The President’s Man
In the field of management, especially of people, President Duterte’s kicking up instead of kicking out former Customs Commissioner Isidro Lapena is called lateral arabasque. It’s an extension of the Peter Principle which posits that in the scheme of things, a person tends to rise to the level of incompetence.
Lateral arabasque is,to use current business lingo, a solution among others.
Management gurus point out that this is resorted to,not to reward the recepient, although it looks that way, but to get him out of the way of achieving the objective. I recall CNN founder ED Turner who said you lead, follow or get out of the way.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson is even more succinct and in-your-face with his own takeaway of the Lapena case It was a promotion in rank alright, but it was also a demotion in trust and confidence. It’s a riddle: Lapena rose and sank at the same time. It defies physics. I remember an American pastor’s comment about backhanded compliment.
The ever reliable and savvy court jester Salvador Panelo has disabused the latter notion. It had been planned all along, not a convenient afterthought after Lapena’s virtual mea culpa. It wasn’t the patented reflexive reaction to the dicey caviling between PDEA head Aaron Aquino and The Sid. Edgar Hoover had warned that if it’s public, it’s propaganda; if private, it’s policy.
Newly-minted Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has weighed in: the President knows what he’s doing and more than what the public knows. You have to concede the point of a former president. What the public doesn’t know is whether Lapena is the President’s teddy bear. There is a term of endearment that is not disclosed in the terms of reference for a job, especially for presidential appointees.
But lateral arabesque should be availed of sparingly, or you sow calamity. It poisons the culture, makes people toxic, corrodes sacrosanct values and gives professionalism a bad name. In theory, it’s a beauty; in practice, it could a be a sure recipe for disaster.
The logic of politics, however, is shifting sands.
In the case of Lapena, he was purposely pulled out from the Philippine Drug Agency (PDEA) to be a linchpin in the President’s controversial war on drugs.