MAPping the Future

Before the 24th Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) International CEO Conference, its chair, Alma Jimenez, wrote in this space that our greatest strategic risk may lie less in missing signals than in reading them through outdated assumptions. On Sept. 8, at Shangri-La The Fort, the Conference took up that challenge under the theme “In the Age of Flux: Scaling the Next Inflection Points.” After a full day of sessions, I left convinced of one thing. At a time when technology makes so much abundant, the scarcest resource a leader brings is judgment.

 

What becomes valuable when technology is everywhere

 

Stavros Lee, co-founder of the US gaming platform Oncade, put the principle simply: value moves toward what is scarce. Speed, access and scale used to be hard to come by. Artificial intelligence (AI) is making all three abundant.

 

What it does not supply is judgment: deciding which problem is worth solving, which risk is worth taking and which trade-off an organization can live with. An AI model can tell a bank which loan applicants look risky. It cannot decide how much risk the bank should carry for a farming town after a typhoon, or what the bank owes a community it has served for decades. So the useful question about AI is no longer whether to adopt it. The real question is what AI should scale for us, and what we should keep human by design.

 

In my own field, where the work has always been about how institutions earn and keep the trust of the people they serve, this is a practical matter. People may accept that a machine drafted a statement or flagged a risk. They will still hold a person accountable for the decision. Judgment, and the accountability that comes with it, stays with leaders.

 

When the fear is getting it wrong

 

Many leaders are less worried about missing AI than about buying the wrong thing. Dallas Dolen of PwC US answered that fear with a story. As a teenager playing piano beside Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock hit a wrong note, and Davis answered with a chord that made it right. Plenty of leaders have already made bad calls on AI, Dolen said; what matters is that the next decision is the right one. Some spending is safe in any future: protecting data, training people, keeping systems flexible. Start with the outcome you want and redesign the work around it, rather than buying the technology first. Measure the value created, not the activity. Use the tools yourself before asking your people to. And accept that you will sometimes be wrong. He is wrong often, he said, and sleeps fine.

 

The second question

 

Judgment also shapes whom we bring along. Dr. Kunihiko Hirabayashi, secretary-general of the ASEAN-Japan Centre, spoke about the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the trade pact that links ASEAN with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Agreements like RCEP lower barriers, but his larger point was about agency: we cannot wait for certainty before we act, and the better answer to anxiety is collective action.

 

He also questioned our assumptions about who drives growth. Young people, women entrepreneurs, startup founders and small businesses are often treated as beneficiaries of growth; he argued that they can be the channels through which growth is created and scaled. In a country where micro, small and medium enterprises make up more than 99 percent of businesses and about two-thirds of jobs, according to the Department of Trade and Industry, the point is hard to dispute. So every leader weighing a new opportunity should ask a second question. After “What does this create?” comes “Who do we enable so that it can multiply?”

 

Innovation that starts with ordinary problems

 

Two Filipino entrepreneurs showed what that looks like in practice. AgriDom, the Davao-based company led by Dom Subang, started from a plain problem: drones make farming faster and more precise, but many smallholders cannot afford one. Its answer is a service model. Farmers book drone work when they need it and pay only for that work. Subang was candid that wider adoption still has a long way to go, and that educating farmers is critical to getting there.

 

Anna Magalona started But First, Coffee as a one-person venture during the pandemic and grew it into a national chain by keeping prices within reach without giving up on quality, using branding, new products and technology to do it.

 

Neither business began with a breakthrough invention. Each began with a familiar problem looked at differently: a gap in access, a price that kept people out, a customer the market was not serving well. Technology creates impact only when people can reach it and use it.

 

Fix the roof when the weather is good

 

Catharine Kho, senior economist at the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), offered the day’s most practical line: “Fix the roof when the weather is good.” Our region has tremendous potential, but it also faces fragmentation, ageing populations and climate risk. Resilience built in the middle of a crisis costs more and comes too late. The time to diversify suppliers, train people and strengthen partnerships is now, while there is still room to choose.

 

What leaders should ask next

 

So here is what I would ask every leader to bring to the next management meeting. What will we scale with technology? What will we keep human? Who will we enable along the way?

 

The answers will differ from one company to the next. What should not differ is the habit of asking them early, before certainty arrives and before the advantage has gone to someone else. Machines will keep getting better at producing answers. Deciding which questions matter, and for whom, remains our work.

 

(The author is Co-Vice Chair of the MAP CEO Conference Committee, Chair of the MAP Trade, Investments and Tourism Committee, and founder and CEO of The EON Group. Feedback at <map@map.org.ph> and <junie.delmundo@eon.com.ph>.)