Last year, Amici Sportsfest 2009 was abruptly postponed due to the Ondoy flooding. While there were plans for chess, badminton, bowling, basketball, and mayhaps table tennis, we only managed to play Bowling. (Ironically, the winner then was the Laguna team, which has since been dissolved and reorganized due to strategic reasons.) Among many of us however are sports lovers who can't let the big let down hold us back forever. And so, we're back to our 2nd set of games, basketball.
We had our first round of basketball last Friday. Game 1 was Thermovar vs Amici Sales, while Game 2 was Service vs Admin. I arrived late for the event while playing chauffeur for my sister because our regular driver was on time for basketball and missing from overtime work. Luckily, I just got there in time for the 2nd game with the Admin team.
There aren't a lot of guys in our Admin department, so the basketball tournament organizer, our service head manager, managed to stack our deck a little. Service managers belong to the Admin group. It's arguably fair, what with the Service team packed with big guys and a big bench. The Sales team, however, have it against them, because a number of their players are really first time players.
I didn't play a lot of minutes -- I managed to get 2 fouls, 1 assist, 0 out of 1 field goal attempts, and perhaps a rebound or two. There wasn't much seesaw in the scores. It was an exciting game nonetheless. For the first quarter, Service team was mostly leading by five points or so. From the 2nd quarter onwards, our Admin team was leading. Admin's lead had ballooned to almost 10 during the 3rd quarter. But late during the 4th quarter, Service has managed to trim their deficit to two points. The last minute was tense, but a turnover by the Service team that time sealed the win for us.
Tomorrow marks the 2nd round of basketball. Game 1 will be Admin versus Thermovar, and game 2 will be between Service and Sales. Stay tuned for more sports update.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Worldbex, Then and Now
Last Thursday, I took the rare opportunity to go out of the office to take a peek at Worldbex. Worldbex is one of the major construction exhibit in the Philippines. We have been showcasing our products in these exhibits for a number of years already. This year's was very different from the previous years...
The first exhibit Amici has joined that I can remember was Philconstruct 2002. I was then working in Canon Information Technologies as a software engineer, and I remember having to leave work at 4pm to get home on the way to the World Trade Center in Buendia. (No, I didn't do under time. I was usually at Jollibee Plaza in Ortigas by 7am then, so I could leave work when the clock strikes 4pm.) It was my first time to commute to WTC. Luckily, it was just a jeepney ride away from Dapitan St., using the Mabini-Buendia route. I got down Buendia, and it was just a nice short walk to the exhibit.
Our booth was part of the USA pavilion, showcasing our A.O. Smith Water Heaters. Laptops, LCD TVs, projectors were not popular then. Instead, we had a small TV with a built in VHS player showing to visitors factory production of A.O. Smith water heaters, including the application of glass lining to heater tanks. I cannot recall if we even had heaters on display. But storage heaters being storage heaters, they are notably unremarkable. Then, our booth was manned by my dad, my uncle, my cousin, and me. The exhibit organizers were generously offering red wine, in which I was exquisitely interested, but when offered I refused, as shy people are wont to do.
That was back in 2002. Our exhibit was more a haphazard experiment in marketing. It's unexplored territory. We didn't have any good way of measuring the impact of the exhibit. And for the next three years, we did not join any more exhibits. A competitor supposedly remarked in 2005 that we were just a small "store" selling water heaters. Three years before that, we probably didn't exist at all, for all that same competitor cared.
I think it was in 2006 when we started joining exhibits after that. It was also that year when we joined the most exhibits in a year -- Worldbex, Conex, Philbex in Cebu, and Philconstruct. We were once again aiming to leverage exhibits as a marketing channel, and we were game to try all of them.
For Conex, we invested on a rather expensive but reusable module, hoping to attract more people with a nicer booth. We have up to four sales personnel entertaining clients. And we have a nice display of storage heaters and pumps. The storage heaters are as unremarkable as before, except for the high efficiency Cyclone storage heater, which brought us some trouble transporting, but nonetheless brought a lot more attention to our company. On the night of the last day of the exhibit, we still had a project completion meeting (aka dinner at Napoli's at Tomas Morato) to reflect on the days' successes and challenges.
The same year, I had my first trip to Cebu for the Philbex exhibit. It was not normal that I was part of the Cebu delegation. But I had a foreign friend in Cebu then, for whom I took the opportunity to tag along. Our booth was simple. We again had a display of our wares, this time focused on instant heaters and swimming pool products. Instead of our expensive module (which early on showed its age due to wear and tear), we opted for the more portable posters and tarps. Philbex was the prelude to our company opening a new Amici Water Systems branch in Cebu.
The exhibits followed brought repeated performances. We started having a formula. We have the registration forms for interested clients. We have a fairly stable product make up. We have pictures and designs of our projects we can show off. We were also more conscious about our expenses. We cut down our exhibits to the essentials that prove effective. We were a bit stingy with our meal allowances. And we didn't have our project completion meetings any more.
Worldbex 2010 had just come to a close. I was only there last Thursday and again on the Saturday. In some ways, it reminded me of our first exhibit in 2002. It was again a small adventure, commuting to WTC and back, to see what's there and what we're cooking.
Gone were our rubber stamp booth of the last few years that looked like a market place with our water heaters, pumps, and other products. We didn't go with an expensive outsourced module, but we had a nice, creative booth thanks to our fantastic and versatile industrial designer. We had an interesting set of videos to show, no longer through a TV-VHS combo but now through an LCD TV and DVD player. We had an aquarium with a manually operated wave ball toy, to get the idea across. We're here again to exhibit, like our first venture, to introduce a product, this time quite different and innovative, this time from France (though we were not in a French pavilion) -- the Wave Ball wave generator.
It was a frontier once more, a revolution of sorts for our company, a reset of our exposition in water technology. We're here to make waves. It's a Wavolution.
The first exhibit Amici has joined that I can remember was Philconstruct 2002. I was then working in Canon Information Technologies as a software engineer, and I remember having to leave work at 4pm to get home on the way to the World Trade Center in Buendia. (No, I didn't do under time. I was usually at Jollibee Plaza in Ortigas by 7am then, so I could leave work when the clock strikes 4pm.) It was my first time to commute to WTC. Luckily, it was just a jeepney ride away from Dapitan St., using the Mabini-Buendia route. I got down Buendia, and it was just a nice short walk to the exhibit.
Our booth was part of the USA pavilion, showcasing our A.O. Smith Water Heaters. Laptops, LCD TVs, projectors were not popular then. Instead, we had a small TV with a built in VHS player showing to visitors factory production of A.O. Smith water heaters, including the application of glass lining to heater tanks. I cannot recall if we even had heaters on display. But storage heaters being storage heaters, they are notably unremarkable. Then, our booth was manned by my dad, my uncle, my cousin, and me. The exhibit organizers were generously offering red wine, in which I was exquisitely interested, but when offered I refused, as shy people are wont to do.
That was back in 2002. Our exhibit was more a haphazard experiment in marketing. It's unexplored territory. We didn't have any good way of measuring the impact of the exhibit. And for the next three years, we did not join any more exhibits. A competitor supposedly remarked in 2005 that we were just a small "store" selling water heaters. Three years before that, we probably didn't exist at all, for all that same competitor cared.
I think it was in 2006 when we started joining exhibits after that. It was also that year when we joined the most exhibits in a year -- Worldbex, Conex, Philbex in Cebu, and Philconstruct. We were once again aiming to leverage exhibits as a marketing channel, and we were game to try all of them.
For Conex, we invested on a rather expensive but reusable module, hoping to attract more people with a nicer booth. We have up to four sales personnel entertaining clients. And we have a nice display of storage heaters and pumps. The storage heaters are as unremarkable as before, except for the high efficiency Cyclone storage heater, which brought us some trouble transporting, but nonetheless brought a lot more attention to our company. On the night of the last day of the exhibit, we still had a project completion meeting (aka dinner at Napoli's at Tomas Morato) to reflect on the days' successes and challenges.
The same year, I had my first trip to Cebu for the Philbex exhibit. It was not normal that I was part of the Cebu delegation. But I had a foreign friend in Cebu then, for whom I took the opportunity to tag along. Our booth was simple. We again had a display of our wares, this time focused on instant heaters and swimming pool products. Instead of our expensive module (which early on showed its age due to wear and tear), we opted for the more portable posters and tarps. Philbex was the prelude to our company opening a new Amici Water Systems branch in Cebu.
The exhibits followed brought repeated performances. We started having a formula. We have the registration forms for interested clients. We have a fairly stable product make up. We have pictures and designs of our projects we can show off. We were also more conscious about our expenses. We cut down our exhibits to the essentials that prove effective. We were a bit stingy with our meal allowances. And we didn't have our project completion meetings any more.
Worldbex 2010 had just come to a close. I was only there last Thursday and again on the Saturday. In some ways, it reminded me of our first exhibit in 2002. It was again a small adventure, commuting to WTC and back, to see what's there and what we're cooking.
Gone were our rubber stamp booth of the last few years that looked like a market place with our water heaters, pumps, and other products. We didn't go with an expensive outsourced module, but we had a nice, creative booth thanks to our fantastic and versatile industrial designer. We had an interesting set of videos to show, no longer through a TV-VHS combo but now through an LCD TV and DVD player. We had an aquarium with a manually operated wave ball toy, to get the idea across. We're here again to exhibit, like our first venture, to introduce a product, this time quite different and innovative, this time from France (though we were not in a French pavilion) -- the Wave Ball wave generator.
It was a frontier once more, a revolution of sorts for our company, a reset of our exposition in water technology. We're here to make waves. It's a Wavolution.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Wave Generators
Last September, we posted in our website a rather vague product page on wave generators for swimming pools. The product here is the Wave Ball, an innovative wave generator in the form of a ball that works through the principle of resonance.
The wave ball is an energy saving alternative to traditional brute-force powerful wave generators. The wave ball is an engineering feat, devised through expert knowledge of wave behaviour, computer technology, and precise manufacturing. Its energy saving feature is due to "reuse" and adaptation of reflected waves within the swimming pool to create desired waves up to 1 meter high.
Yesterday, after nearly six months since initial posting and information gathering, we have formally introduced the Wave Ball to our sales force. Due to its rather expensive initial costs, it is a special niche product. However, we believe it has tremendous potential through huge operational savings.
The wave ball is an energy saving alternative to traditional brute-force powerful wave generators. The wave ball is an engineering feat, devised through expert knowledge of wave behaviour, computer technology, and precise manufacturing. Its energy saving feature is due to "reuse" and adaptation of reflected waves within the swimming pool to create desired waves up to 1 meter high.
Yesterday, after nearly six months since initial posting and information gathering, we have formally introduced the Wave Ball to our sales force. Due to its rather expensive initial costs, it is a special niche product. However, we believe it has tremendous potential through huge operational savings.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Service Desk Soft Start
A month ago, I talked about an information systems module for our service department. Since then, Amici's IT and Service department have held a few meetings on expectations and mock ups of the module, not surprisingly called Service Desk.
Service Desk was designed after our company's short-lived experiments with Request Tracker and OTRS, both open source web-based issue trackers. We did not push through with web-based issue trackers because we needed a customized system well integrated with our current stack. We were not looking for a help desk system, but instead a service and schedule management system. OTRS felt too IT-ish, which our company is not. Request Tracker lasted longer (two weeks) but lack of integration to our CRM proved cumbersome.
That was two years ago. Service Desk collected dust instead of improving our service because the process to interface with it, the overall structure of our Service Department was only to be stabilized two years after.
Last Saturday, we formally introduced Service Desk to our sales force. Rather than the original rudimentary table design that stressed outstanding service requests, it sported a new employee daily schedule interface that gives focus on scheduling constraints and resource management. The table design is still available as an alternative view, but for the main target users, our service managers and our sales team, the daily schedule view remains the obvious choice.
Sales brought up an obvious request. Should not Sales be allowed to create the service requests themselves? Then, our service managers need only to monitor outstanding requests so that they can schedule them appropriately.
This option is readily available, should service request processes be revised. In fact, this was the original design of the Service Desk. However, it remains to be seen whether the size of our company shall warrant the process change.
Right now, when Sales request services, they usually call any one of three service managers to relay details and wait for an SR number. Sometimes, it's easier to jot down details on a small sheet of paper and to hand that personally to our service managers. Unfortunately, in practice a lot of waiting may have to be done either way. Jotting down details on paper also duplicates encoding of the service request.
The proponents of the separation of duties for Service Requests and Job Orders espouses the advantages of the analogous Sale Order and Sale Invoice system.
The requestors will themselves encode their requests, reducing the encoding bottleneck by a factor up to 7 (20+ people to encode their own requests, rather than 3 to encode everyone's requests), and also reduce typical errors such as misspellings. A standard work flow for requesting service is simply clicking on a Service button from the related Sale Invoice to automatically fill up fields and link the sale to the service request. Service Managers can then focus on providing appropriate schedules for all outstanding requests.
The communication pattern between requestors and service managers will be different. Instead of the current poll-waiting method whereby Sales busily waits for an available Service Manager to communicate his requests, a message passing, event-driven methodology becomes natural. This is akin to email instead of the telephone.
Requestors will not have to wait for an SR number. The computer system automatically provides a request ID and even notifies requestors via email any updates on their requests. Service Managers will be notified of any pending requests and are free to schedule them. Scheduling those requests in turn automatically notifies requestors of the new schedules.
I believe the SR <> JO system is appropriate especially for big companies. The poll waiting communication pattern is obviously inefficient for large volume of issue/service tickets. For our company however, our lower volume might not give enough points to either methodologies.
Service Desk was designed after our company's short-lived experiments with Request Tracker and OTRS, both open source web-based issue trackers. We did not push through with web-based issue trackers because we needed a customized system well integrated with our current stack. We were not looking for a help desk system, but instead a service and schedule management system. OTRS felt too IT-ish, which our company is not. Request Tracker lasted longer (two weeks) but lack of integration to our CRM proved cumbersome.
That was two years ago. Service Desk collected dust instead of improving our service because the process to interface with it, the overall structure of our Service Department was only to be stabilized two years after.
Last Saturday, we formally introduced Service Desk to our sales force. Rather than the original rudimentary table design that stressed outstanding service requests, it sported a new employee daily schedule interface that gives focus on scheduling constraints and resource management. The table design is still available as an alternative view, but for the main target users, our service managers and our sales team, the daily schedule view remains the obvious choice.
Sales brought up an obvious request. Should not Sales be allowed to create the service requests themselves? Then, our service managers need only to monitor outstanding requests so that they can schedule them appropriately.
This option is readily available, should service request processes be revised. In fact, this was the original design of the Service Desk. However, it remains to be seen whether the size of our company shall warrant the process change.
Right now, when Sales request services, they usually call any one of three service managers to relay details and wait for an SR number. Sometimes, it's easier to jot down details on a small sheet of paper and to hand that personally to our service managers. Unfortunately, in practice a lot of waiting may have to be done either way. Jotting down details on paper also duplicates encoding of the service request.
The proponents of the separation of duties for Service Requests and Job Orders espouses the advantages of the analogous Sale Order and Sale Invoice system.
The requestors will themselves encode their requests, reducing the encoding bottleneck by a factor up to 7 (20+ people to encode their own requests, rather than 3 to encode everyone's requests), and also reduce typical errors such as misspellings. A standard work flow for requesting service is simply clicking on a Service button from the related Sale Invoice to automatically fill up fields and link the sale to the service request. Service Managers can then focus on providing appropriate schedules for all outstanding requests.
The communication pattern between requestors and service managers will be different. Instead of the current poll-waiting method whereby Sales busily waits for an available Service Manager to communicate his requests, a message passing, event-driven methodology becomes natural. This is akin to email instead of the telephone.
Requestors will not have to wait for an SR number. The computer system automatically provides a request ID and even notifies requestors via email any updates on their requests. Service Managers will be notified of any pending requests and are free to schedule them. Scheduling those requests in turn automatically notifies requestors of the new schedules.
I believe the SR <> JO system is appropriate especially for big companies. The poll waiting communication pattern is obviously inefficient for large volume of issue/service tickets. For our company however, our lower volume might not give enough points to either methodologies.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
IT and You
As a small company in growing pains, Amici has grown accustomed to incessant process changes in constant search for the best way of doing things. Some changes though not merely whims without reasons are due perhaps to hypotheses and not so scientific methods of experimentations. Most will have foundations in text book analyses and prescriptions of friends in or out of the industry. It should be good then that we are not so big as to be inflexible. We strive to be agile.
Information technology is one pillar our company leans on to improve itself. And as much as changes live and die and evolve through generations, information technology only outlives itself due to constant makeover. Processes such as counting inventory, tracking serial numbers, monitoring expenses, preparing our next orders, etc. find themselves renovated as ideas and plans come into fruition in every next iteration of our information system.
People, whether cooperative or antagonistic towards each and every change, play the bigger part in moulding our company evolution. IT changes that find huge backlashes are commonly flawed in design or expectations. People are the users who swear by the strengths of and curse the weaknesses of our system. They demand change more demandingly than mere routine pro-activeness.
There is however a natural wall between people and IT. On one side, a lot of people do not know what to seek from IT. They live with what's there, and dismiss inefficiencies as way of life. And then on the other side are people who see IT too magically, without practical consideration to time or budget. IT though materially inexpensive costs time and manpower.
Also, the software developer who receives requests from users is too often distanced to understand what users expect. Users themselves do not know too well their requirements, and the software developer challenged in communication is only happy to guess usage and expectations.
The solution of course is a comfortable entanglement between IT and users. But before that, Amici IT should seek organization and sustainability.
Information technology is one pillar our company leans on to improve itself. And as much as changes live and die and evolve through generations, information technology only outlives itself due to constant makeover. Processes such as counting inventory, tracking serial numbers, monitoring expenses, preparing our next orders, etc. find themselves renovated as ideas and plans come into fruition in every next iteration of our information system.
People, whether cooperative or antagonistic towards each and every change, play the bigger part in moulding our company evolution. IT changes that find huge backlashes are commonly flawed in design or expectations. People are the users who swear by the strengths of and curse the weaknesses of our system. They demand change more demandingly than mere routine pro-activeness.
There is however a natural wall between people and IT. On one side, a lot of people do not know what to seek from IT. They live with what's there, and dismiss inefficiencies as way of life. And then on the other side are people who see IT too magically, without practical consideration to time or budget. IT though materially inexpensive costs time and manpower.
Also, the software developer who receives requests from users is too often distanced to understand what users expect. Users themselves do not know too well their requirements, and the software developer challenged in communication is only happy to guess usage and expectations.
The solution of course is a comfortable entanglement between IT and users. But before that, Amici IT should seek organization and sustainability.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Number Business
Like any normal business, we work with numbers here in Amici Water Systems. Sales agents compute discounts and totals for each of their sales; the collector or cashier computes change for the customers; sales supervisors add up her group's sales for the quarter and their expenses; HR handles the intricate payroll in a very complicated spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org; marketing does forecasts for her latest marketing project; service and project managers work with limited sets of resources and time to prepare service estimates and project schedules; managers and accountants look at financial statements.
Unlike a lot of businesses however, our major products are heavily about numbers. When we size water heaters for your home, swimming pool, or a hotel, we may need basic numbers like the number and flow capacities of showers, the number of bathtubs, the dimension of your pool and the ambient temperature of water and atmosphere, or the number of rooms in a hotel or occupancy rate during peak hours for water heating. The number of solar panels needed, the output capacity of heat pump water heaters, the storage capacity of hot water tanks form a system to provide enough hot water at a desired temperature for however your business uses hot water. Pumps and tanks are sized according to required volume and pressure as well as horizontal and vertical distances between water source and installation site. The appropriate models of swimming pool pumps and filters for your swimming pool depend on the volume of your swimming pool as well as its usage. Our products are technical. They are a number business.
Due to the nature of our business, it is important for our people to know their math, and do it well. Though our various product trainings cover to a degree specific product physics informally, there is so much room for improvement in our technical training program. Formalization of the program, including gradation and tests, will be helpful in the long run in educating our people.
Arming our people with efficient tools are just as important. While the old-fashioned basic calculator is still the preferred equipment of many, due to its convenience and portability, the versatile spreadsheet and other computer programs are available for more advanced computations. Our product catalog has a few pages devoted to conversion tables. We have a compilation of spreadsheet/form templates for various common calculations in our day to day business to speed response time. At one point, I've even written a small unit conversion tool to help convert basic units of measurement we use in our company. Nowadays, with internet access being almost a given, Google's built in calculator has been a boon to quick and easy calculations.
My personal favorite calculator, however, is Qalculate. Unfortunately for Windows and Mac users, it is only available under Linux. (Fortunately for our company, we use Ubuntu, a fairly easy-to-use Linux distribution, in which installing Qalculate is just a search and a few clicks away.) Qalculate not only features a robust scientific mode but also unit conversions, currency conversions, and even calculus. As an example of its power, you can enter 6 kilowatt hour to Btu and it gives you 20.472747 kBtu. Computing the desired gpm pump requirement for a residential swimming pool 10 meters long, 6 meters wide, and 5 feet deep is simply entering the following expression:
10 meters * 6 meters * 5 feet / 8 hours to gal/min
It gives an answer ~ 50.324776 gal / min.
Unlike a lot of businesses however, our major products are heavily about numbers. When we size water heaters for your home, swimming pool, or a hotel, we may need basic numbers like the number and flow capacities of showers, the number of bathtubs, the dimension of your pool and the ambient temperature of water and atmosphere, or the number of rooms in a hotel or occupancy rate during peak hours for water heating. The number of solar panels needed, the output capacity of heat pump water heaters, the storage capacity of hot water tanks form a system to provide enough hot water at a desired temperature for however your business uses hot water. Pumps and tanks are sized according to required volume and pressure as well as horizontal and vertical distances between water source and installation site. The appropriate models of swimming pool pumps and filters for your swimming pool depend on the volume of your swimming pool as well as its usage. Our products are technical. They are a number business.
Due to the nature of our business, it is important for our people to know their math, and do it well. Though our various product trainings cover to a degree specific product physics informally, there is so much room for improvement in our technical training program. Formalization of the program, including gradation and tests, will be helpful in the long run in educating our people.
Arming our people with efficient tools are just as important. While the old-fashioned basic calculator is still the preferred equipment of many, due to its convenience and portability, the versatile spreadsheet and other computer programs are available for more advanced computations. Our product catalog has a few pages devoted to conversion tables. We have a compilation of spreadsheet/form templates for various common calculations in our day to day business to speed response time. At one point, I've even written a small unit conversion tool to help convert basic units of measurement we use in our company. Nowadays, with internet access being almost a given, Google's built in calculator has been a boon to quick and easy calculations.
My personal favorite calculator, however, is Qalculate. Unfortunately for Windows and Mac users, it is only available under Linux. (Fortunately for our company, we use Ubuntu, a fairly easy-to-use Linux distribution, in which installing Qalculate is just a search and a few clicks away.) Qalculate not only features a robust scientific mode but also unit conversions, currency conversions, and even calculus. As an example of its power, you can enter 6 kilowatt hour to Btu and it gives you 20.472747 kBtu. Computing the desired gpm pump requirement for a residential swimming pool 10 meters long, 6 meters wide, and 5 feet deep is simply entering the following expression:
10 meters * 6 meters * 5 feet / 8 hours to gal/min
It gives an answer ~ 50.324776 gal / min.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Traditions
Our company as organizations do grows its traditions with age. Though our company history is more than 30 years already, more than half the average lifespan of a corporation, our company in its current form is very young.
The first five years have been about products. With a small office for three people, our company grew slowly but steadily, selling good products at fair prices while maintaining low overhead. Tradition has been opening at day and closing at night, and the year-end inventory.
The next years after up to now however have brought dramatic changes. Leadership developed and luck blessed our company. Now, it's really about the people, good people, selling good products. More social traditions followed.
Some of our major company events such as Christmas parties and Team-building are recent traditions. They do not make much sense in a company of 3 or 4 persons.
Some haven't earned their keep to be called traditions. This new year's company outlook missed this year (Or I missed it somehow.) Last year's sportsfest and moon cake festival were unceremoniously aborted after typhoon Ondoy. Nevertheless, this year holds promise for the sportsfest's continuation with an already scheduled chess tournament.
These recent company traditions arose from normal progressions of relationships. As our company focused on people, relationships among develop to form cohesive groupings. Working with more people preludes socializing with more people. When there's stability, social interaction in and out of office contribute to each other's growth and group cohesiveness. Lack of maintenance on the other hand brings about apathy and division.
It would have been lacklustre if traditions were to arise only for its own, as a pure business decision without magic of innovation and communication, with a goal first and foremost to promote bonding as if it can be plasticized so conveniently. (But one can still grow from there, giving probably adaptation and creativity.)
Our sportsfest (or the idea of) have been borne in part from common sports played by fellow officemates. Our weekly basketball have been quite steady for the past year. Badminton, though it hasn't caught on, has fans such as yours truly. Chess? Table tennis? People among are finding common grounds of activities, on which to share and find unity.
As an young, agile company, we can expect traditions to come to show the Amici way. More people coming in means more possibilities of formation. When people go out, we expect changes. We must be alive to maintain the best traditions and let bad traditions die quietly.
The first five years have been about products. With a small office for three people, our company grew slowly but steadily, selling good products at fair prices while maintaining low overhead. Tradition has been opening at day and closing at night, and the year-end inventory.
The next years after up to now however have brought dramatic changes. Leadership developed and luck blessed our company. Now, it's really about the people, good people, selling good products. More social traditions followed.
Some of our major company events such as Christmas parties and Team-building are recent traditions. They do not make much sense in a company of 3 or 4 persons.
Some haven't earned their keep to be called traditions. This new year's company outlook missed this year (Or I missed it somehow.) Last year's sportsfest and moon cake festival were unceremoniously aborted after typhoon Ondoy. Nevertheless, this year holds promise for the sportsfest's continuation with an already scheduled chess tournament.
These recent company traditions arose from normal progressions of relationships. As our company focused on people, relationships among develop to form cohesive groupings. Working with more people preludes socializing with more people. When there's stability, social interaction in and out of office contribute to each other's growth and group cohesiveness. Lack of maintenance on the other hand brings about apathy and division.
It would have been lacklustre if traditions were to arise only for its own, as a pure business decision without magic of innovation and communication, with a goal first and foremost to promote bonding as if it can be plasticized so conveniently. (But one can still grow from there, giving probably adaptation and creativity.)
Our sportsfest (or the idea of) have been borne in part from common sports played by fellow officemates. Our weekly basketball have been quite steady for the past year. Badminton, though it hasn't caught on, has fans such as yours truly. Chess? Table tennis? People among are finding common grounds of activities, on which to share and find unity.
As an young, agile company, we can expect traditions to come to show the Amici way. More people coming in means more possibilities of formation. When people go out, we expect changes. We must be alive to maintain the best traditions and let bad traditions die quietly.
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