Such campy wisdom can only come from your Batallion Commander, yes? At any rate, NYer offers an explanation:

The social psychologist Robert Levine, who has devoted decades to studying people’s ideas about time, suggests that cultures can be divided into those which live on “event time,” where events are allowed to dictate people’s schedules, and those which live on “clock time,” where people’s schedules dictate events. Unsurprisingly, countries that live on clock time are more successful economically—if perhaps less fun at night—than those which do not. In part, that’s because attitudes toward time tend to pervade nearly every aspect of a culture.

Then I think about all those Filipinos who are here in the U.S. They essentially live on two timezones (excuse all the nightshift nurses out there who still say they're on "Filipino Time"): the one timezone is the American timezone, which means Monday to Friday. Always on time. Not wasting anyone's time.

But as soon as the weekend rolls in, you can't really get them to come in on time. Things just naturally -- culturally? -- slow down. An event may happen, and who knows if and when they'll be part of it. Often, these events are those organized by Filipinos for Filipinos. They warp from American Time to Filipino Time. (My ex-boss back in Manila will flee at that thought. He's British.). I am, of course, guilty of the same.

At what time, hence, will we Filipinos get off Filipino Time for good? It reflects a lot, if I may extrapolate, on our consciousness of ourselves as a nation of Filipinos. When we ask, where are we going, we know where, seldom do we know how, but no one has an idea when. There certainly is that prevailing sense of not having a long-term plan, which in turn does not allow us to process and schedule the present and time ourselves well. What happens, it seems, happens. There are certain Christian underpinnings, but on Holy Thursday, I'll skip that.

I guess when we start viewing minutes as a commodity, like those of us working in the city (and those of us who have seen "Run, Lola, Run"), we become more punctual. That's why in Makati, like in Japan and in Times Square (emphasis on Time) people walk fast (not the tourists) and most transactions are quick. Jump over to Quezon City, the heart of our government, and you see people melting away the hours, if you see anyone at all. There are legacies of inadequacy (manual typewriters) and mediocracy -- all hallmarks that, if a poor sense of time dictates on culture, then our government is one big siesta. No wonder so many people want in! And, when Ramos was President, he'd start work at 4 AM; and, that idea that the president is out there pounding the pavement 5 hours before you do just gets you going in the morning.

And, as the economists Kaushik Basu and Jorgen Weibull have pointed out, in a country where everyone is always late, it becomes rational to be late. There’s no point in getting to a meeting on time if no one is going to be there. Tardiness feeds on itself, creating a vicious cycle of mañana, mañana .

Again, what to do for a country that's always late? If there is a good prescription for Ecuador, we have hope:

What Ecuador really has to overcome is the idea that culture is destiny, that showing up late is just what Ecuadorans do. In the past two decades, great attention has been paid to the economic significance of cultural predispositions—to the role, for example, of trust and risk-aversion in the old Soviet-bloc countries’ fitful attempts to adapt to capitalism. Culture, we have discovered, matters more than many bondholders wish it did. But it is not immutable. In Western Europe and the United States, people once had to learn to become punctual, too. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, factory owners applied enormous effort (and plenty of coercion) just to get workers to show up on the right day, let alone at the right hour.

I believe the less we tolerate tardiness, which starts at home and in school, then the faster we get out of our rut and become a "clock time" culture. If only the fact that the PBA games start on time, there is much hope yet for Filipinos on Filipino time. In the meantime, yet another nugget of ROTC wisdom:

Even a busted clock is right twice a day.

Fitting to end with a quote from the article I'm reacting to:

We are constantly being told, about social norms in places like the Middle East, “That’s just the way it is.” Perhaps. But by taking on tardiness Ecuador’s citizens are telling us something else: culture is what you do, not who you are. It’s about time, too.