I am deeply honored and extremely grateful to be chosen by the country?s most prestigious management organization as its Management Man of the Year for 2009.

This award represents a very important triumph, not just for me, but for all professional managers in this country. And I view this as a tribute and recognition of the professional management team of the Ayala Group, as well as all the members of the MAP.

And for this, I am humbly grateful to the Lord Almighty for being chosen as the representative of this very august group.

I would like to express my appreciation to my family, headed by no less than my 97-year-old mother who, as a public school teacher, managed to mold on me the importance of hard work and service to others.

I am also grateful to my wife, Mambie, and my daughters Corrine, Mariel, and Reggie for their patience and support all these years.

Ayala group

I wish to especially thank the Ayala Group and the Zobel de Ayala Family.

Don Jaime, a Management Man of the Year awardee himself, I consider as my model relative to how he has espoused the Ayala values system that we are now practicing all throughout the various Ayala companies. In particular, he has inspired us to have a concern for others, support local communities, and contribute to economic development. This values system, in turn, was carried through and even enhanced by his two sons.

Jaime Augusto has influenced me through his advocacy of trust. This value of trust has encouraged me to empower people and decentralize most of the operations that I got involved in.

He and his brother, Fernando, emphasized the importance of being engaged with the base of the pyramid and venturing into industries that Ayala was not known for in the past?infrastructure and the utilities.

Fernando has been chair of Manila Water and of Ayala Land. I want to express my thanks to Fernando for always challenging us to take a ?quantum leap? in everything we do, particularly in the areas of customer service, operating efficiency, and in social responsibility.

I am very grateful for being given the opportunity to learn from and practice the values system imbibed in the Ayala group, which I had found to be perfectly aligned with my own personal values system.

It has been my personal mission to ensure that in the exercise of my professional career, I would make a positive difference. First, by finding ways in my work life to help in the improvement of the lives of others. And, secondly, to accomplish this by developing people in the organization so that they can in turn extend the same level of improvement in the quality of life of the people we serve. This personal mission of mine was not without some very good foundations.

I started out in IBM, where I gained multinational company skill sets, making sure that we were properly implementing systems and processes as we went along.

In Ayala, I managed to learn entrepreneurial skill sets. I was fortunate to have transitioned out of the IT field into the Ayala Land organization when it was founded in 1988.

While in Ayala Land, I was given the opportunity of being in charge of the property management company. One of the key functions of this company was to provide the water supply system in Ayala Alabang. That was perhaps when I was noticed by Jaime and Fernando.

Since I was a little bit knowledgeable about water systems, they gave me a bigger responsibility. That was being true to the adage ?In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.? It was a major adventure in my life.

I call it a major adventure because it was replete with so many challenges. As we got started, we were tasked with making sure that we delivered 24-hour water supply to our five million customers.

That was very daunting for me because in my own residence, in 1997, I was getting water every other day. At that time, only a million were getting 24-hour water supply in our own network. This was largely because two-thirds of the water was getting lost.

And it was 1997; the onset of the Asian financial crisis. Everyone in the investment community was saying that Ayala had a problem and we were doomed to fail. But thanks largely to the excellent foundation that was laid by my predecessor, Jun Berba, as well as the guidance of Del Lazaro, another Management Man of the Year awardee, it was much easier for the organization to pull through. Water is now available 24 hours a day to six million Manila Water customers.

We managed to reduce system losses from two-thirds down to 15 percent today. This is probably the fastest record of non-revenue water reduction in the world for a large city like Metro Manila.

Of the people that did not have water supply in 1997, two million of them belonged to low income communities. It?s so easy for us to appreciate the value of how 24 hour water supply would impact the quality of life of poor people. In the past, they had to wait up to late at night to get water to their homes.

24-hour supply

Worse, if they had to buy from informal sources, they would have spent up to ten times more, and with poor water quality at that. Today, these two million people are benefiting from 24 hour water supply at a reasonable cost.

Those were the major success stories we had during my major adventure in Manila Water. And I would like to share with you some of the learnings and insights and the main approaches followed by the management of Manila Water in order to make all these accomplishments possible.

The first important insight was the fact that former public sector employees are great employees. Adhering to the value of trust, we empowered them. Provided with the proper environment, they were equal to the task and performed very well, given their natural desire to serve.

The second was how we believed in the youth working in Manila Water. We hired about 300 young college graduates to join the organization. And, coupled with our former MWSS colleagues, they have managed to deliver a level of service uncommon for most public utility companies. They were present in every barangay. They worked there. They lived there. They stayed in those communities just to make sure that they delivered the proper level of service.

And today, we?re very happy that many of these young employees now belong to the middle management levels of Manila Water.

That exercise of coming around with a decentralized organization, being present in the grassroots, can also open our eyes to the value of being engaged with the base of the pyramid. Something that at the onset was a bit foreign to the Ayala Group. In the case of Globe, for example, we managed to reach only half of the base of the pyramid.

In Manila Water, we managed to reach 100 percent of the base of the pyramid. And we learned much from that exercise. It taught us how to tap the market potential that is present in that sector.

Another lesson that I would like to share with you is how Manila Water applied the positive Filipino value systems. Very often we find negative things in the Filipino value systems?like pakikisama. But I think we are so much richer in that we have many positive Filipino values.

Let me start off by giving an example in the word ?katiwala,? or trustee. It is a word that we used whenever we decentralized and empowered our young people to work with the local communities. They told us what the problem was. We gave them the resources and they would come back with results. Katiwala establishes the very direct relationship between the two parties. It is a term that is easier for us Filipinos to understand; more appropriate than the words empowerment or decentralization. This is truly a good example of how we can make use of many of these Filipino values to further our own management skill sets.

Positive values

And there are many more examples. ?Bayanihan,? for one, helps in bringing everybody together to ensure that the whole company would ably address any major problem. We use the word ?suki? to establish the very wonderful bilateral relationships we have with vendors, instead of calling it a vendor program.

And for all of these wonderful Filipino value systems that we have adopted toward the success of this company, I?d like to give the proper credit to the Manila Water organization, headed today by Rene Almendras whom I see is very much engaged with local communities and who now espouses the environment as his battle cry.

After that major adventure I have been given another in Ayala Land, which I find extremely challenging and exciting.

In all of these career assignments, I have come to believe that what is important is for us to get a handle on that hidden meaning behind everything that we are doing. It is important that, as we try to accomplish our business goals and objectives, we make sure that there is a social dimension to whatever we do.

Ayala Land is better known for serving the top of the pyramid. But we have come to realize that other sectors need to be served also. Thus, we are expanding to the base of the pyramid. We feel that by doing this, we can make a difference in the lives of more people.

We believe that by providing for housing for public sector employees, overseas Filipino workers and business process outsourcing employees, we would be able to significantly improve the quality of lives of these people.

We feel that if we start expanding into other geographies outside of Makati, Alabang and Laguna, we can serve and provide a better quality of life to more people. And by doing so, we will be serving our country in terms of stimulating economic development.

As part of the Ayala Group we will be getting more deeply involved in sustainability initiatives and make sure that our social and environmental goals are integrated properly into our management plans.

In closing, I would just like to pose certain challenges to the members of the MAP. Today, we find ourselves in a difficult environment, starting off with the global economic crisis. Poverty levels are increasing; there are natural disasters; and we will be going through a political transition.

At the same time, I do feel that these problems and challenges are also opportunities. The problem with the budgetary deficit would mean that the private sector would be asked to step in and remedy a lot of the infrastructure deficiencies of the country. We feel that there are opportunities by way of public-private partnerships naturally happening.

Another challenge to the management group is to be a lot more engaged with the communities at the base of the pyramid. This could be the key to the country?s accelerated development.

Economic activities

As the country marks its political transition, let?s engage in more economic activities in areas the country lacks, such as infrastructure and utilities. These are activities that have made our group profitable and, at the same time, allowed us to help improve the quality of life of the people we are serving.

My main message is that we should not merely see ourselves as professional managers. Let us view ourselves as responsible Filipinos who have the ability to help solve the country?s problems. And by doing so, we?re all contributing toward the upliftment of lives of the Filipinos whom we all love.

(Speech delivered by the author, who is President and CEO of Ayala Land Inc. when the ?MAP Management Man of the Year 2009? Award was conferred on him recently. Feedback at map@globelines.com.ph. For previous articles, please visit .)