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The most expensive sentence in Philippine boardrooms this year will be: "We'll deal with sustainability reporting next year. "With Memorandum Circular No. 16, the SEC has made PFRS S1 and S2, Tier 1 companies are already inside their first reporting period. And two years after each tier's adoption, independent limited assurance over Scope 1 and 2 emissions becomes compulsory. Here is what I keep seeing in my conversations with boards: the challenge is rarely willingness. It i

Most technology failures aren't technology failures. They're change management failures wearing a technical excuse. At Chevron, I was tasked with leading Management of Change for the Philippines - awareness, training, and assurance to meet Chevron's global MOC standards. That mandate taught me something most technology rollouts today ignore: change isn't a phase you run after deployment. It's a discipline you build before it, with its own standards, its own owners, and its ow

Philippines just crossed into upper-middle-income status. Ask the middle class how that feels, and 68% will tell you: anxious. FWD Philippines’ Financial Confidence Report 2026 surveyed 1,050 middle-class households earning ₱25,000–₱149,999 a month. The findings should sit uncomfortably with every business leader in this country. 74% say rising costs are straining their budgets. 91% of millennials are supporting aging parents while raising their own children. 40% of Gen X dou

The most expensive mistake in enterprise AI right now isn't buying the wrong technology. It's assuming the technology is the problem at all. PYMNTS Intelligence just surveyed senior technology executives at US enterprises with $1 billion+ in annual revenue. When asked what limits AI performance - organisational readiness or the technology itself - 71% pointed at their own organisations. Only 11% blamed the technology. A 7-to-1 verdict. And here's the detail most coverage mis

Most executive profiles start in the boardroom. This one starts on two wheels. Our Founder & CEO, Yen Roxas, was recently featured on Manibela of UNTV for an owner's review of his Harley-Davidson Heritage Classic but the conversation went well beyond the machine. He spoke about what the ride really represents: 🏍️ Brotherhood and leadership. As Regional Director of Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) Philippines, Yen led 32 riders on a 17-day, 4,400+ km, 6 Roll-On Roll-Off ferries,

Only 2 of 17 Sustainable Development Goals. That's the number the Philippine Statistics Authority put on the table this week - and it should stop every boardroom conversation about "doing our part" on sustainability. Ten goals show progress since 2015. But progress isn't the target - pace is. Of 99 measurable indicators, only 23 are moving fast enough to land by 2030. Fifty-one need to accelerate. Twenty-five are moving backward, including health outcomes and urban resilienc

Two data points from this year should sit uncomfortably next to each other. AvePoint's 2026 State of AI report found that 88.4% of organisations suffered at least one AI agent-related security incident in the past year - data leakage and manipulation by untrusted inputs the leading culprits. Around the same time, Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April - four months in, after rolling out AI coding tools to roughly 5,000 engineers and gamifying usage

The Philippines just crossed a threshold three decades in the making. GNI per capita: $4,850. The World Bank's upper-middle-income line: $4,636. After 39 years as a lower-middle-income economy, we're officially in a new category. The numbers behind it are real. GDP growth averaging 5.8% a year since 2021. Broad-based - not one sector carrying the rest, but gains across industries. That's the kind of growth that's harder to engineer and more durable when you get it. But I've s

Most boards still file AI and ESG under two different reports, reviewed by two different committees, owned by two different teams. That split is starting to cost them. The friction is real. AI is a heavy industry, AI the energy and water behind every model run sit uneasily next to a net-zero commitment. Black-box decisioning collides with governance's demand for explainability. And productivity gains that displace people don't sit comfortably next to a social license to opera

This afternoon at the Philippine Chamber of Commerce Inc HQ, economist Calixto Chikiamco, Jr. of the Foundation for Economic Freedom walked a room of business leaders through 80 years of Philippine path dependence. From the Bell Trade Act of 1946 to the de-industrialization charts of 2024. From Manila as the Pearl of the Orient to the most concentrated economy in Asia. Slide by slide. Decade by decade. Crisis by crisis. One image stopped the room: Manila in the 1950s next to

The timing couldn’t be more deliberate. The Philippines is accelerating its digital infrastructure buildout. Smart cities, AI industrial hubs, emergency response networks - all of them run on resilient connectivity. Israel has built some of the world’s most battle-tested network technology. This forum was a serious conversation about closing that gap. The afternoon included a roundtable with industry leaders - a candid, high-caliber exchange on where Philippine digital infra

Most books on AI tell you what the technology can do. This one asks what you need to become. I just finished AI-Powered Leadership by Silberman, Maltzmann, Abramo, and Kanabar - and what struck me wasn't the frameworks. It was the honest premise beneath them: that the biggest barrier to AI adoption in organizations isn't the algorithm. It's the leader. After 29 years running operations across Asia Pacific with Chevron, and now advising C-suite executives on AI integration thr

I just finished David Epstein's Range, and it crystallized something I've believed for years but rarely said outright: the world rewards specialists for visible, narrow excellence - but it's generalists who solve the problems that actually matter. Epstein's argument is simple but radical. In "wicked" domains - ones with shifting rules, ambiguous feedback, and no fixed playbook - breadth of experience beats depth of specialization. Sampling widely before committing isn't a det

$10 billion. 4,000 acres. A 99-year lease. A US State Department agreement in the works. This isn't a feasibility study. This is the Philippines being handed a seat at the table of the global AI industrial order and the question is whether we're ready to sit in it. BCDA President Joshua Bingcang said something that deserves to be quoted in every boardroom in this country: "The point is you have to grab this kind of opportunity. Otherwise they will have to scout in Vietnam or

June 12, 1898. Kawit, Cavite. A flag raised. A nation declared. 128 years later, the question isn't just how far we've come - it's what we're doing with the freedom we inherited. For me, the answer is simple: build. Serve. Lead with purpose. Build enterprises that put Filipino talent and Filipino technology on the world map. Serve the nation not just clients. Lead in ways that leave something behind worth inheriting. That's what independence asks of every generation. Not just

Here's the honest truth about most AI strategy sessions at the executive level: They're designed to make the vendor look credible. Not to make you more capable of leading. So leaders leave informed but not equipped. They can repeat the talking points. They can't make the calls. That gap - between AI awareness and AI leadership is the most expensive capability problem in organizations right now. And almost no one is naming it. AI leadership isn't about understanding the techno

I spent part of this week reviewing the MMDA's Oplan Metro Yakal Plus - the official contingency plan for a 7.2-magnitude earthquake along the West Valley Fault. Most people will never read it. They'll encounter it as a viral social post with a dramatic headline and move on. That's the gap that worries me. The plan itself is sound. Four self-sustaining quadrants. Pre-positioned commanders. Designated evacuation corridors. Golf courses repurposed as emergency hubs and helicopt

The Philippines is sitting on something rare and most of us haven't fully reckoned with what that means. Three inputs the global AI hardware stack can't function without: Critical minerals that power semiconductors and batteries. A large, English-proficient, technically trainable workforce. And a geographic position inside the first-island chain at the exact moment the world is rewiring its supply chains. That convergence doesn't happen by accident. It also doesn't last. The

The Philippines is now the 13th signatory to the Pax Silica Declaration. Most people will read that as a trade headline. I read it as a strategic inflection point and a clarifying moment for what we should be building right now. The Declaration isn't just about semiconductors. It's about who gets to shape the architecture of AI computing infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and critical mineral supply chains for the next several decades. The signatories - Australia, Finlan

Most organizations don't have an AI problem. They have a judgment problem. They adopt the technology. They build the dashboards. They run the pilots. And then they discover that AI amplifies whatever is already true about how they lead - their blind spots, their short-term mind-set, their gaps in governance. This is why "leading with AI" is not a technology strategy. It is a leadership posture. It means placing AI at the front of your strategic thinking, not as a cost-reducti