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Striking it Rich — a Curse

What if all of a sudden Jamaica were to strike it rich, like we discovered a source oil, natural gas, gold or diamonds?

Evidence suggests that that could be one of the worse things we could wish upon ourselves.

Trinidad is currently undergoing an oil and natural gas boom that is fast becoming a source of concern to some of its citizens.

Why so?

Recent past history tells us that developing countries that “discover” a single source of a new mineral commodity end up wrecking their economies. Oil and natural gas are the most recent instigators, but gold, diamonds and other precious ores have also played their part.

How does this happen?

Well, believe it or not, it could be compared to hitting the lottery, which often involves

  • changing locks, phone numbers, addresses, names, etc. to gain some relief from the public
  • being informed of “new” cousins that claim kinship, and a cut of the winnings
  • family members and friends who refuse to talk to you after you refuse them their “share”
  • complicated new choices on taxes and investments
  • hiring a lawyer and accountant (at least)
  • new “friendships” based on what you have, rather than who you are
  • saying “No way” more often than “Yes” to worthy causes and needy people
  • being included by thieves and other dirty, rotten scoundrels in their short to medium term career planning

I have never won anything in my life, but I once met someone whose lottery-winning uncle refused to fund her continuing education once she decided to switch from Pre-Med… causing her to drop out in mid-semester.

The problem with a windfall is that it distorts things. Undeserved and unearned resources are placed in our hands. We have an instant material power that is unmatched with equal wisdom. Our capacity to live life productively remains unchanged, but Lady Luck has granted us the fruits of a windfall and fate demands that we deal with them nonetheless.

The new NBC series “Windfall” offers an interesting and dramatic account of one group of lottery winners.

Trinidad’s current windfall is actually its second, and the last one was bad enough and recent enough to have those with long memories nervous. Some of the effects of $75+ per barrel oil are already plain to see.

  • Rising GDP and government revenue have served to stimulate an appetite for instant wealth, leading to a startling increase in kidnappings. The disparity in income between the lucky and the unlucky expands dramatically and quickly.
  • Government’s desire to increase employment led to the creation of artificial employment in the form of the CEPEP program and others. In short, they provide a decent wage for a disproportionate (in other words, small) amount of value. The end result is an indecent one, however – first wage inflation, and now a labour shortage.
  • Increasing traffic, but few new roads being built. Several spots have become nightmares, such as the roads into Maraval and Diego Martin.
  • Port of Spain’s real estate prices have risen dramatically fuelled by the demand by expats related to the oil industry
  • While the oil and natural gas sectors are booming, the non-oil related economy is stagnant. In short this means that the only thing separating Trinidad from other developing countries is the price of oil on the world market – a commodity price over which the country has no influence

Could we expect the same things in Jamaica if we were to make the same kind of discovery?

  • Would our crime increase in the same way, as people’s expectations collectively rise more quickly than incomes?
  • Would our real estate prices also explode?
  • Would government policies also encourage under-employment, and a labour shortage?
  • Would the economy come to rely on unsustainable factors such as the price of oil on the world market?

Countries such as Nigeria and Venezuela have clearly suffered historically from their windfalls, leading some to say that the discovery of oil is the worst blessing that a country could pray for.

The remedy seems to lie in a commitment by government to the long term development of its people, increasing education and its sister, productive capacity, faster than expectations of instant wealth.

Would our politicians resist the temptation to forego easy spending to gain votes? Finance Minister’s Omar Davis’ recent admission that he authorized election spending to gain votes legitimized common, if unspoken knowledge. His words gave us no confidence that he and others would act any differently.

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The Launch of a New ezine

Finally, after what feels like months of research, I am ready to launch my new eZine, entitled FirstCuts.

It is intended to be a provocative source of ideas and new thinking for Caribbean companies, based on work and research of Framework associates. You can use the link at the end of the page to sign up, or just send an email to FirstCuts@aweber.com from the email address that you wish to add to the list of recipients.

If plain text is not to your liking, you can always access the html version of the newsletter at the following link: http://tinyurl.com/pw7fa

At some point I may also post a copy of the newsletter here at the site, but there appear tto be some IE to Firefox kinks to work out, and as a Firefox user I do not want to look at a garbled version of my own newsletter!

Enter the form below to subscribe to the eZine.








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CaribHRNews; The Source for Caribbean HR News

Framework Consulting is pleased to announce the launch of CaribHRNews, a Squidoo-hosted aggregator of the most recent internet-based news related to the Human Resources profession.

On the company website, the page may be accessed from the link on each page titled CaribHRForum.

President Francis Wade noted “We wanted a single place to find all the information related to the Human Resource industry and after months of searching for viable solution we found one that would not require intensive manual effort.”

The price to use the service is free to professionals, and the cost of its maintenance is being underwritten by Framework Consulting.

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Shortage of Labour

The Trinidad Guardian is reporting a phenomena that I mentioned earlier this year that to us here in Jamaica is astounding: Trinidad is nearing full employment.

The evidence being presented is that outlets like KFC are having a hard time finding sufficient labour to staff their restaurants, and at least one owner of another fast-food outlet echoed the same sentiment to me recently.

This will be a real test for CSME, which is specifically intended to correct imbalances like these.

Guyana and Jamaica have tremendous unemployment problems, yet Trinidad only competing with Barbados in the minds of people across the region, for the title of the most difficult place to which one can legally migrate. Just the other day, an acquaintance of mine had to return to Jamaica after encountering work permit difficulties after several months of living in Trinidad.

Unfortunately, the CSME legislation was only very recently expanded to include nurses and teachers. It looks like it will be some time before casual workers are included, if ever. So fast-food outlets in Trinidad will continue to have the problems they are having, and it is likely to only get much worse before it gets any better.

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Weinberg on Writing

Several years ago, I picked up my first Gerald Weinberg book — The Secrets of Consulting.

He is a computer programmer who, in that book, stunned me with the unique insights he had about the consulting profession. It was one of the seminal consulting books I read at the time when I was learning that there was more to the craft than just knowing a bunch of good stuff and being really smart.

When I read that he had a new book called Weinberg on Writing, I jumped at the chance to read the book, thinking that it would once again marry some lines of thinking that normally do not go together.

I was right on this one. His book is like nothing I have ever read, and now that I am thinking of myself as a writer (of more than lots of emails) his advice on how to organize ideas and writing energy explained a lot to me about my own writing behaviour, why I like to blog and how to organize ideas by following ones own level of inner energy.

The Fieldstone Method is one that he has invented and named. It has to do with gathering ideas and points of inspiration for writing, in the same way that someone who builds fences from stones found in a field (i.e. fieldstones) must find just the right stones to build the structures they want. Here in Jamaica, we have them all over the country, and we like to build retaining walls and gully walls from football size limestones (and the aid of a lot of cement.)

The book, which is all about building bits and pieces of ideas into a coherent whole gives me some comfort. Even though I am not using Mrs. Richardson’s format from my days at St. Andrew Prep School, I have still been following a relatively coherent method that I am going to improve and enhance using the ideas from this book.

In short — I recommend it!

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Trinis in Jamaica

My colleagues and I are engaged in a very interesting project: what is the Trinidadian manager’s experience in Jamaica?

We are also on the lookout for some help.

Recently, we completed the first report from the Caribbean Acquisition Project. We decided to do a follow-up study, interviewing Trinidadian executives on a few dimensions of their relationship with Jamaican workers who, from all accounts and my own experience, differ significant from the workers they deal with at home in Trinidad.

This difference is one that they are not prepared to deal with, unless they have spent significant time working in Jamaica.

Without going into too many details about what we are finding, suffice it so say that some of the results are surprising yet, thankfully, not impossible to deal with effectively. The problem is that currently exists no resource to deal with the gap that Trinis face when coming to manage Jamaicans (or Barbadians, or Guyanese, or anyone else for that matter.)

The odds, however, of a Trinidadian executive being sent to run a company in Jamaica are greater than any other combination of 2 nationalities, due to Trinidad’s economic strength, Jamaicans’ willingness to emigrate and the poor historic performance of Jamaican managers. This makes for a sizeable population of Trinidadian expat managers in Jamaica, many of whom are willing to be interviewed!

And this is where we could use the help — to identify Trini executives working in Jamaica, or who worked in Jamaica for at least six months.

Email me directly with any one you might know who qualifies.

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Digicel vs. TSTT

In an earlier post, I described how Digicel was culturally missing the boat in Trinidad and Tobago.

In the excellent online magazine — Caribbean360.com — Ian Alleyne gives some interesting insights into what has transpired over the last year or so, giving the impression that Digicel has blown the opportunity to capitalize on the deep resentment Trinis have had with TSTT, which I consider to be even worse than C&W ever was here in Jamaica.

Click here to go to the full story

Incidentally, I spent 112 minutes on hold calling C&W yesterday’s billing toll-free line, before giving up…

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The Power of Writing

Since I started blogging last year the number of words that I have written for public consumption has gone up dramatically. It has really been an amazing outlet for me, and an avenue for ideas and self-expression that has been fun and mind-opening at the same time.

Only now can I imagine writing a full fledged book — how many blog entries would it take to write a book after all?

However, I have not been as successful in convincing other consultants that they also must write.

I read the following article from Robert Middleton today, sent to my inbox as an ezine. I decided to share a link, but I cannot find a link so here is the email I received in total:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi Francis,

As you go through the InfoGuru Manual you might have noticed that I talk about writing quite a bit. In fact almost every chapter has something about writing – writing your marketing materials and web site copy, writing articles and talks, writing eZine copy and writing motivational copy.

In my opinion, writing is THE KEY to marketing professional services. There’s no way to really get around it. Someone once said that writing was simply ‘salesmanship in print.’

Sure, you can network and meet a lot of people, but by committing information about your services to writing you can ‘meet’ hundreds, if not thousands of people and tell them all exactly the same message about your services.

I was once struck by the power of writing when I was leading a business support group many years ago. I was demonstrating the power of ad copy and showed them a little ad in a local directory of services. This ad was about massage therapy. The headline, the copy the appeal were so interesting and attractive that one of the participants wrote down the telephone number to call the advertiser.

The interesting thing is that we had a massage therapist in our group who offered substantially the same services and had been sharing what she did with the group for several weeks. But the power of that little ad had more impact on our participant than meeting and talking with a massage therapist on a regular basis!

The Core of InfoGuru Marketing is sharing what you know and leveraging that knowledge to attract all the clients you can handle. This isn’t just an empty marketing phrase. It really works. And it starts with writing.

If you’ve gotten a few chapters into the manual and you haven’t written anything yet, it’s time to start. It might be your Executive Summary that gives an overview of your services or a short article or an outline for a talk. It doesn’t matter. Start somewhere.

One of my mentors, Alan Weiss, the author of Million Dollar Consulting, writes every morning. I actually suggest you do the same. Take the time to write something that will forward your business. With this writing you’ll have the ammunition to start promoting your business with real impact.

And, of course, there’s a lot of information in the manual itself on how to write more effectively. don’t just skim over these sections. Take the time to do the exercises and build some momentum in communicating the value of what you do.

All the best,

Robert Middleton

Action Plan Marketing
210 Riverside Drive
Boulder Creek, CA 95006

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“By Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Please visit Robert’s web site at http://www.actionplan.com for additional marketing articles and resources on marketing for professional service businesses.”