A Heritage of Smallness = 21st Century Bigness

Before anything else, let go of your easily-prickable Pinoy pride for 15 minutes and read (or re-read) Nick Joaquin’s A Heritage of Smallness.

In this influential essay, the one-time National Artist for Literature holds up a mirror to the Filipino Soul and eschews our love affair with all things small :

“Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay mahoma, noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi.”

He further builds his case, noting the Philippine aversion of going for big, bold risks.

Whereas other countries have the grandeur of millenia-old pyramids, colloseums, or castles, our landscape reveals … invisible traces of the nipa hut, obliterated in months and years, not centuries.

This seeming absence of ambition in our DNA is a reinforcement of Joaquin’s three theories :

“First: that the Filipino works best on small scale–tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of the big.

Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy materials–clay, molten metal, tree searching has failed to turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even carabao horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has not been used to any extent remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is that we feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge of materials that resist.

Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we tend to rut in it and don’t move on to a next phase, a larger development, based on what we have learned. In fact, we instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses when confronted by a challenge from outside of something more masterly, instead of being provoked to develop by the threat of competition.”

While there’s most certainly truth in this – denial would only be delusional and unproductive – it’s time to reframe Joaquin’s thoughts and put them in a new historical perspective; Most especially since this so-called heritage of smallness is a jiu-jitsu move whose time, I believe, has finally come.

The transformation spurred by the Industrial Revolution saw unprecedented growth and scale driven by cookie-cutter replication;  This great leap forward was facilitated by large-scale organizations and systems : huge industrial factories and their assembly lines, massive one-size-fits-all educational systems, sprawling country-wide infrastructure – all supported by financial institutions that both oiled and churned the giant wheels of commerce.

Just consider the following examples :

The tri-media attack of Television, Radio, and Print became national – even global – platforms, easily influencing and swaying popular opinion at a massive scale.

Big Business got bigger, while the small guys got smaller. The latter would eventually became roadkill for the ever-burgeoning class of multinational corporations : Wal-Mart dries up the Neighborhood Mom & Pops, Starbucks engulfs the local coffee shops, Barnes and Noble kills the community-based bookstores.

The so-called First World Countries’ GDP’s would balloon and dwarf those in the Third World at mind-boggling ratios. These countries even formed an Industrialized Nations’ Club called the G8 – with their collective financial institutions pretty-much dictating the pace of the World Economy.

But something peculiar happened at the turn of the century.

The large institutions started teetering, and are now on their way into becoming dinosaur-obsolete – their 20th century innards simply being torn apart by 21st Century Realities.

The seemingly impenetrable consolidation of media became oh-so-vulnerable. Professionally produced shows on Television compete with amateurish two-minute antics on YouTube; Internet radio is replacing the radio station as we know it; And every week we extol eulogies on yet another magazine and/or newspaper’s death, as they become replaced by blogs, websites, and online forums.

Even Big Businesses are in quite a disarray. Wal-Mart survives through its ongoing reinvention; Starbucks is now buckling under its own weight – in fact, its new experiments are going community-based as unbranded local shops; Amazon.com and a myriad of niche online booksellers continues to threaten the very economics of brick-and-mortar stores. And don’t get me started on the really easy pickings, The Banks That Were Too Big To Fail, But Did.

On that note, the Global Financial Crisis of ’08-’09 swept across the industrialized nations – their financial institutions becoming a worldwide domino of economic disaster. Tackling this dangerous web was no longer something that the G8 could address in isolation, and so to deal with it they had to involve an expanded group, the G20.

The most-developed, largest countries which just a decade ago seemed invulnerable flirted with disaster and economic depression.

This breakdown in large 20th century institutions certainly has me thinking : maybe Being Big isn’t that – pun intended – big a deal anymore.

From 2010 onwards, maybe it’s time to revisit the other side of the spatial spectrum and get reaquainted with the virtues of smallness.

—

It’s no secret that The Rise of Smallness is being fueled by the Internet’s overarching disruptive shadow. Call it what you will – Wikinomics, The Groundswell, The Long Tail, an Army of Davids – the fact is that no other time in history has power been so democratized and redistributed – from multinational companies into a mosaic of startups; from large institutions into the hands of collective individuals.

Indulge me now by sharing with you Exhibits A & B  (both hailing from the same source : uber-brain-food magazine, Wired’s Issue 17.06 – a major, major influence on my thinking with regards to this matter).

Exhibit A is the article, The New New Economy : More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity -  which showcases the decline in number of the Megacorporations and the viral proliferation of an Ecosystem of Startups.

Exhibit B is more a mindbend, if you will.  Kevin Kelly talks about The New Socialism : Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online – and this is where it makes the leap from mildly interesting to extremely interesting.

Because the secret sauce isn’t really in The Small per se; it’s the aggregation of what I can only call as ‘The Many-Small’ into an almost sentient-network, mimicking swarm intelligence.  And so it’s not just the empowered individual which is the focus of the matter, but rather the groups of individuals bound together, moving from Web 2.0 Guru Clay Shirky‘s hierarchy of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collective action.

What does this all have to do with the Philippines?

Because for better or for worse, Nick Joaquin is absolutely right. We are indeed a nation of smallness, divided across a myriad of 7,107 islands.

From sari-sari stores to barangays, from nipa huts to sachets, from farming small plots of land to microfinancing – it is the small that dominates the Filipino landscape.

But if we mirror the Internet model, then we can arrive at the logical conclusion that we’re sitting on a goldmine. And it’s not in The Small. It’s in harnessing The Many-Small.

Our work in Hapinoy is an extremely relevant example to the thinking here. The smallest, minutest unit of retail – the humble sari-sari store – by far dominates the number of retail outlets in the country. While there may be a few thousand supermarkets and groceries nationwide, there are almost 700,000 sari-sari stores sprawling every nook and cranny of the archipelago. 700,000! Numerically, that’s more than 90% of all retail.

So individually, the sari-sari store is too micro to make a dent in the universe. But as a Hapinoy network, the aggregation and alignment of hundreds of thousands of sari-sari stores represents a massively untapped economic opportunity. It’s most definitely not Wal-Mart, but it is a powerful force in its own right.

What makes this model more resilient is that its not solely reliant on a centralized nervous system. Close one Big Box Hypermarket and your business goes under; Close a couple of hundred sari-sari stores and you’ve got an equal number of stores that can willingly take its place. It’s self-healing on the fringes, with a high tolerance for fallouts.

Now extend this Hapinoy model into other Filipino Many-Small realities.

Micro-Businesses.

Barangays.

Public Schools.

Agricultural Plots of Land.

Seven. Thousand. One Hundred. Seven. Islands.

And then add layers of technology to mesh them together – wireless networks, mobile communications, the web as a platform – and the possibilities just effortlessly, exponentially grow.

Let me make it clear that this I am not proposing mere consolidation; The model is hinged on networking and connection. Every point in the mesh retains its individuality – every Hapinoy Store retains its freedom and ownership – it can link and de-link with the chain. But whenever it is plugged-in, then it benefits from the power of the unified group.

—

To end, the challenge of Nick Joaquin wasn’t only in the Filipino’s limited capacity of churning out small things; It was also very much a commentary on the smallness of our thinking – of our lack of ambition, of grandness, of boldness.

But just because we’ve got small things doesn’t mean we have to think small.

The fact of the matter is that we probably won’t be building grand pyramids anytime soon;

But the good news is that we might not even have to.

We can embrace our heritage of smallness;

We can embrace the small things this heritage has given us.

Because at this point in history, we can make enormously gigantically big things out of them.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Hapinoy, Happynomics, Philippines 2020, Technology & Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.