adm MBA 4 3

  Continue to

Speech of MBA Alumni at introduction of MBA IV candidates

Members of the head table: highly respected Ms. Alida Pengel, Mr. Hans Lim A Po and Mrs. Olly Chin A Sen, MBA candidates and old friends good evening.

Could there be something going on at FHR?

To my regret I will not be able to tell you that you have started a stroll through the park. To put this in further perspective I will use Paul Meyers’, a well-known writer on leadership, definition of a total person. That is a person that has a balance in the following six areas of life: Financial and Career; Family and Home; Physical and Health; Mental and Educational; Spiritual and Ethical and Social and Cultural. As can be guessed mental and educational will definitely thrive during this Program and there will be some imbalance in and between the other areas. Be prepared for that and correct the balance after this study, although easier said than done. Let me tell you a little story about this imbalance. When the MBA intake 1 was in the middle of the Program we were challenged by the MBA intake 2 to a football match (I am avoiding the word soccer here). They were just starting the program. They beat us bad and in fact we taught they were just better than us. But when we played them again a year later when we had completed the program and they were in the middle of it, we realized that there was something more to this. These fast guys from the first match, surely they looked smarter, but they were a lot slower and we had a chance to redeem ourselves. This is just to make the point on the balance disturbance.
This not an easy assignment you will have to work hard, but it can be very enjoyable and as you are all parts of this group it is up to you to create that enjoyable environment.
Besides all this hard work, this program will yield you some other important responsibilities and benefits. Lets take a look at them.
Importance for Suriname
Here I am going to focus on Knowledge Management, which is important for your company, but increasingly so for our country.
Business is about outsmarting/out thinking the competition. Come up with a faster process, a better product, faster deliveries to be short with innovations. I have used the word outsmarting, which means by using our brains. Now lets park this for a moment and look at what is happening in our country.
Some years ago Suriname was ranked as the 17th richest country in the world. During my MBA study I desperately tried to find that report but nobody I asked knew the exact title and author, that’s is not to say that it has not existed.
A large part of the materialization of this wealth will be through the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources. Now non-renewable resources have their advantages, but also some major possible setbacks, lets look at them:
(and this will surprise you to hear it from somebody who comes from the oil industry)
• A boom in mineral exploitation can create a false hope of welfare, encouraging a laid-back mentality. And now we all know what happened after the seventies when the Dutch development aid stopped and we woke-up to the reality that we don’t earn enough and later to find out that among others Trinidad & Tobago had taken a large lead regarding e.g. industrial development. Let us further explore this point with a close-by example, for this we will make a little trip to Venezuela in 1970’s. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, Venezuelan Oil Minister and OPEC Co-founder in the early 1970's said, "oil will bring us ruin". He called Petroleum "Devils Excrement". His statements were strange at that time, as the Venezuelan Government revenues were higher than all the previous years combined since the country was formed. It seems history has proven him a gloomy prophet. Thirty plus years later, because of the same Petroleum, per capita income in Venezuela is lower than its 1960 level. A large part of the 26 million inhabitants still live in poverty.
• Second problem is these minerals are non-renewable, meaning if depleted it is over. And you will be surprised how fast this can happen. In oil an oil-reserve is depleted in 20 years, in gold in 10 years. You can only continue if you find new reserves and off-course you will not find them forever.
• Finally, it must be established that our way of basic mineral exploitation is not exactly a source for creative knowledge development.
Compare this to what’s been said about using our brain; we might be left without our non-renewable resources and -due the lack of an infertile environment- a poorly developed knowledge management system. The latter is essential for long-term survival. If cheap labor is not cheap anymore and mineral resources are depleted the competitive advantage of any country will be based on knowledge application.
This is not a doom scenario, but it could happen and with your level of education and experience I see a pivotal role for you in good guidance of this process. I encouraged you to play a role in this area and to address this issue during your Program as elements are included.
Importance for your company of the Management & Accounting program
That good management is important is very clear, so lets focus on accounting.
I have worked for quite some years in the Accounting and Management information section of Staatsolie, and I can tell you there are still opportunities for a lot of improvement. You only have to look at the timeliness of reporting, and I can’t mention any names, but there are some large companies that have not yet finalized their 2005 annual report.
To give you some further perspective from the company I work for. This is a technically dominated company, but increasingly colleagues realize that they need good accounting information. This includes: cost per item produced for the determination of sales prices; make our buy decisions; cost reduction information; liquidity planning information and preventing of accounting scandals. If these areas are not addressed properly there are two results possible bankruptcy or subsidy.
A colleague of mine teasingly used to tell, hmmm bookkeeping is putting it on the left and not forgetting to also put it on the right ain’t it, that shouldn’t be that difficult, hey you can’t complain about your job. Luckily we joint the MBA intake 1 together. After the lectures from the Financial Accounting course he came up to me and said ‘boy accounting is a lot harder then I taught’. And just a tip, if they still think the movie is only about them, send them to a Financials course for non-financial employees. Management information is important it will also be your role to let your colleges realize it, the future of your company depends on it.
Importance for you as a person
It is already a privilege to contribute to your country and company as explained in the previous part, but still there is more on a personal level.
What you will get in this Program is up to date mind triggering developments in the respective areas of the Program. In a two weeks course you will be up to date with modern day thinking, methods, etc. on the respective issue. In many cases this is the latest knowledge available on the issue. Your own drive and intelligence to translate this to the Suriname circumstances and build upon this could give you and your company an unprecedented competitive edge. This is an amazing feeling. Try to recognize it and work on it.
To conclude
I know that calculations were/are made at FHR to determine how many MBA, MPA are needed to have a certain effect on the development of this country. After you have succeeded this will bring the total of the masters’ series to 187.
Just see yourself a drop of water falling on the clean surface of a lake and the ripples spreading out. The ripples represent your influence and the lake Suriname. With 187 persons we could cover quite some surface. Make the drops as large as possible. So to come back to the title ‘Could there be something going on at FHR?’
I am sure there is as I was when I experienced the quality of this education and I now experience the benefits of it in my day-to day work.
Work hard, don’t go for mediocrity go for good results the future of this country can be altered by us.
And if you feel down occasionally during the Program think of the words of Albert Einstein. You may question the first part, but there is so much truth in the second part. He said:
It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-Swiss-U.S. scientist.

MBA intake 1 graduate:
Annand K. Jagesar
Flora, March 30, 2007