SEEDS Succession Program
By philobean | July 13, 2009
Objective: To establish a succession program for the SEEDS Student Publication of SHS-J.
Why is it important? We cannot achieve our long-term vision of turning SEEDS into a feeder publication for journalism talent in the top universities in the
How would you describe the current system? The faculty adviser of SEEDS is highly involved in the publication process. You could say she acts as the de facto editor-in-chief, playing a major role in both managing the production and editorial processes of the publication. This is because student editors-in-chief have an average of only 1 year of previous experience in journalism either as a SEEDS reporter or editor before taking the EIC position. Section editors, on the other hand, usually have no previous journalism experience and are recruited based on interest rather than skill. This has resulted in (a) a sick-cycle of ever increasing dependence upon the faculty adviser, (b) high incidence of “reinventing the wheel†within the organization as learning is not passed on from one generation of editors to another, and (c) inconsistent publication productivity and quality across school years.
How will a succession program help? By developing a succession program, we enable peer-to-peer mentorship across generations of editors; thus, fostering organizational learning. Would-be section editors will start as section writers (e.g. news reporter or feature writer) and section editors will vie for the position of EIC. On average, EICs will have between 2-3 years of previous experience in SEEDS while section editors will have 1-2 years of experience. The overlap allows SEEDS editors and writers to not only share what they’ve learned (i.e. soft skills) but also institutional assets, such as logos, typefaces, layouts, etc.
Two Key Interventions:
In order to establish a self-reinforcing succession program, the following interventions are recommended:
1.      Editorial Buddy System – Currently, the faculty adviser bears the brunt of the mentorship work of SEEDS editors and staff. This is overwhelming. The editorial buddy system will assign a ‘buddy’ from a pool of alumni mentors who are active writers in college papers (college writers) or in industry (freelance or full time journalists) to each SEEDS editor. These alumni-mentors will help their mentees improve both their writing and their publication management skills.
2.      Recruitment Program – It will be impossible to have a succession program if there are not enough members in an organization, especially if most (if not all) members are from the graduating batch. It becomes important, therefore, to actively recruit ‘young blood’ from among the first and second year students. This gives the editors, alumni-mentors and the faculty adviser enough time to groom these young recruits to become well equipped section editors and editors-in-chief in their third and fourth years. This also enables these would-be editors to pass on their honed skills to new recruits as they approach graduation. A good place to start recruitment is among avid book readers as they already have an appreciation for the written word.
Key Metrics to Measure Success:
|
 |
Current Situation |
Bridge |
Succession Program |
|
Faculty dependency |
High |
Editorial Buddy System |
Medium to Low |
|
Peer-to-peer mentorship |
Low |
High |
|
|
Institutional assets |
Low |
High |
|
|
Member Recruitment |
Low |
Recruitment Program |
Medium to High |
|
Membership Turnover |
High |
Low |
Topics: Personal | No Comments »
Freakonomics: Fruits, Vegetables are Cheaper the further away?
By philobean | September 28, 2007
I spent the first 21 years of my life with little fruits and vegetables in my diet. (And I grew up in the Philippines.) Like many other developing countries, the Philippines is often perceived (not quite accurately) to be an agricultural economy. Assuming this as true (after all, we do grow *some* export quality fruits), one would think fruits would come cheaper closer to home. To my shock (and perhaps to the shock of many other OFWs who’ve come before me), this is far from the case!
Lets take the case of bananas. I bought a *six-pack (of bananas)* just last weekend at the Cold Storage supermarket across Somerset MRT Station. The six-pack was stickered doubly with the labels: ‘Dole’ and ‘From the Philippines’. How much? A few cents (50 if my memory does not defraud me). 50 Singaporean cents: 14-15 pesos.
Months back. I purchased 18 pieces of that (*super-sweet*) midgets of bananas for 30 pesos, give or take, from a twentysomething man in tattered clothes manning a fruit-laden wooden pushcart along Vito Cruz (now Pablo Ocampo) street. The made-in-the-Philippines bananas I purchased from a supermarket at the heart of Singapore’s shopping district cost almost the same (on a gram-for-gram basis). Yet, quality-wise, the 50 cent six-pack trumps (by far) the 30-peso bunch of eighteen.
Fruits and vegetables are a simple matter really. You don’t really have to do a lot to sell them. (They *are* a commodity after all.) Why would we go through the trouble of exporting *top brass* produce when, I’m sure, a local market exists for the products without substantial marginal losses to the topline?
Topics: A little political, Business | No Comments »
Ubelievable: Finding Some in the Hospitality Industry Quite Inhospitable
By philobean | September 16, 2007
Were they being bigots, racists, or plain-old inhospitable buggers?
A friend of mine (a masters degree holder with honors) called up a number of hotels here in Singapore. His only sin: he wasn’t calling to book a room but to see if there were any openings. Well, some hotel HR managers (like an HR officer at Swissotel the Stamford) were polite: they responded by simply hanging up mid-sentence. Oh well, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were busy with more important things? Like afternoon coffee, for example?
Others, however, weren’t as patient.
Let’s take one such case: Seconds into a phone call with a Hilton Hotel HR officer, she interrupted my pal, not even trying to mask the irritation in her voice, and saying “No, no, no! We do not accept Filipinos!” Being the gentleman that he is (half wondering how the woman on the other end of the line found out he was a Filipino by the mere sound of his voice), my friend pretended not to have heard. But, then, realizing her mistake, the HR officer took a turn to courtesy. She hung up. <Better that than more racist insults, nay?>
When this story was first told to me, I couldn’t believe it. Singapore just celebrated its National Day about a month back. The theme: “Celebrate Singapore: City of Possibilities”. The prime minister even highlighted Singapore’s multi-racial stature as a source of great strength for the city-state. Talk about hypocrisy albeit perhaps unwitting? Well, if racial integration and sensitivity were state policy, shouldn’t racists be punished for their bigotry? My experiences with the Singapore Government have been all but heavenly. I only hope that their graciousness will trickle down to those less inclined toward such innate fairness and receptivity.
Topics: A little political, Business, Personal | No Comments »
From Water Therapy to Water Torture
By philobean | September 1, 2007
Water — the most valuable resource on Earth, a.k.a. the Blue Planet. Some fast facts: the world is made primarily out of water. Land is the exception to what is mostly vast oceans and seas. Of the Earth’s water, 97% is salty. The remainder: fresh. Of fresh water, a huge proportion — something in the 90 or so percent, I believe — is frozen. Some 1% or less, therefore, remains fresh usable water for human consumption. Environmental engineers, economists and scientists agree that this faction of a point percentage is more than enough to serve all human water needs for a long time. Key question arises, however. Does this calculation consider the quickly evolving uses and abuses of this one key resource?
 On the side: water therapy and water torture? The difference: state of mind. After all, both practices involve the systematic use of water and gravity to effect some form of internal emotional reaction from the person subjected to the *treatment*. Funny, isn’t it? How what may be torture for one person held in an undeclared prison camp in Africa may be a highly sought after and well paid for service in another city halfway across the globe?
Topics: Environment, Personal | No Comments »
Yahoo! Mail Beta: Better (surely) but Good Enough?
By philobean | August 28, 2007
First week of Yahoo! Mail Beta’s release months (or had it been years?) ago, from the old look and feel, I switched to it immediately. Just as quick as I did, I switched back.
Yahoo! Mail Beta was a pain to use, especially if you weren’t on (non-encumbered) broadband. Being a Filipino college student back then, Internet cafes, University hubs, and dial-ups were my primary web access points. Turns out, Yahoo! Mail Beta’s too good for so cheap a system. Who cares? My minute-long glimpse of the new Yahoo! GUI didn’t impress anyway: it looked cluttered, blindingly (and boringly) white, and took ages to load my 3,000++ e-mail inbox.
To date, there hasn’t been much progress on improving GUI on Yahoo!’s side but there have been some initiatives to improve content. For one, they integrated an instant messaging feature (Yahoo! Messenger) and an SMS feature into the system. They threw in Yahoo! Calendar and a FeedReader too. While its true that besides not making any progress on *face value*, Yahoo!’s also copied most of these add-ons from Google (Gmail’s Google Talk and Google FeedReader), putting these all together in this way is definitely a step in the right direction. Yahoo! fell back a few, behind Google, in the free webmail battlefield, but with further improvements on the product (plus, Yahoo!’s longer history in the business and its now limitless storage facility), we may soon see the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet giant make a quick catch up in the months to come.
Topics: Technology, Personal | No Comments »
Things in the Strangest Places
Sub: Remnants from Home
By philobean | August 25, 2007
Walking along the second floor “bridge way” between the old Novena Square Mall (right above Novena MRT) and the new Novena Velocity, I *came across* something quite unexpected–fibrous, bright brown poop. Of who or what left it there I have no clue. What’s clear, however, is how of all the places in the world I would have least expected to have my brand new Rusty Lopez’s (which I got for only 300 pesos at the Rusty Lopez factory outlet at the Cubao-Expo by the way!) violated at a spanking-clean mall at the heart of Singapore. If it had happened back home in the Philippines (and it has numerous times earlier in my life), I wouldn’t have stopped to question. But here?
Life’s full of surprises. A cliche, obviously. But the thing with cliches is that, for the most part at least, they’re true. Watch out then! Who knows what’s headed your way.
Topics: Personal | 1 Comment »
Finding Truth in *Odd* Claims
By philobean | August 22, 2007
Walking along the brick path along the foot of Rasa Sentosa Resort’s main building, find your way toward the wall climbing area and you’d eventually come across a star-like marker on the ground. The marker will read something to the effect of “this is the southern most point of Southeast Asia”. That startles me a bit. Isn’t the southern most point in Southeast Asia somewhere in Indonesia?
Benefit of the doubt, maybe they know something I don’t. Fine. So, I continue on my tour of Singapore’s Sentosa Island. Not long thereafter, I find another marker (no where near Rasa Sentosa but also on Sentosa Island) claiming the path of land on which it stands to be the “southern most point of continental Asia”. Okay, admittedly that may be true. (After all, the southern most point of continental Asia is definitely in Singapore. That it’s this point or somewhere close by isn’t of much significance.) But consider this: assuming that the southern most points of Southeast Asia and continental Asia are in Singapore, won’t these points be necessarily one and the same? Can one path of land (herein known as Singapore) have more than one “southern most point”?
Claims, claims, claims: even in Singapore (where reliability is taken seriously), claims still can’t be trusted without a second thought. I wonder who the marker-makers thought they’d fool by that stunt? What a myopic move indeed.
Topics: Personal | 1 Comment »
Books at a Bargain Price of 50 Pesos @ Bridges (formerly, Goodwill) Bookstores
By philobean | August 12, 2007
Notice how the once three- (or was it four-) storey Goodwill Bookstore at Glorietta 1 closed to become a one-storey bookstore that looks almost exactly like the old Goodwill’s ground floor? The new bookstore’s named Bridges. Nothing really great about Bridges (as it is, in essence, nothing but a reduced version of the old Goodwill).
Well, that may be true…but ever wondered where all those other books (once displayed across three-/four-storeys’ full of shelves) have gone? A small (but not quite insignificant) portion of that bulk’s gone on sale (for as low as twenty pesos per copy!) And this is happening across a good number (I’d say all but I really haven’t been to them all yet) of Goodwill Bookstores across the Metro.
A week back I picked up copies of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Future Shock and War and Anti-War, both at 50 a piece. Today, I picked up four business books (two on business process reengineering, one Harvard Business School Press publication and one on Asia Megatrends) all at 50 a piece. Not exactly pristiene condition but its really not bad (no where near Book Sale book quality, that is).
While most of these books are (well) out-dated (circa 1995), its better to have read an old book then to have read none at all, especially when it requires an investment of only 50 pesos plus some spare time! Besides, some (not all) of these books are timeless!
Topics: Personal | No Comments »
Help Save Energy with Google’s Blackle.com
By philobean | August 10, 2007
“If Google had a black screen, taking in[to] account the huge number of page views [the site generates], according to calculations, 750 megawatts per hour per year will be saved.”
Google, in a display of environmental awareness and social responsibility, launched <www.Blackle.com>, an exact replica of <www.Google.com> with a black (instead of white) backdrop. Spread the word! Though the text’ll be a tad bit harder to read, this much savings in energy will be worth the incremental effort.
Plus, it looks cool (at the very least, the goths will surely like it). Set it as your home page now (most especially if you’re an Internet Cafe). No better way to promote it within your household and your community than that (with the exceptions of spamming and blogging, of course).
Topics: Environment, Technology, Business | 4 Comments »
Money Matters: Does Money Matter?
By philobean | August 9, 2007
Money can’t buy happiness–at least, so the saying goes. Well, I’m inclined to agree. After all, I’ve never seen an ad post for happiness. I’ve never seen happiness sold at the stores (no matter how big or small, modern or prehistoric). This proves a point, surely. But does it prove that money can’t buy happiness? Or does it simply prove happiness isn’t being sold (or can’t be)?
If happiness can’t be sold, then we can’t buy it (tautological definitely). Thus, we can safely conclude we can’t buy happiness directly. That’s settled.
Moving forward, however; can we buy things that can buy us happiness? Stated otherwise: can we indirectly buy happiness? Well, this is a little more tricky as you can very well see. Herein listed are some of the more commonly attributed sources of happiness: wisdom, intelligence (or knowledge), power or influence, social capital (i.e. simply, people find you endearing), accomplishment and honor; and so on.
So, can money buy all these things? Yes and no (it depends). No, it can’t buy these things directly (as it can’t buy happiness directly) but it can buy them indirectly.
Note the following:
(1) Wisdom cannot be pursued on an empty stomach. Thus, money is necessary for philosophical inquiry. If you’re too busy looking for your next meal (or savoring the current one), you’ll likely not be all that wise. [Note how philosophical inquiry began as soon as accumulation of wealth became a possibility.]
(2) Moving on to knowledge. The most popular sources of knowledge: education (preferably higher education at some prestigious institution), books (they cost some too), more recently the Internet (well, its not free either!), your parents (if they know stuff, someone probably paid for it), and so on. Knowledge isn’t free. That’s why its so coveted (more now than ever before, in fact).
(3) Social capital. Doing good things will cost you. It won’t always cost you money but someday its bound to. Ever gave a Christmas gift that didn’t cost a centavo? (If you said yes, I’m inclined to think you’re lying. There’s got to be at least some indirect costs somewhere in the procurement process).
(4) Accomplishment and honor: Think the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or, closer to home, the Ayala Foundation, and so on. The world’s biggest philanthropists are also the world’s richest persons. No doubt why. (And, no, no, no. You can’t win the Nobel Prize without at least a centavo. You think research is cheap? Think again!)
Alas. We need money to be happy. Oh, wait, wait. I can almost hear the pedants screaming ‘injustice’ as I type up these words. Yes, money is a necessary condition for happiness but, yes, I have not proven that money is a sufficient condition for it. (Which basically means that, while I need money to be happy, having money won’t give me happiness.)
Agreeing then that the objection is valid, we conclude that, in most cases, money can’t buy happiness. However, money can buy happiness sometimes…
When? When used wisely. Our new motto: “Happiness is naught but money spent wisely”.
Topics: A little political, Personal | No Comments »