Welcome to the World of Grown Ups! You’ve really made it. You’ve hemmed and hawed your way to inde­pen­dence; you’ve started liv­ing on your own; and you really love it.

And then you go to the gro­ceries and can’t believe that toi­let paper could actu­ally cost that much. Things you took for granted when you were liv­ing with your par­ents are not cheap. And pay­ing the rent really eats up on your allowance, er, salary.

Wel­come to the real world boy. You can­not ask money from your par­ents no more!

A world that can­not jour­ney with self is also a world that can­not go deep. We have heard of the world’s incli­na­tion for super­fi­cial­ity. We see its hand in the impor­tance placed on celebrity sta­tus (some peo­ple can relate to movi­es­tars more than to their own rel­a­tives), on form rather than sub­stance, in quick-fix solu­tions to prob­lems. In this coun­try, our sense of pol­i­tics have blurred with our sense of show­busi­ness. We have actors “play­ing” politi­cians, and politi­cians dab­bling in show­busi­ness. It’s an anthropological/cultural prob­lem more than any­thing else, but let me haz­ard a guess: isn’t this blur­ring of pol­i­tics and show­biz due to the fact that the audi­ence (us, the Fil­ipino peo­ple) love it?

This one I first read in a Star­bucks after Manny Pac­quiao won against Ricky Hat­ton. This is by one of my favorite colum­nists of the Philip­pine Daily Inquirer, and I’d like to share it, partly because I could really under­stand the need for sys­tems in our coun­try. While being vague about the how-tos and the nitty grit­ties of how to build this “sys­tem”, the arti­cle points out some­thing I advo­cate myself: that sys­tems help change a cul­ture, along with the right atti­tude, and more long-term approach to things. If politicians–and Fil­ipinos in general–could let go of their self­ish egos, and stop focus­ing on their own per­sonal lega­cies, sys­tems would prob­a­bly see the light of day in this country.

As Ray Ander­son was prepar­ing to give a speech at Inter­face, the bil­lion dol­lar car­pet com­pany he founded, he had a stark realization.“I was run­ning a com­pany that was plun­der­ing the earth,” he recalls. While Inter­face fully com­plied with the law, Ray knew that wasn’t enough. So he chal­lenged his employ­ees to find ways to turn it all around, and fore­stalled objec­tions from his own stock­hold­ers. “He bet his entire com­pany,” remem­bers one col­league. And the bet paid off. Today, Inter­face has cut fos­sil fuels by 45%, reduced water usage by 49% and slowed its land­fill con­tri­bu­tion by 80%. Plans are under­way for it to be a fully “restora­tive enter­prise” by 2020. Oh, and along the way? Inter­face has saved over $336 million.

The Per­sonal MBA web­site works on the assump­tion that busi­ness schools don’t have a monop­oly on worldly wis­dom, that you do not really need to be in busi­ness school to be good at busi­ness, and that you can learn if you’re seri­ous about learn­ing advanced busi­ness principles.