace where the missing cash went.

The missing cash was a crisis but, unfortunately, was treated more as a challenge. The result was the likelihood that the building wouldn’t recover the money and services for the owners & occupants would not be up to par.

In another example, a large manufacturing corporation had a warehouse full of slow- to non-moving inventories of materials and products. The chief executive officer (CEO) assigned the problem to task force to handle what to do with the non-moving inventories. The task force, after several months of study, recommended that the corporation invest in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software system to streamline its inventory management system. After many weeks of planning and implementation, however, the ERP system failed to reduce the non-moving inventories.

The corporation’s chief finance officer sounded the alarm that the non-moving inventories were dragging down the company’s cash flow. But the CEO didn’t think it was a crisis and he delegated the problem back to the task force for further study.

The CEO saw the non-moving inventories as a challenge as the non-moving inventories didn’t pose an immediate threat to the corporation’s business. But because he didn’t put much importance to it, the corporation didn’t grow as much as it could have because of the inventories’ drag on the company’s finances.

What we see as challenges can really be crises. And what we see as crises can just be challenges. But challenges can evolve into crisis if we don’t address their importance and crises can downgrade into challenges when we respond to them and mitigate their immediate threats.

We deal with all sorts of problems every day. In the course of doing our jobs, we categorise problems as either a crisis or a challenge, depending on their urgency and importance.

We must be careful, however, to know the difference between crises and challenges. In the end, it depends on how much we value our enterprises that would determine how we distinguish between the two.

About Ellery’s Essays

Comparing Supply Chain Management versus Supply Chain Engineering

What’s the difference between supply chain management (SCM) and supply chain engineering (SCE)?

Supply chain management is the management of people, structures, & systems that underlie the relationships of functions which enable the flow of merchandise & services from their sources to their destinations and users.

SCMs work with existing systems & structures as they harness resources, negotiate with vendors & 3^rd parties, and manage their teams to transform materials to products and serve their enterprises’ customers.

Supply chain engineering involves the building of those systems & structures SCMs manage. SCE’s tasks include setting up logistics networks, developing procurement & production systems, proposing & implementing additional capacity projects, erect new facilities, customising demand & inventory management systems, writing up methods & procedures, and improving the environments & conditions of workplaces.

SCMs plan, organise, direct and control existing systems, structures, & facilities.

SCE’s study, design, and construct new systems, structures, and facilities.

Both SCMs and SCEs overlap in that both manage the resources and people assigned to them. But each has its own exclusive aims.

Both SCMs and SCEs have huge scopes. Supply chains encompass activities from the acquisition of merchandise, the transformation of materials to finished products, the storage & handling of inventories, the dispatch & transportation of items, to finally the delivery of items & post-sales services. Supply chains extend beyond the borders of enterprises and thus require negotiation & collaboration with vendors and 3^rd party service providers. It can be overwhelming for both SCMs & SCEs.

Supply chain management is related to operations management, a subject that falls under the business administration degrees in many colleges. It has become a visible and high-profile field brought on by the need to be perfect & productive in the competitive business world of the 21^st century.

SCMs have merited a place in the upper echelons of organisations, in which more and more enterprises have welcomed chief supply chain officers as valuable members of the executive suite.

SCE, meanwhile, is a spin-off from Industrial Engineering (IE), which is concerned with the boosting of productivity via improvement of systems, methods, and the workplace. Industrial Engineering, however, is a not well-defined field and remains one where many do not see it as deserving as equal to other engineering disciplines.

It doesn’t help that IEs are constantly re-defining what Industrial Engineering is and thus, have not gained much recognition because they have not resolved their identities universally among enterprises and industries.

And since IEs are constantly trying to convince people who they are, even as they themselves try to figure it out, SCEs naturally would not have much of a starting chance for recognition themselves. Supply chain engineering is invisible, misunderstood, and unappreciated, and will remain so for some time.

Which is too bad.

Supply chain management has become a high-profile job. We have come to rely on supply chain managers to seek solutions to the causes of disruptions in the flows of our merchandise. We have elevated SCMs to critical roles to attaining the productivity we want in our operations. We see supply chain management as a hopeful avenue to enterprise success.

Well and fine for SCMs but unfortunately, SCMs are only as good given what they have.

Being managers, SCMs do a lot of work via their relationships with the people that report to them (e.g. procurement, logistics, planning, manufacturing), their peers in other departments (e.g. sales, R&D, finance, marketing, legal, personnel), their superiors (e.g. CEO, COO), and with customers, vendors & 3^rd party service providers. It is through these relationships that SCMs get things done.

Managing relationships, however, has its limits. In relationships we work with what we have. We work within systems & structures. We make do with whatever resources we have available. Owners may give us budgets to augment our resources but SCMs usually just add to whatever they have, instead of changing how things are done.

For example, because of looming risks in sourcing via international trade, SCMs would seek vendors closer to their operations. They would opt to source from multiple vendors, rather than to just one or two. They add to their alternatives but don’t really change the system of procurement.

SCMs do get things done, however. SCMs succeed in serving the demands of customers and they make great strides in continuously improving the productivity of their operations.

But only to a certain extent.

When it comes to changing how things are done, supply chain managers aren’t the best fits. That job best goes to supply chain engineers.

Whereas SCMs work with what they have and who they relate with, SCEs change the structures & systems that underlie supply chain operations. SCEs change how things are done and the very platforms where they are done.

Going back to the example above about sourcing from vendors, whereas SCMs may source from multiple vendors closer to home, SCEs would study & develop changes to the procurement process altogether. SCEs would examine the system of sourcing and how the enterprise buys the merchandise it needs. They would look at better ways to improve the system; they would look for that one best way of procurement.

SCMs manage with what they have on hand to realise results. SCEs change systems & structures so that SCMs shall realise results further from what existing systems were capable of.

We see supply chain management becoming a highly recognised high-profile profession that has earned a key role in achieving enterprises’ strategic priorities.

It, however, can only do so much with existing systems & structures.

Supply chain engineering gives us the potential to change our supply chains to make them more capable and productive. SCE, however, is not a well-known field and lacks recognition in most, if not all, industries.

There are a lot of issues and challenges facing enterprises in their supply chains. We could use all the help we can get not only from supply chain managers but also from supply chain engineers as well.

If we are to tap our supply chains, we should not only manage them well, we should also change them. We would need to recognise the potentials of the supply chain engineer.

About Ellery’s Essays

Freedom Comes via Control & Influence

Gurus and so-called motivational experts teach that we are free to decide our future, to do whatever we want, to believe whatever we wish. We can be whatever we want to be. We can pursue personal goals and choose our path to happiness.

Viktor Frankl experienced life in several Nazi concentration camps through World War 2. He lost several members of his family, including his wife. He was deprived of liberty.

Viktor Frankl said we determine our happiness (meaning of life) via our freedom of will. We are free to think what we want, to feel what we believe.

Liberty is a condition or right to engage in actions as allowed or limited by the laws of wherever we happen to be. It is freedom limited by other people, that is, societies, governments, enterprises, private associations, etc. We can do only what the laws allow.

Freedom in the context of free will and what gurus & motivational experts talk about is about the unlimited space we have to decide our fates, to choose what we like, and to go to wherever we want to be.

What the gurus & motivational experts don’t say, however, is that freedom comes with a price.

Boundaries of countries, regulations, economics, culture, peer pressure, and our social & family ties attempt to corral that unlimited space. Some of these boundaries are real, some are all in our minds. But they’re there and we pay a price whenever we challenge them for the freedom we want. What we have within these boundaries are liberties, not freedom.

Freedom is not free. The more we want it, the more we’d have to pay for it, to work for it, to fight for it.

Sometimes it’s not just a good idea to fight for that freedom of unlimited space.

I’ve seen young families opt for the good life of travel and neglect their families. They cry at the funerals of their passed away relatives as they regret not being there when they were needed. Afterwards, they travel again and in their later years, they regret not saving enough time for retirement. Their children, meanwhile, follow the same footsteps of enjoying the good life and neglect their families.

As much as we are tempted to negatively judge people for choosing paths that seem wrong, we are in no position to do so. The people were and are free to decide what they wanted and they paid the price for it.

Freedom isn’t about enjoying unlimited space but is about gaining more control and influence.

Control depends on our values & principles. We steer our lives based on what we believe are important to us. And we put our efforts and resources to controlling our actions towards those values & principles.

The beauty of our values & principles is we can change them as we learn and experience. And in effect, we can change what we control.

Our degree of control depends on what we can influence. We should strive to be more influential to gain greater control. Influence is not power; it’s the ability to bring others to share your values & principles, and to lead yourself & others to common goals.

Influence is a paradox in that in order for us to sway others to our side, we need to listen and consider the opinions of those others. To sway, we should allow other people to sway us. Influence is a two-way street; we influence as we also are influenced.

Freedom is that unlimited space we wish to enjoy. Liberty, on the other hand, corrals us to a limited domain depending on where we are. We strive to gain and experience more of that unlimited space that lies beyond liberty. We pay a price for it when we do.

Our freedom, however, grows via how much we control and influence. Control is about maintaining our path towards our goals. Influence is about getting more control over those things that limit our freedom. We gain influence not by asserting our beliefs but by considering other people’s points of views and sharing ours.

[The Philippines celebrated its 125^th Independence Day on June 12^th, 2023].

About Ellery’s Essays