Just a week before we celebrate the Lunar New Year, Discovery Channel on Jan. 22 and 25 celebrated the rags-to-riches entrepreneurial saga of Jollibee founder Tony Tan Caktiong. Established in 1975 as a two-branch ice cream parlor in middle-class Cubao, Quezon City, Jollibee was built up by the China-born Tan into the country’s biggest fastfood conglomerate with over 400 branches in the Philippines. He achieved a business coup by buying the Taiwanese-owned Yonghe King fastfood chain all over China in a bold expansion and his only son is now mastering his command of Mandarin by studying in Shanghai City.
At the gym of the Manila Polo Club in Forbes Park, Makati City, a group of business executives was discussing the unprecedented Discovery Channel feature on Jollibee and most of them couldn’t forget Tan’s quote on the idea of "dreaming big." His maternal cousin, First Life CEO Peter G. Coyiuto, disagreed, telling the group of corporate bigwigs that the true secret of Tan’s success as the country’s youngest taipan is good karma. Asked to explain, Coyiuto recounted specific corporate governance policies and acts of Tan that reflect his humility, unimpeachable integrity, honesty, hard work, discipline, frugality and other traditional Confucian values. He explained that these brought him immense blessings.
Princeton and Columbia-educated Dr. Jose Kho Hay Ting lamented that, due to the prevalence of corruption in politics and uncertain investment conditions in the country, many of the bigwigs in local politics and business earned their fortunes not through business ingenuity but by unscrupulous means. He added that a lot of the elite amassed their fortunes by cheating the government, either by stealing from state funds, tax evasion or smuggling. He complained that lots many wealthy businessmen cheat their laborers, steal from their stockholders and partners, defraud banks, and cheat their own siblings and relatives. In contrast, entrepreneurs like Li Ka Shing of Hong Kong, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell of USA, and Acer founder Stan Shih of Taiwan are great business geniuses. He urged entrepreneurs to use their brains and work hard, and appealed to politicians to allow more positive investment conditions to encourage true world-class entrepreneurship.
One of the best examples of a great Asian entrepreneur who had sown good karma was the early 20th-century Rubber King of Singapore and Malaysia Tan Kah Kee. He donated the bulk of his fortune for the construction of schools and colleges in his ancestral Jimei Village in south Fujian province. He is also legendary throughout the overseas Chinese diaspora for having built China’s first privately-funded Xiamen University. In the 1930s, during the Japanese military invasion of northern China, Tan Kah Kee served as chairman while Philippine Lumber King and China Bank founder Dee C. Chuan served as vice chairman of a Southeast Asian campaign to aid the war of resistance. Tan Kah Kee led a disciplined and spartan lifestyle devoid of unnecessary luxuries, but donated all his wealth to education and civic causes.
Today, his good karma has ensured his enduring good reputation and his grandson Lee Seng Wee, taipan of Singapore’s Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation and boss of the Great Eastern Life group, is still one of the world’s richest billionaires today.
In the 21st century, the world’s wealthiest billionaire, Bill Gates of Microsoft, has evolved from business icon to a worldwide role model as the most generous philanthropist on earth today. In Asian culture, what Bill Gates and other civic-minded entrepreneurs of the world are doing is planting the seeds of good karma for their enterprises, their reputations, their children and their future heirs. The concept of karma is almost the same as the Christian teaching of "what you sow, you shall reap."
Indeed, more than just mega-bucks and corporate conquests, what matters in history is the good karma we have accomplished in our earthly lives. It is tragic that in our society, there are tycoons who destroy their reputations by not honoring their business obligations or contracts to their customers, but hiding behind legal loopholes and political connections. There are also business people who irresponsibly peddle franchises. There are also those who prefer to cut corners and do immoral acts to get rich quick.
We must always heed this warning from the Bible: what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?