There are not many books on entrepreneurship authored by Filipinos. Most of such books are written by Western—especially American—authors. This is not surprising considering the observed preference of most Filipinos for employment over entrepreneurship. For most Filipinos it is far easier to think of employment—especially employment in the government, with its security feature—than to have to comply with all the requirements of putting up a business.
To the short list of Filipino-authored books of proprietorship should be added a new book co-written by Exequiel P. Villacorta Jr.—a colleague of mine at the now-gone Private Development Corporation of the Philippines—and Dr. Eduardo A. Morato Jr., a professor at the Asian Institute of Management. The book is “From Hard Knocks to Professional Entrepreneurship.” I am happy to have something to say about the book now that I have had the pleasure of reading it.
The content of “Hard Knocks” is a perfect blend between the marketplace experience of Villacorta—the hard knocks part of the book—and the guru knowledge of Morato. The focal points of Villacorta’s career have been PDCP, where he started a program called Business Clinics for small- and medium-scale enterprises, and the business group of Henry Sy, particularly Banco de Oro. A professor for 40 years, Morato has done professional and research work for De La Salle University, Development Academy of the Philippines, AIM and Ateneo Graduate School of Business.
Villacorta’s former boss Sy and two other highly successful businessmen —Manuel B. Villar and Francis Tiu Laurel—are the book’s hard-knocks entrepreneurs. They comprise the first of the three sets of successful businessmen into which “Hard Knocks” has divided its eighteen subjects. That Villacorta writes glowingly about Sy and his hard-knocks beginnings is perfectly understandable. Who wouldn’t?
Five individuals comprise the second set of entrepreneurs featured by the book. The five are described by the authors of “Hard Knocks” as “highly educated executives with prestigious MBA degrees and years of business experience.” The business interests of executives-turned-entrepreneurs Jose E.B. Antonio, Guido A.A. Delgado, Ricardo P. Cuerva, Eduardo L. David and Gabriel M. Paredes range from real estate and energy to finance and logging.
The third set of successful businessmen featured by “Hard Knocks”—Anton Ortigas, Raffy Juan, Patricia Prado, Deborah N. Rodrigo, Richard Calleja, Emily Versoza, Barry Cruz, John Aguilar, Rajan Uttamchandani and Kamrul Tarafder—are described by the book as much younger entrepreneurs who “took over their parents’ ailing businesses (but eventually) set up their own enterprises.” AIM’s (and, later, AGSB’s) vehicle for inculcating the principles of professional entrepreneurship in the last two sets of successful businessmen was the Master in Entrepreneurship program developed by Morato, which was launched at AIM in 1999 and at AGSB ten years later.
A key component of the ME program —a feature that all the ME students found very useful in their businesses —was the three-part business plan that the students had to draw up. The first part is an external assessment of the environment in which the student’s enterprise operates; this includes a good look at the political, economic, technical, social, ecological and market elements of the environment. The second part is the internal assessment of the student’s enterprise; this includes the diagnosis of the enterprise’s overall performance and its competencies, resource utilization, management functions and administrative processes. The third part is the business plan itself; at this point strategies are formulated and the programs needed to support the strategies are determined.
In business circles the phrase “school of hard knocks” is often heard and some successful businessmen are said to be graduates of that school. What the phrase intends to imply is that the businessmen achieved their success without the benefit of intervention by institutions like AIM; they got to where they are through a combination of common sense, trial and error, experimentation and grit. The story of Sy, for one, is a story of learning from the school of hard knocks. In giving their book its name, Villacorta and Morato were in effect saying to aspiring businessmen, “You don’t have to go through the school of hard knocks; you can enroll in an institution like AIM and learn professional entrepreneurship.”
Has the Master in Entrepreneurship program been a success? The results of the 2016 Survey of Master of Entrepreneurship Graduates certainly say so.