Rudy Ang who was recently appointed as Dean of Ateneo de Manila’s John Gokongwei School of Management (JGSOM), has by no means led a conventional life. A scholar since his grade school days, Rudy holds an MBA from Boston College (which he completed as Class Valedictorian) as well as a double major in Business Management Honors and Communication Arts from the Ateneo (from which he graduated with Magna Cum Laude and departmental honors). He also practices what he preaches: As managing director of a company of which he was a founding member, he is in charge of several enterprises, spanning food retail and franchise management, real estate and education.
Rudy envisions the JGSOM as a center for excellence in business education in the region. Recognizing the need for changes that must be implemented to realize this vision, he has pioneered various programs such as the School of Management Business Accelerator (SOMBA), Junior Term Abroad Program, hosting of the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) University, the Family Business Breakfast Roundtable, and the Business Leadership Forum.
Here Rudy talks more about his plans and the challenges he faces as the Dean of the JGSOM.
Why did you decide to enter the education sector?
I wasn’t planning to. I was originally a Communication Arts major. Then I was told that I might not earn enough to make a living. So I took Management, fully intending to go into business. But I was invited to join the faculty by the chairman of the Management Department then. I was told that since I was young, I should not be in a hurry to make my first million pesos; that there’ll be time enough to make money in the future. Why don’t I do some service work first? So I said, "Okay, that sounds reasonable. I’d teach for two years before I worked at something maybe more lucrative." But God works in strange ways. It’s been 20 years now and I’m still here. I started teaching full time in Xavier School and part-time for Ateneo. Eventually I resigned from Xavier and came here to Ateneo to teach full time.
What are the strongest qualities of the Ateneo JGSOM?
First, I think we’re very lucky that we’re able to attract a lot of the best raw material. Some of the very best high school graduates come here. If you have really good students coming in – naturally, you have greater chances of having good output product. But one of the most important things we have here is our focus on values formation that distinguishes us from schools that focus only on skills and techniques. Sometimes other people criticize us and say that we don’t teach enough technical courses. But our feeling is – if we had to give up more of the formative courses to put in more technical courses, we’d rather not have those additional technical courses. Techniques can be learned on the job, but the formation of the person is much more important. This is a great strength I feel that we have.
How would you compare it to DLSU, UP and other schools’ business programs?
With UP, the contrast is very obvious. There is no spiritual formation in the UP curriculum. We have many more theology, philosophy, and literature classes. A very objective and verifiable difference we have is that DLSU’s programs are often times very functionally based. BSc. Major in Marketing, BSc. Major in Accounting… We have no such functional area courses. All of our management courses are general management courses. Even Management Engineering (ME) is not a functional area of management. There are two reasons for this. One, we don’t think the very young person coming in knows exactly what he is going to do after graduation so it would be foolish for that person to specialize so early. You can specialize at work and then eventually do masters in a specific field that you want. The second and more important difference is that we focus on being entrepreneurial. For you to be an entrepreneur, you can’t just know a lot about one thing. You have to know a lot about many things to run the show. This is our philosophy.
We have six minors. Students in any of our programs can complete a minor area of concentration as part of their degree. But to make entire degree programs – I don’t think so. Even the Ateneo’s entire philosophy is liberal arts. General, holistic formation of the person.
Do you think that the SOM produces students who are competitive not just locally, but internationally as well?
Definitely. Just one look at our alumni profile will show you that many of them have over time become country and regional managers. Many of them have moved overseas and assumed very important positions there. Some of the companies they have set up are now competing with regional and global players. But we’re not just sitting back and saying, "go out and compete." We’re trying to help them become more global. For instance – this year, we launched our junior term abroad program. For the very first time, 23 of our students went to various countries and spent a semester abroad. It is not unusual that students go abroad. We’ve always had scholarships available to certain partner universities. The reason why many students choose not to go abroad is that it will delay graduation by a year. Now, we’ve worked with the other schools here and created a special semester for people going abroad. We identify sophomores who have opted to spend a semester abroad, we screen them, we select the best among them, we place them in schools, and then we have a special school year just for them. Now, for the first time, we have large numbers of students spending time abroad. In order to make our students globally competitive, they have to gain an international perspective.
Does Ateneo subsidize the tuition?
Ateneo does not spend anything but it taps its international exchange partners so that our students are able to go without paying tuition. Almost all of them have some sort of subsidy. It’s still expensive – students still have to budget around $5,000 to $6,000 for the semester, but that’s much, much less than they would spend if they went on their own.
What schools have you partnered with?
Right now we have programs with the University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University. There’s a French university called Essca which has a campus in Budapest and France. We have the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, the Hong Kong Baptist University, Waseda University and Kyushu University in Japan. We’re also tapping our Jesuit network to increase the total number of partners. I didn’t want to announce this yet, but we are trying to see if we can have some arrangement with the Wharton undergraduate business school. Our only edge there is that so many of our alumni have done so well in Wharton.
I heard that the SOM is promoting a new – more professional and dynamic image. Is this true?
Some years ago, when we were designing the SOM, we asked ourselves: What’s our vision for the SOM? We decided that the type of student we want to produce should have certain qualities – ethical, global in outlook, technically proficient, comfortable with the use of technology, etc.
First, we do not just want to have national recognition. We want to have regional recognition as a center for excellence in undergraduate business education. Second, we want our school to have an impact on the community outside the school not just through our students, but as a school. In the past, we focused on doing a good job with our students and our contribution to the country would be through what our students would eventually achieve. Simply put, that’s not good enough anymore.
For example, you probably have seen an ad for our Business Leadership Forum to be held at the InterCon Hotel. This is the fourth we’re holding. This is our school’s contribution to the business community. We invite CEOs and COOs of successful Philippine companies and ask them to share their success stories with others in the business community. We also have a family business breakfast round table, limited to 50-60 participants each time. We’ve already had two sessions of that; we have four more planned for the year. We are doing a lot of outreach activities that are geared towards helping the business community directly as an institution. Establishing regional presence – we’re hosting in the JGSOM something called ASEF University (ongoing until tomorrow, Feb. 14). Thirty five to 38 international students from all over Asia and Europe are here and we have 12 speakers – two of them Filipinos – from all over the world. We bidded for this. It’s held twice a year; once in Europe and once in Asia. We’re very pleased to be the fourth host in Asia. Previous hosts were top-tier schools like Peking University, National University of Singapore, and Chulalongkorn University. The JG Summit Group has been very generous in supporting us. It’s something like an International Youth Camp.
Were there any adverse reactions to the dress code you implemented in the School of Management?
The dress code is a hot issue among the students right now. The dress code is another part of what we feel is formation. It’s not so much image necessarily that we are trying to project – or that our students have to dress a certain way. It’s more about self-discipline and a sense of propriety. The dress code is one manifestation of these values. Some of our students come to school looking as if they have just rolled out of bed and came to class. This is not just unpleasant to see, but is a sign of disrespect for their classmates, teachers, and the rest of the community.
Can you explain more about the Business Accelerator Program?
This program is something we’re really proud of and we are hoping will take off. Students all have to do entrepreneurial projects in senior year but many of the projects they do are small-time because they have so little time to do it. How do we get our students to be more global in their thinking, to think bigger and look at businesses that are scalable? We said: Let’s give them more time, let’s give them support, let’s give them facilities, and let’s attract what we hope our some of our best students to enter the program. Our dream is that our best students will leave Ateneo not competing for the jobs that are out there, but rather they will go out and create jobs for other people. Our students have skills, talents, and resources available to them that are not available to others. They should go out and do more for this country by generating employment. This is the whole point why the JGSOM is primarily entrepreneurial in its focus. Many of our students will not actually set up businesses, but if their whole attitude in what they do is entrepreneurial – looking for innovative ways to do things, getting things done instead of pointing the finger of blame at others – that’s a big contribution to this country.
How diverse is the student population of the JGSOM?
In general, Ateneo’s tuition fees dictate that most of its students come from upper to middle-income families. But 15 to 16 percent of the Ateneo student body is on financial scholarship. The fees are not affordable to most people, which is very unfortunate. However, if you compare our student body now to the student body 10 years ago, you’ll see that there are many more feeder schools and a lot more students from the provinces. There’s also a preferential option for provincial students. Entrance test cutoff scores are a little lower and scholarships are given more freely to try and do some sort of social engineering to bring in more underprivileged students. We’re also taking on more activities wherein we intervene more directly in the outside community – one positive side effect of this would be that more people would think of us a possible university choice.
What other changes do you plan to implement in the JGSOM?
We’d like the school to move towards generating more research. We’ve never been known as a research-oriented organization. Creating a more research-oriented culture is something we’d like to go into. This year, we came out with the Loyola Schools Review for the School of Management. It’s a research journal for the university. This March, we are launching the Ateneo Student Business Review, highlighting student research. We’re also starting to join more and more international competitions.
How do we ease the country’s problem of brain drain?
If we can just create more opportunities for people here, fewer people would leave. I don’t think we can sit back and blame the government and say, "do this, do that" so that we’ll stay. We have to do our share. Ateneo experiences its share of brain drain. We send some of our best faculty abroad and they don’t come back. But some of us have come back. I have some very talented faculty here. Working with people like these – we hope, can help to create opportunities to make this country more attractive. It would be great if the government did more, but even if they didn’t, I think we can make some difference ourselves. The SOMBA is precisely the sort of thing that will keep people with resources from leaving. And since we are generating employment for people without resources, even these people don’t have to leave.
How was the education sector affected by the recent economic and political upsets?
Look at our list of uncollectible accounts. Even in the Ateneo, many schools are experiencing a decline in applications. The number of applicants used to grow tremendously each year. Now, it’s not growing as fast. We’re not able to collect from many of the students, even in a school like ours. Can you imagine schools that have lower-income or middle-income students? The education sector has been very much affected by people choosing not to continue their studies. Every private school relies on cooperation with outside sectors to run its programs. Many of the traditional donors are also finding it difficult to be as generous today as they were before. The availability of resources is affected. And of course, the environment that our students go into is very different. We have to respond by making our curriculum here appropriate for the context that our students will be going out into.
What are the greatest challenges that you face as the dean of the SOM?
The greatest challenge is attracting qualified human resource to help us get our work done. We are very successful in recruiting some of the best students in the country. We have been fortunate enough to be blessed with many good faculty. But if we had more full-time faculty members on board, there’s so much more we can do. A lot of people keep saying that our problem is money. In fact, I don’t think that the problem is money. With the right people, we can get the money. We can do educational entrepreneurship. There are all sorts of activities we can do that would provide a real service to the community but can also generate income for us. We try to recruit our top students and we have been successful. We try to attract some of our very best students while they’re young but then we have to send them for graduate degrees. Not all of them come back. We have a gap in the middle. The 30s age group is not present in the faculty. Our salaries are simply not competitive – the political and economic environment is not terribly attractive either.
What do you think are the most important characteristics one must have to succeed in business?
A good educational background is a must, but how do you define good? Good does not necessarily mean the most prominent school, although that helps. Good does not necessarily mean the best grades, although that may also help. For business, I think what we really need to develop in people is the attitude of opportunity seeking, innovation, and persistence. However, having skills and techniques without the right values and personal formation is useless. If you are not self-confident, if you are not someone who’s a go-getter, if you are not someone with vigor and vitality – it’s hard to get anywhere. I always tell the students in the Honors program – the most important thing you leave here with is not your degree. The degree can only help you get your first job. The most important thing you get here is the training to always do your best in all that you do; the training to be diligent and not give up when things get tough. Ability to work with people from different backgrounds, ability to walk to someone supposedly famous and important and not be afraid to say, "Can I interview you?" A good pedigree and connections will help. But ultimately the most successful people are the ones who have the right formation. And just as it’s difficult to define good, you have to define success. There’s a whole long discussion of what success really is.
The question I’m always asked by High-4 Students is "Which is the best school or which is the best program?" The gifted students always ask, "Which is better — Management Honors or ME?" The fourth year College students looking at job offers always ask, "Which is the better company — Unilever or PnG? What is the best offer?" My response is always: It is a fruitless exercise to say what is best and to try to say what is best outside of your own personal context. What is best for you is different from what is best for others. Only you can really answer what is best. The only thing I can do for you is ask you the right questions because your own answers to those questions will help you decide what is best. The most disappointing thing I’ve encountered is when one of our most outstanding graduates came to me and asked: "Sir, should I work for Unilever or Shell? I’ve been leaning towards Shell because they’re going to pay me more." For someone with so much talent, more doors are open. And one’s basis for choosing which door to enter surely should be based on something more important in the long run than how much the salary is going to be.
And it should be the same for High School students. There’s no best course. Fine Arts can be the best course for you. It depends on what you like to do and what you are able to do. You have to match your interests and abilities. This is my advice for all young people. Know yourself so that you’ll know what choices to make.