My second tour of duty in Brunei ended on a Friday, an ominous day of 13 June 1997. Like a soldier returning home, I must move on and stay in the country to recirculate, be with my kids and create an enterprise.

Business 101 in Brunei providing ground zero experience in marketing, selling and basic finance were good enough to start camping out and plan to execute a business.

Planning was easy. More coffee even make it easier. Hmm, how to execute was the huge wall to tear down to get the business going.

One of sisters, Joy was doing her MBA at Ateneo and reading a lot of books and case materials to prepare for her thesis. And I got hold of her book on strategic management. For the next six months, I was reading the book and helped Joy write her thesis. The thesis should have been titled "Constructing the Launch Pad of GSI".

The strategic mindset is key to starting up an enterprise. It separates boys from men and determines the winners of daily skirmishes in corporate battlefield. Strategic management maintains the entrepreneur's "eyes" focused on a wide angle view of the enterprise to telephoto view of specific components of the business.

But that's my own internalization of the strategic management. What I learned from SBEP at UAP is best described in Wikipedia :

Strategic management is the process of specifying an organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources to implement the policies and plans to achieve the organization's objectives.

It is the highest level of managerial activity, usually formulated and by the Board of Directors and performed by an organization's Chief Executive Office (CEO) and executive team. Strategic management provides overall direction to the enterprise.

“Strategic management is an ongoing process that assesses the business and the industries in which the company is involved; assesses its competitors and sets goals and strategies to meet all existing and potential competitors; and then reassesses each strategy annually or quarterly [i.e. regularly] to determine how it has been implemented and whether it has succeeded or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology, new competitors, a new economic environment., or a new social, financial, or political environment.” (Lamb, 1984:ix)^[1]

Strategies after strategies, charts to many more charts - GSI slowly emerged from several McDonald's, Jollibee and UP campus meetings in January 1998. Its first name was a mouthful - Geomatics and Environmental Management Consulting (GEMC). Several of my classmates and graduate students of MS Remote Sensing of the UP College of Engineering participated. One of those who attended the initial brainstorming meetings was Abigail Ramos now with WWF.

Making GSI's strategic framework rock solid for my colleaguesto execute, there could be a third tour of duty in Brunei - being a diplomat.

Another dream to dream about.

Labels: Abigail Ramos, MS Remote Sensing, SBEP, strategic mindset, UAP, UP campus

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