Candice Gotianuy: Changing company culture, becoming the best

By her own account, she was dragged “kicking and screaming” into the family business just a few months after graduating from the Ateneo de Manila University in the mid-1990s.

But life—and her father—had other plans for Candice Gotianuy.

Known today as one of Cebu City’s most prominent young personalities, this up-and-coming business leader, entrepreneur and educator initially wanted to become a lawyer and was all set to enter law school after she graduated from college.

At that time, she was just waiting for law school to start when her father flew to Manila and took her to a fancy dinner.

Her father is Cebu-based businessman and lawyer Augusto Go, who also owns the University of Cebu.

“I think he was afraid I was going to be a bum,” she adds with a chuckle. “So he sat me down and said, ‘I’m opening a new campus and I need you to run it.’”

“So as their graduation gift, some kids get to go abroad, or their parents gift them with a European trip, or they get a car,” she said with a hint of envy. “I… got a school to run.”

She admits that she initially resisted the idea of running a school, but was eventually won over by her sense of responsibility to her family.

“The moral of the story is this: If a man—any man—invites you to a fancy dinner, he wants something from you,” Gotianuy says with a hearty laugh. “It is applicable across all levels.”

Now in her 14th year of running the University of Cebu Educational System as its chancellor, Gotianuy is in charge of the four campuses in the booming central Visayan island. She also runs a separate institution called the College of Technological Sciences.

Gotianuy’s drive to further improve the quality of the University of Cebu was stoked by her stint at Harvard University where she earned her master’s degree in education.

What she learned from one of the world’s best universities would prove invaluable in her drive to change things back home, including implementing some painful reforms that required some new people to be brought in and some longtime staffers to be let go.

According to her, however, once a leader starts the ball rolling, “change” and “reform” can easily gather momentum.

“If you are passionate about quality and excellence, and you believe that this is the way your organization should be, you will eventually attract like-minded people, and let go of people whose visions are not aligned, and you will have a team that will change your system,” she says.

Indeed, the small college started by her father in 1964 has grown in size, becoming a full-fledged university in 1992. All told, some 44,000 students study in the various schools she runs, studying maritime courses, information technology, nursing and, more recently, engineering.

“We’re one of the biggest private universities in the country,” she states. “But I want quality, more than the numbers. We had to invest in facilities and in people.”

More recently, Gotianuy was also put in charge of St. Vincent General Hospital, an old 100-bed tertiary level hospital, which she wants to transform into one of Cebu’s premier medical facilities.

“Again, the situation is challenging, but we see this as something that can really help improve the community we’re in,” she explains.

Of course, it’s not all about work for Gotianuy, who is never far away from her other passion: horses.

Whenever her schedule permits, she goes to her riding school in Lahug called Whistlejacket Farms where she perfects her riding skills (she prefers the discipline of “dressage” over the more athletic “show jumping” field).

“It’s one luxury I indulge in,” she says. “Horses are very interesting and challenging. Each one has a different personality and temperament.”

According to her, riding also helps relieve the stress she accumulates from running her small school empire and can also be used to set the day’s “tone” on days that she rides early in the morning.

She also loves listening to music and is a big fan of the rock band U2 (“the best band in the world,” she says with conviction).

She even has all the DVDs of their major concerts, and tells of how she joined the group’s fan club just to be eligible for buy tickets to one of their concerts in New York ahead of everyone else.

She says she actually bought two tickets to that concert, a year in advance, in the event that which was scheduled a year later, just in case she would have already met the “man of her life” by then.

“Alas, I had to throw the tickets away,” she adds. “But that’s how I live. I can be impulsive, but I try to live, live to the fullest.”

So does she have time for love given her busy schedule?

“For my horses? Always,” she replies with a laugh, but immediately adds, “When the right person comes, there will always be time.”

Asked about her proudest achievement so far, Gotianuy does not dwell on the financial success of the educational institution she runs, or the recognition it has received from its many stakeholders across society, or even the challenges she faces in the hospital she now manages.

Instead she shows scanned clippings of a front-page newspaper article about the 2008 sinking of the M/V Princess of the Stars off Romblon Island, where survivors of a shipping accident were interviewed about their ordeal and eventual survival.

Some of the passengers of the ill-fated vessel, it turned out, were off-duty seafarers who were able to keep their flimsy rubber lifeboats aright as well as fish more passengers out of the water amid the rough seas brought about by a raging storm.

According to one seaman interviewed, the raft would sometimes be on the verge of folding or capsizing because of the strong waves, but their training kicked in and they were able to keep it afloat.

“We were more organized because we knew what to do,” he says. As fate would have it, that particular seaman was educated and trained at the University of Cebu.

“That is one of my proudest moments,” Gotianuy says. “I feel we’re making a difference here.”

View comments

TAGS: Business, Cebu city, Education, People, Philippines