Interesting interview with Manny Pangilinan, the CEO of First Pacific, on the PumaPodcast, where he talks about his early life, business career and some of his regrets. Some notes below (for personal reference only, any mistakes in the transcription are mine).

He was born in 1946. His father was a banker, working for what eventually became Trader’s Royal Bank. Typical Filipino father – didn’t speak much, was a disciplinarian. They didn’t have a warm relationship, but he looked up to his father as a role model, even wanted to join the bank to follow in his footsteps, but his father consistently discouraged him from pursuing it. Upon reflection, he thinks his father didn’t want him to get involved in the politics of the business. He still remembers one Christmas Eve, where his father had to work late because some politician wanted some money and he had to call Marcos for approval, stay to open the vault, etc. He wasn’t too happy with that, was always against behest loans. His father wanted to shield him from that environment.

His mum was very lively and extroverted. Always told him he worked too hard and to get more rest. She and his dad were both very strict when it came to matters of integrity. He still remembers one incident when real estate prices had tanked after Aquino’s assassination in 1983. His dad retired in 1985, and he offered to buy them a house in South Forbes for ~PHP 5m Pesos, but his father refused, in part because he felt that people might think he had stolen money for the bank.

When he said he was going to HK for work in the mid-1970s, his father didn’t stop him. One thing he remembers is his father always deemed him to be too aggressive by nature (although as a banker, his father was innately conservative). That is probably part of the reason he was a lousy banker. Thinks you have to be aggressive, take risks in a more entrepreneurial career, that’s just the nature of the beast. He probably is more aggressive than others. Over time, however, he has noticed that younger generations of entrepreneurs in the Philippines have become more aggressive and growth-oriented, which he thinks is the engine of the economy.

In 1966, he left Manila for Philadelphia to do his MBA at Wharton. It was a fairly memorable period –  beginning of the hippie years, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War etc. Student protestors were very active on the Penn campus at the time, in part because there was a center at the university that produced some of the chemical weapons the US was using against the Vietnamese. It was a period of heightened awareness for him, with exposure to lots of new and different issues. He got caught up in some of it, and could certainly see the emotion behind the protestors. But it was ultimately an American situation and he was a foreigner in that land.

He enjoyed his time at Wharton, but thinks it was a mistake to go straight from college to business school. He didn’t know enough about life and business to get more out of the experience. He could do the sums (e.g. merger accounting), but didn’t know what it meant in real life, the impact on people and the business. His advice to younger professionals is to get some real life exposure and work experience before going to graduate school, so you have a better sense of what it is you want to do with your life.

He also thinks it is a good idea to get some experience abroad, if you can. Part of the reason he left the Philippines was that he found the atmosphere stifling. The extended family system provides a huge cocoon of comfort that stifles initiative. People always have someone to fall back on and, as a result, he thinks there is very little personal responsibility and accountability. The ability and inclination to take risks is also very low, which is a major impediment to entrepreneurship. You cannot really teach entrepreneurship without lifting the cultural barriers towards risk taking (reframing it as a good thing rather than a bad thing). He wanted to get out and prove to himself that he could become successful in his own right, which is what his father wanted for him. It was a big challenge initially because there were cultural differences working in HK and it was a new job in finance. He learnt a lot about finance from the Chinese staff he worked with in HK, from FX, to balancing treasury positions, lending practices, hedges. 

In the context of the Philippines, however, he thinks it is also important there is a reverse immigration policy to eventually attract and encourage overseas Filipinos to return home, contribute to the economy, create jobs and teach others what they have learnt abroad. That was always personally important to him and part of the reason he chose to return in the late 1990s. At the time, his firm could have made the PLDT investment and appointed a CEO, but he told the First Pacific board that he felt personally responsible for making it work (given the investment was close to US$749m, he had to make sure it worked!). But he could only do that by coming home and managing the company. He also wanted to prove himself in his own country. When he first went to HK in 1976, he gave himself 5 years, but that that got stretched to 22 years because the work was just very interesting for him. He still loves HK and it is like a second home to him. Coming back to the Philippines was a big challenge; he needed to relearn the culture and how things operated because he had been away so long. It was also a very different political landscape in the late 1990s versus the 1970s when he left.

What do people misunderstand about his life? You have to pay a heavy price for his kind of life, where you choose work before family. One of his deepest regrets was not to have his own family. He found it hard to handle the demands of the job and the demands of a family. Some people can do it, but there is always a compromise. In his case, he didn’t want to compromise, felt he was on a mission. His work before family approach has attracted a lot of criticism, but at the end of the day, that’s his standard, you either go along with it or you don’t.