by Atty. Jessica Los Baños
Are you complying fully with the law? Here’s a checklist of the basic legal requirements that your business should be following.
Because MSMEs have great potential for growth and contribute significantly to economic development, they are subject to simple registration and compliance procedures, provided with ready bank financing, and afforded easy access […]

Many business owners believe that the best way to get things done is by becoming enfants terribles who can scare and intimidate their employees into doing what they have to do.
After all, isn’t that what Steve Jobs (Apple) and Ken Lay (Enron… before they crashed) and a host of other CEOs of successful firms do? […]

Instead of making life a little easier, this wardrobe concept has managed to baffle the workforce. Here’s how to do corporate casual the right way.
What makes business casual so ambiguous is the fact that each industry, and perhanps even every company, has a different set of norms. Smaller companies tend to have more relaxed dress […]

If you believe that the customer should always come first, you may want to think again.
Which is more important: the Customer or the Organization?
If you ask this to the typical MBA-graduate manager, the answer would most likely be “The Customer.” It sounds like a right answer. After all, isn’t the corporate mantra typically “the customer […]

Most Philippine companies treat salaries as confidential pieces of information. And there’s good reason for this: for one thing, other companies will have a harder time pirating your people if they don’t know what their going rates are.
But it’s also possible that you’re keeping employee salaries confidential because some employees get “special treatment” over others… […]

Is your company hemorrhaging manpower? Do you have job positions that have seen different people filling their seats every couple of weeks? Are you getting tired of giving the pink slip to people who are just not up to your standards?
If you ever find yourself nodding in agreement, then the bad news is that there’s […]

There are two schools of thought regarding the idea of being a “nice” manager.
One school says that nice guys finish last, and that their being nice people end up leading to an organization that doesn’t accomplish anything, or in having people that don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing in the first place.
The other […]

One of the things I love about getting to meet CEOs of successful SMEs is that a surprising number of them built their businesses out of a sincere desire to help others.
For instance, Joanna Duarte of Big & Small stating that she built her business to help give jobs for “her girls” (see our November-December […]