Jaza bags business leader award

MANILA, Philippines - Ayala Corp. chairman and CEO Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala was given the Asia Talent Management Award at the 9th CNBC Asia Business Leaders Awards held on Nov. 25 at the Grand Ballroom of Capella Singapore.

CNBC’s Asia Business Leaders Awards acknowledge exceptional CEOs in the region. Recipients of the awards are considered visionaries behind today’s outstanding businesses and recognized for their strength, innovation, ingenuity, knowledge and foresight, values that the award-giving body believes are imperative to creating successful businesses in the global economy.

The Asia Talent Management Award is given to the business leader who is deemed to value his company’s workforce and is committed to supporting, developing and retaining talent, as well as nurturing the next generation of leaders.

Zobel told The STAR that he accepted the award not so much for himself but on behalf of all the men and women, officers and staff of Ayala Corp. 

“When I look across the group and at the people we have working here, there’s a tremendous diversity of talents,” said Zobel, who is personally involved in supporting and nurturing the next generation of leaders in Ayala.

“A large part of the job is to create the right environment so they can all do what they’re good at doing and come together to create something better. We strongly believe that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Zobel, the only Filipino honoree this year, was acclaimed for his personal involvement in supporting and nurturing leadership within the company.

“Mr. Zobel identifies and mentors key leadership talent within Ayala,” his citation reads. “His personal philosophy toward leadership development is that he has ‘a direct responsibility as a leader to see others after us succeed in developing our institutions, keeping them relevant in changing times and making them progressive forces that contribute to the nation’s welfare’.”

Among the talent management programs he was noted for were an Ayala group-wide talent review process and the leadership acceleration program in conjunction with Harvard University.

Zobel, now 51, assumed leadership at Ayala as president in 1995 and chairman and chief executive in 2006.

“I took over leadership at Ayala, with my brother Fernando, at a relatively young age,” said Zobel, the seventh generation of his family to lead the country’s oldest conglomerate. Fernando currently sits as the conglomerate’s president and chief operating officer.

Ayala pioneered Philippine real estate development, banking, and insurance.

Over the past decade, it has entered into other strategic industries including telecommunications, water distribution and electronics manufacturing.

Zobel’s leadership style is democratic and one which seeks to motivate. He knows that “learning, understanding, and motivating individuals and teams are very important drivers for any leader.”

“We maintain a very open culture of communication at the senior management level both in formal management committee meetings as well as regular informal group gatherings where issues, thoughts are discussed and challenged in a healthy, engaging dialogue,” he added.

Over the years, Zobel has been credited for making Ayala one of the best managed companies in the country and in the region.

“None of us have all the answers to the challenges we face but I feel we can avoid problems by having structures that encourage self-reflection,” he said. “Self-reflection can be achieved on many fronts but we all need a check and balance, be it at the board level or at the customer level.”

He said that encouraging feedback and having the chance to reflect on it are important basic management principles, adding, “Remaining true to what one does best remains key to success. It does not mean one cannot reinvent oneself.”

Zobel knows that achieving iconic status in the Philippines is not enough in a fast-changing business environment. Under his watch, he plans to steer the increasingly diversified conglomerate towards new investments and markets beyond the group’s shores.

“We have to tap in more forcefully into global opportunities,”  he pointed out.

Just as important, Zobel is making sure that Ayala’s core businesses continue to perform well and that it further strengthens its leadership position in its own backyard by “being number one or a strong number two” player in real estate, financial services and telecommunications.   

“Finding solutions to design, finance and then implement these opportunities in the market and see them contribute to the national economic agenda of our country has been very fulfilling,” he said.

In 2007, Zobel became the first Filipino to be awarded the prestigious Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award.

“The 9th annual CNBC Asia Business Leaders Awards is our way of celebrating and recognizing business leaders who have shaped the Asian economy, and who will continue to lead corporate Asia forward,” said Satpal Brainch, president and managing director of CNBC in Asia Pacific.

Other awardees this year were A.M. Naik, chairman and managing director of Larsen and Toubro Ltd. (India) for CNBC Asian Business Leader Award; Sir Gordon Wu, chairman of Hopewell Holdings (Hong Kong) for lifetime achievement; Yancey Hai, CEO of Delta Electronics (Taiwan) for innovation; Tan Sri Dato’ Francis Yeoh, managing director of YTL Corp. BHD (Malaysia) for corporate social responsibility; and Ajai Chowdhry, chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems (India), who received the most votes by CNBC’s viewers in Asia Pacific.

In 2004, Gerardo Ablaza Jr., CEO of Manila Water Corp., won the CNBC Asian Business Leadership Award when he was still with Globe Telecom. Both Globe and Manila Water are Ayala Group companies.

According to CNBC, the winners were chosen under stringent, objective, and transparent criteria, judged by an independent panel led by CNBC’s knowledge partner the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and research partner Development Dimensions International. The panel included respected management strategists, academics, corporate personalities and CNBC’s executives. Judging was done in three phases, starting from a review of quantitative data to select top performing companies across Asia, face-to-face interviews to assess leadership qualities, leading to the final selection of winners.

Candidates were evaluated based on a combination of criteria including the companies’ financial performance, creativity, innovation and social responsibility and their ability to create short-term advantage, long-term value and competitive edge.