‘I DO not know why—is it [because of] the water you drink?” author and innovation expert Guy Kawasaki asked aloud during a roundtable discussion at Globe Telecom’s packed Enterprise Innovation Forum at the Edsa Shangri-La Hotel in Mandaluyong City last week. “Everywhere I [went] to, I [saw] happy faces,” said Kawasaki, who was in the Philippines for three days to talk about how companies should “jump to the next curve.”
Later, in a meeting with the media, Kawasaki again expressed his admiration for the happy people he met, and surmised that “perhaps, [it was] the coconut juice,” which, he said, he could drink. This admirable trait that Kawasaki gushed about was probably what made him game enough to sign copies of his book Rules for Revolutionaries for eager media personalities, despite the little time he had (just five hours before departing the country), and with all the interviews he did and the speeches he delivered.
“Hipolito, Change the world,” Kawasaki wrote on the opening page of my copy of Rules for Revolutionaries, which is considered a must-read for techno-entrepreneurs or ordinary employees who want to flourish in business.
Kawasaki, a former chief “evangelist” at Apple Corp. and the current chief evangelist for online graphics-design tool Canva, was also captivated by the young Filipino graphic designers he met during a gathering at the SM Mall of Asia that was arranged by Globe.
Asked about what the Philippines should do, Kawasaki said there is a need to produce more engineers, and emphasized the need for more entrepreneurs. Marketing, for instance, could be done on social media. But in determining whether a company succeeds or not, that depends on “sales”, said Kawasaki, who had “led the charge against worldwide domination by IBM.”
A Globe senior official explained that the sold-out forum fulfilled the company’s goal to fortify Globe Business’s industry thought-leadership stance. “By bringing in the world’s biggest names in innovation, such as Kawasaki, we leveraged on the fact that we helped provide the impetus to our information and communications technology sector to take on innovation as a way of life in their organizations,” the official said.
ABS-CBN president honored
FOR the innovations that her company made, ABS-CBN President and CEO Charo Santos-Concio was awarded the Gold Stevie Award in the Female Executive of the Year in Asia category at the prestigious Stevie Awards for Women in Business, which was held in New York last week.
Those innovations include ABS-CBN Mobile, theme park KidZania Manila in Taguig City, and public-service initiatives for the victims of the October 15, 2013, 7.2-magnitude quake, the Zamboanga siege in September 2013, and Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan).
Concio bested nominees from 22 nations and territories for the Gold Stevie Award (Stevie is Greek for “crowned”), which is the world’s top honor for female entrepreneurs, executives, employees and the organizations they run. ABS-CBN was cited for its TV-ratings dominance, film subsidiary Star Cinema’s box-office sales and high credit rating for its P10-billion bond offering, among others.
Concio shared the award with her “fellow Filipinos and my family at ABS-CBN, whose passion to serve Filipinos around the world and provide help to those in need makes me so grateful and proud to lead a company that puts public service at the heart of its business.”
JG Summit profits from Meralco
JG Summit, the holding company of the Gokongwei family, saw its core income rise 37 percent for the first nine months of the year, thanks to its acquisition of a 27.1-percent stake in the Manila Electric Co., which San Miguel Corp. (SMC) off-loaded last December. For the first three quarters, JG Summit posted earnings of P15.02 billion, and is on track to hit its 2014 profit target of P18.86 billion.
The Meralco shares that JG Summit acquired accounted for P3.8 billion in incremental profits. Also accounting for the spike in JG Summit’s income was the contribution of Robinsons Land Corp., which earned P3.8 billion in the January-to-September period on account of its leasing revenues.
Next year JG Summit is expected to have a profit squeeze because of weaker earnings from Meralco, which indicated that it would be difficult for the power firm to raise costs, given the low economic growth.
E-mail: hugagni@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Benjo Laygo