Roni Tapia Merk: Dreaming – and acting on – the boldest dream

For people who know her, Roni Tapia-Merk is a go-getter, an achiever, a generous empathizer, everyone’s confidante, a comrade, comadre, soulmate and ego-booster.

Ronnie is inspired these days. Perhaps it’s because she recently moved into a sprawling love nest in Valley Golf with her husband, Richard, and daughter, Manna.

But, there is another reason for her positive mood. She recently met a very inspiring woman–Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, author of the book, Dream the Boldest Dream, which has been responsible for adding zest to the life and careers of countless people. Roni will also play host to Dr. Cole when she visits the country this week.

"It is those with the boldest dreams who awaken the best in all of us," says Cole in her book.

Dr. Cole is an anthropologist, educator, author, and spokesperson for women’s rights and diversity issues. She was the president of Atlanta’s Spelman College who made it one of the "best college buys" in the U.S. On her inauguration, Bill Cosby donated $20 million to the college, then considered the biggest single donation from an individual to an educational institution. She is also professor emerita of Emory University and recipient of no less than 47 honorary degrees.

Dr. Cole has lived a full life and built a career that has prompted several prestigious publications to call her an "American national treasure."

Roni, like her idol Dr. Cole, is not just a dreamer either. She worked to achieve her goals in life. Today, she is president of the International Association of Business Communicators. The vice president for corporate communications of the Bank of the Philippine Islands. She is also executive director of BPI Foundation, director of the Bank Marketing Association of the Philippines, and formerly vice president of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Her marriage to Richard Merk, the country’s "Prince of Jazz," deepened Roni’s artistic awareness.

Roni says that Dr. Cole is a member of the board of directors of Coca Cola Enterprises, Coke’s biggest bottler, and of the giant Merck Co. Inc., and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Cole was invited by Roni to address the national conference of the International Association of Business Communicators, Philippines, of which Roni is president. The conference is on Tuesday, Jan. 29, at the Hotel Intercon Ballroom.

The conference theme is "Communication in an Age of Disruptive Change." The topic is timely since there is so much loss of confidence in our government.

It could be a question of leadership, not only on the national level but also in one’s place of work and personal life. "Leadership is all about believing one hundred percent in yourself and learning to believe two hundred percent in the people you are asking to follow you," the book says.

Roni Tapia Merk’s Book List

I must have read, oh, maybe a hundred books in the past three years. I wish I could read more, but I have a job to do and that is my priority. At any rate, of all the paperbacks that came my way, only a handful are worth the time stolen from my busy schedule. It’s been said we could extract something good out of middling publications, but wouldn’t it be better if we could zero in on the best?

1. Dream The Boldest Dream by Johnnetta B. Cole: I will start off with something that is not exactly a book, but a compilation of aphorisms. Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole instills the wisdom gained over several decades of work as an educator, anthropologist, and advocate of women’s and minority rights. Dr. Cole, president of a college for women in Atlanta, Georgia, demonstrates the invincibility of the human spirit. It will be remembered that as late as the 1960s the State of Georgia was the epicenter of the racial war between whites and blacks.

Dr. Cole inspires, persuades, and cajoles the reader to be the best that she is capable of becoming.

2. The World In 2020 by Hamish McRae: Author Hamish McRae sees East Asia becoming the richest region in the world. A bolder prediction–and this is the underpinning theme–is that China will emerge as an economic behemoth and a military superpower, with Japan continuing to dominate trade and business not only in Asia but also in Europe.

The fall of the US is inevitable, McRae warns, unless it can get its citizens to shape up.

Apart from China and Japan, the countries that make up the Asian powerhouse team are South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. And it is now becoming clear that Thailand and, in its wake, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, will become the future manufacturing centers.

Only a generation ago, poverty was their common lot, and so the Chinese and Taiwanese, Japanese and Koreans worked hard and long to escape it. Today, they are compulsive savers.

3. Management Challenges Of The 21st Century by Peter Drucker: No reading is complete without a book on information technology. In his latest treatise, Management Challenges of the 21st Century, Peter Drucker lays down the premise for his main theme: that the knowledge workers it spawns will, "within a few decades, bring out fundamental changes in the very structure and nature of the economic system."

The author observes that on the theoretical level labor and capital are equal in importance. But labor – defined as knowledge workers – tends to disturb the equilibrium.

Unlike assembly line workers, knowledge workers are partners not subordinates, and the corporation had better get used to the idea. These modern-day workers demand that they be treated as equals.

Quality is important in the assembly line, but only for the purpose of keeping up with standard of production. The demand for quality is not to eliminate flaws in the operation but to cut them down to acceptable levels. It is quantity rather than quality that serves as the touchstone. The more products the better.

It’s different in knowledge work. Here, quality is the essence. To get the public to patronize the corporation’s products or services in the modern setting, quality is of paramount importance.

According to Drucker, the number of students in the class is not important in judging the performance of a teacher. The proper question to ask is, does the student learn anything? That, he stresses, is a quality question.

4. Driving Change by Jerry Yoram Wind and Jeremy Main: The corporation as we know it is dying, if not already dead. The ownership structure has changed, from a corporation owned by a few individuals who put up the capital, to a corporation owned by hundreds, even thousands of people.

In a society of people becoming increasingly aware of their rights and prerogatives, the corporation is required to look after the stakeholder interest rather than the narrow shareholder interest. As the word implies, stakeholder refers to all those who have a stake in the corporation: employees, suppliers, customers, and, of course, the shareholders themselves.

The authors, Jerry Yoram Wind and Jeremy Main, note that some social scientists even maintain that the corporation operates on a franchise granted by the people–a franchise that can be withdrawn if the people feel they are not benefiting from it. Others go so far as to suggest that the benefits of incorporation should be reserved only for socially responsible companies, with taxes reduced or eliminated. In return, the corporation is expected to make employees partners in the business, promote flexible work schedules, and ensure a safe workplace.

William Saffire, the New York Times columnist, fulminates that "the ‘stakeholder’ has replaced ‘proletariat’ in the lexicon of the left." He states that the phenomenon arises from the fact that with socialism having failed, the left is introducring a new socialism under the guise of protecting the public.

Another holdout of the old economic school, Herbert Stein, argues that requiring corporations "to solve major social problems...would be a wasteful diversion from their most important function," which is to put people and resources to work most efficiently.

But Saffire and Stein are fighting a losing battle. The corporation with its structure inexorably changed is here to stay. And the stakeholders have already taken the upper hand, and they will not easily give up their gains. They will hound a company that appears to exploit labor or condone sexual harassment in the workplace or degrade the environment or foist products of shoddy workmanship upon the public.

5. Soul Of A Business by Tom Chappell: In this book, Tom Chappell, CEO of Tom’s of Maine, a company that has made itself a leader in natural health care products, tells us how he, moving past quantitative research, listens to people, not as impersonal groups but as family members, friends, and neighbors.

A theology student after creating a successful company, Chappell does not compromise the company’s philosophy upon which the company has been founded just to make more money by using synthetic materials. To this man, only natural ingredients are to be used in his soaps, shampoos, hair rinses, shaving creams, bar soaps, mouthwash, and skin lotions.

He notes that his wife and children are deathly afraid of synthetics – they cause cancer – so why should he poise upon unsuspecting customers what they themselves would not use?

The company is in business to serve society, with profit only a means to keep it in business, to enable it to expand so that it can manufacture more products for more people. Although it is only a secondary consideration, the money keeps pouring in, thus validating the wisdom of the company dictum: do well by doing good.

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Book of the Week: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. A great read despite his being disinvited to Oprah. Available at all National Book Stores and Powerbooks branches.

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Magazine of the Week: Wallpaper, distributed by Emerald Headway.

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Your comments and suggestions are always welcome at readclub@aol.com.