Why Are Filipinos Not Entrepreneurial?

Latest Philippines Outsourcing News
5/5/2005

Why Are Filipinos Not Entrepreneurial?

I don’t like to play favorites, but from time to time I think Michael Tan is my favorite Inquirer columnist. His Pinoy Kasi articles are insightful and amusing, and really a pleasant break when you’re tired of hearing about politics.

Sometimes Mr. Tan writes about Filipino professional life. And one time, he made a reference to one of my posts in Offshoring Digest. I still have a bone to pick with Mr. Tan over something in that two-part article, but that might be something for another post.

Anyway Mr. Tan once talked about the Filipino tendency to mismanage budget, to blow our earnings in non-essential items. This trend is especially apparent among young BPO professionals, or our modern-day “yuppies.” Off the top of my head, I don’t think Starbucks ever enjoyed such a growth in loyal patronage before the call center boom.

A taxi driver recently shared a gripe with me over the lifestyle led by a lot of young BPO workers. He’d been in Makati for two years, and he’d had his share of passengers from BPOs, mainly call centers. “You know these kids with their English and their fine office clothes… you think they’re rich? Every time they get their salary, where do they go? To bars and fancy restaurants, spending every last centavo. And they always take a taxi going to and from places! So pretty soon, they have nothing. No savings, no spending money. They just sit around waiting for the next payday.”

What he said made me think of how so many young Filipino professionals take the high salary range offered by BPOs for granted, living like this sunshine industry will last forever. Much as I’d like to believe this really isn’t the case, since I know quite a few young people who help their families out by alloting part of their salaries to household expenses, I’ve also witnessed young people working in BPOs complaining about being penniless, so far off from the next payday.

Where does this spending attitude come from? Mr. Tan says it’s the cultural need to spend in order to build alliances, and to prove yourself the “big man.” But in the case of our BPO workers, I suspect there’s an additional factor. It’s the compulsion to strive for a quality life, the lure of a consumerist lifestyle. In school, the prevalent mindset is that if one wants to be able to buy expensive things (and one should want to buy expensive things, if only for the sake of tasting/experiencing them), one must strive to be a good worker: “When I have a job, I’ll work hard so I can buy what I want.” The end goal of working, then, is to be able to afford more non-essential things.

Saving to invest – or, even saving for the sake of saving – takes a backseat to saving for the sake of a short-term gratification. Putting up one’s own business is hardly a life goal; ask young BPO workers what they’d like to do later in life, and they might say they want to travel to a distant place, or they want to gain enough expertise to be able to work and reside in a developed nation.

First, I think we have to focus on creating a “culture of savings,” as Mr. Tan has said. Then, we can think about creating an entrepreneurial culture.

http://kalakalan.info/index.php?p=4