We all know Murphy’s law: What can go wrong, will go wrong. Having run a company in the Philippines for over 15 years I can attest… Murphy was a Filipino. We had just about every catastrophe imaginable:
- Typhoons
- Droughts
- Petulance (even the dreaded cadang cadang)
- Revolution
- Communist Attacks
- Worker strike
- Export Taxes
I could go on and on. The one offset to all these issues was the amazing capabilities and hard work put forward by the people of our Philippine company. Having done business around the world, I will take our Philippine management over all of them. I will never forget the call when our logistics manager told me he had to reroute trucks taking containers of product to the port around a military standoff between factions of the Philippine army during the overthrow of the Marcos regime. Business isn’t usually life or death, but then it was. General Foods/Kraft had been doing business in the Philippines since 1928 and the only time supply got disrupted was during WWII. The Philippines has had problems, but filipino people found ways to get the job done.
What is the super club message from this story?… prepare for things going wrong, have a back-up plan, so when things go wrong, you have the means to work around them. Chances are, if you have done the preparation, your guests will never even know you had a problem.
The Philippines also has some amazing culinary offerings. The fresh seafood is fantastic. We had a plant on the southern island of Mindanao near the city of Davao. The hotel we stayed at was right on the bay and they had a nightly seafood barbecue. The prawns were huge. A predecessor of mine once said: “Seeing the size of the prawns in Davao, I now know why the rest of the world calls them shrimp”. The chef would grill them and serve them with garlic butter.
Another seafood specialty was a sea bass called “Lapu-lapu”. You have to love a fish that is named after the native chief that murdered Magellan. Yup, Magellan the first man to circumnavigate the globe was killed by a Filipino. The world lost a great explorer, but the chieftain got a very tasty fish named after him.
There are lots of things about Philippine cuisine that you might want to take a pass on. Ask a Filipino what they miss about the food of their youth and it is amazing how many will say balut. Balut is a developing bird embryo. You know, an egg with a little texture. Another of my least favorites, is durian fruit. This is a tropical fruit that is described as: “Taste like heaven, smells like hell”. I have been on a plane where passengers brought durian aboard as a carryon. Before you know it, the whole cabin smells like soiled baby diapers. One of my rules of international cuisine is: Be extra careful if someone tells you something is a local delicacy. I grew up eating lobster in New York and have heard people call the green guck in lobster a delicacy. Yuck!
A Philippine delicacy – balut.
(Durian Fruit)
(Lanzones)
(The best mango in the world)
The good news is that the Philippines has the most amazing tropical fruit imaginable. The mango and pineapple taste different, and is better, than anywhere in the world. The papaya and melons are fantastic. The Lanzones fruit was a rare treat. That’s the good news. The bad news was that when the Lanzones came into season, a large number of our plant workers wouldn’t show up because they could make more money picking Lanzones… What can go wrong will go wrong.
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