Bridging and building a progressive future

I convey my personal thanks for giving me this opportunity to be Management Association of the Philippines’ 75th president —the fifth woman to lead this organization—with high hopes that during our watch, we can rise to the challenge of leaving a significant mark in the 73-year history of this organization.

The year 2023 will still be challenging—a continuation of the transition years as we try to put our pandemic experience in the rear-view mirror. Now, we must set our sights on what’s ahead with cautious optimism even as the fight with COVID-19 continues.

The bigger challenge before us will be recovery—not just in the economic front but also in the structural rebuilding of the fundamentals needed to address the impact of the digital transformation and the changed business dynamics in our government to our respective organizations. The growing expectation that business should integrate social responsibility as success indicator places an enormous burden on our shoulders that will need new, transformational ideas and a high degree of collaboration across industries and sectors.

MAP can be that lynchpin, the hub if you will, to generate ideas and help make that cooperation happen. MAP today has solidified its standing as a professional, impartial and independent organization whose advocacies extend beyond its mission to achieve management excellence. We are a voice that is listened to in many socially relevant issues we initiate, support and reinforce in multiple platforms to influence changes for the better.

Preserving these gains is foremost in the mind of your 2023 board. During our strategic meeting last November, we committed to work on crafting and implementing a two-pronged strategy to significantly contribute to this objective: by bridging and enhancing the internal fundamentals and harnessing our collective strengths to help in building a national future in shared prosperity.

‘BRIDGE’

To give flesh and substance to the theme, we mapped out six priority programs aptly embodied in the acronym BRIDGE.

• We keep Bridging our internal strengths,
• Focus on Resilience and Recovery,
• Initiate and welcome Innovation,
• Advocate for Diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI,
• Make a strong push for Growth and people development; and
• Base our actions on what can contribute to the Environment, social and governance or ESG goals.

6 Clusters

With the identified key directions of MAP for the year, the board will work with 30 MAP committees grouped into six clusters. The programs will be harmonized, tracked and calibrated to maximize resources and generate quick wins.

The first cluster is tasked to bridge the internal strengths. Our collective strengths will enable MAP to lead, be the voice for management excellence, the hub of new ideas and solutions that can effectively push our advocacies forward.

Today’s MAP is a diverse group in age, gender and professional background. We have a relatively young board that can potentially cement what MAP has been desiring to do for years: to create and institutionalize an environment that would bridge and connect the wisdom and wealth of experience of the seasoned CEOs with the new thinking, new ideas, innovations in doing business and new paradigm of the next generation of CEOs. This combined force will enable us to foster thought leadership and collect a wealth of ideas, solutions and business opportunities that are adaptive, transformative, relevant and sustainable.

We will focus on narrowing the generational divide and creating an environment of real inclusiveness, true to our management discipline of succession planning.

Our first act, therefore, was to assign next generation members to be co-vice chairs in most committees to give them the opportunity to lead, participate and be immersed in the organization. We also keep making strides in achieving gender balance.

Building internal strength also means that we can provide support to our members through timely information that can increase the confidence level in their business planning. We will establish DATAMAP that will make available relevant statistics, facts, figures, policy papers and other research materials that we may all need from time to time. MAP can better serve the members when we can help manage business risks through informed data points.

Building a progressive future

Because these are core components of our programs, I shall personally head this cluster. Armed with a strengthened MAP, we shall do our share in building a progressive future.

The cluster on resilience and recovery is headed by Ciel Habito, former secretary of National Economic Development Authority under the Ramos administration. His group will persistently pursue the eight-point recommendations that MAP submitted last 2022 to the incoming administration.

To provide inputs to our members on the business horizon, we will hold an economic briefing on Feb. 8. However, we feel that we can enrich the context of the economic prospects if we can identify investment opportunities we can take advantage of to expand our markets. This year, therefore, we will be introducing an innovation of twinning the briefing with an investment campaign within the first quarter of the year. This initiative will be undertaken in partnership with the Department of Trade and Industry.

The importance of innovation cannot be over-emphasized. Digital marketing expert Donald Lim, is a natural choice to oversee this cluster tasked to implement programs to help scale up tech startups. It will also provide support for students to turn their technological ideas into actual products and services that will benefit farmers, fisherfolk and the rest of our population.

The DEI cluster assigned to Karen Batungbacal is expected to conduct the third round of the SGV-MAP NextGen CEO Transformative Leadership Program as one of its major undertakings.

This cluster will continue to encourage our next generation members and leaders to engage through the 4th MAP NextGen CEO Conference. This is the learning platform where they can discuss the most pressing challenges being faced by their generation and provide an avenue for them to learn from one another.

The growth and people development cluster is headed by Chito Salazar, whose forte is education. Their task is to undertake initiatives and pursue critical reforms to address our education crisis and to promote life-long learning.

And fittingly, the ESG cluster, which will be headed by Alex Cabrera of PwC Philippines, will keep us focused on the advocacy and social responsibility dimension of what we all do.

Friends, we are in for a busy, busy 2023. It may seem to be lofty goals that we set for ourselves but we have a lot of catching up to do and we can do no less. What gives us confidence is knowing that we have one another’s back and we have the valuable support and active participation of the MAP community and our partners in government and other business organizations. INQ

(This was lifted from the inaugural address delivered by the author on Jan. 31 as the 2023 MAP president. She is the founding partner and CEO of Du-Baladad and Associates or BDB Law. Feedback at [email protected] and [email protected].)