Joecon and his Asean legacy

This week, the Philippines will host one of the most important international events in a decade: the 48th ASEAN Summit. It has been a fast and demanding lead-up, not only for those of us in the private sector-led ASEAN Business Advisory Council (ASEAN-BAC), but also for our counterparts across the Philippine government.

To align with the momentum of the Summit, we scheduled our own ASEAN-BAC council meetings around it, with an efficient hop over the weekend from Cebu – where the ASEAN Summit will take place – to Boracay, where ASEAN-BAC will convene. I am genuinely excited to bring colleagues and guests from throughout the region to these places. I’ve spent enough time sailing the Visayas to know they are in for a truly special experience.

Yet amid the meetings, logistics and the steady rhythm of diplomatic engagement, I can feel the spirit of my late father, Jose “Joecon” Concepcion Jr., guiding me step by step. You see, he helped plant the seeds of what would eventually become ASEAN-BAC through his pioneering work with the ASEAN Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

His belief was simple but prescient: a private sector-led regional organization could promote cooperation in a way that would propel the Philippines toward industrialization. In the 1980s and 1990s, he and the prominent leaders of Philippine business understood that the ASEAN region offered strength through numbers. Instead of treating each market as an island, they saw the advantage of allowing countries to identify their economic strengths, align collective efforts accordingly and then build mutual support through trade and interdependence. In their view, one ASEAN was THE strategy.

Looking back now, the idea feels even more relevant. We are living through global economic and geopolitical turbulence, where supply chain resilience has become the language of every boardroom and the concern of every investor. In that environment, I find myself returning to how right Joecon was to imagine a unified ASEAN market as not only beneficial, but necessary – an approach that can strengthen regional competitiveness while helping each country move forward in step with the others.

As he often did, Joecon approached the matter methodically. He studied other regional economic alliances – such as the Latin American Free Trade Association, the Andean Group and the European Economic Community (the EEC, which later became a foundation for what is now known as the European Union). He believed ideas only become durable when they are pursued with persistence. So he organized meetings, encouraged business leaders to join the cause and ensured follow-through.

The focus and dogged pursuit of the idea eventually earned him the nickname “Mr. ASEAN,” a title I still hear when I meet his contemporaries and even younger colleagues who never worked directly with him but have heard the stories. Joecon never did anything halfway. That intensity was contagious. The impossible did not discourage him; it challenged him. One of his favorite songs, after all, was “The Impossible Dream.”

He also had a distinctive working style: he wanted to cram as much as he could into the time available to him. My younger brother, Bernie, often accompanied him on foreign trips and during flights, while everyone else was settling into sleep, Joecon would be tearing pages from newspapers and magazines, collecting information on anything that caught his interest. Those clippings became part of his personal reference library meant to keep him informed on everything from computer accessories to oil prices.

But what I think truly made Joecon different was his concern for the social dimensions of broader economic problems. At the time he was building up RFM and defending it from would-be marauders, when the peso was weakening, dollars were scarce and smuggling was rampant – Joecon looked at those issues and asked what they meant for people. There were politics, of course, and people often loved to debate the political angle. But Joecon always circled back to the human consequences: how those “high-minded” arguments in boardrooms and government halls affected the common tao.

Over time, people recognized the hard-nosed businessman for what he really was: a humanitarian.

One story from the family that still gets retold is about an incident during a PBA game. Sarsi – then an RFM team – was playing against the Jaworski-led Añejo, and because basketball hero Jaworski had such a strong following, the crowd was overwhelmingly Añejo. Joecon got carried away and ended up cheering for the opposing team. Someone teased him, telling him to “move to the Añejo side” of the coliseum. He apparently took the suggestion seriously, or perhaps the moment got the better of him, because he found himself at a hotdog stand, buying hotdogs, with no cash on him. Someone recognized him and offered to pay. When he returned and told us about it, we asked who the kind stranger was who had paid for the hotdogs. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

Just as important to him was leaving a legacy of a prayerful and compassionate family. In one of his final letters to the family, he instructed us to carry forward the Concepcion legacy with faith and warmth – telling us, in essence, to love Jesus, to inspire one another and to help the poor.

So as we enter this week – this significant week of the ASEAN Summit – I carry more than the agenda items and meeting schedules. I carry a perspective. Joecon’s vision reminds me that regional cooperation is not only about the coordination of policies or alignment of markets. It is ultimately about building the conditions for a region where people can live better, businesses can grow responsibly and nations can grow together, leaving no country behind.

That is the spirit I want ASEAN-BAC to bring into the room: practical, persistent work – yes; but also a social conscience and a compassionate commitment. And if Joecon has taught me anything, it is this: dreams become real when you act on them consistently, and when your drive is guided by values that outlast the moment.