Federico R. Lopez, executive and CEO of First Philippine Holdings Inc. (FPH), First Gen, and Energy Development Corp., is the current year's Management Man of the Year, a lofty honor given by the Management Association of the Philippines.
The latest past awardees were Fernando Zobel de Ayala, John Gokongwei Jr. furthermore, Tessie Sy Coson.
The 59-year-old Lopez, referred to close partners and companions as Piki, is one of the country's staunchest promoters for spotless and sustainable power. He was picked "for enthusiastically pushing for the nation's progress to a low-carbon economy through his different supports to proactively address the hopeless harm of environmental change."
Here is his acknowledgment discourse:
It's huge that you're giving me this honor precisely 20 years after the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) gave the equivalent on my dad, Oscar Lopez.
Nobody has impacted me and what First Philippine Holdings (FPH) is today more than him: his qualities, discipline, love for nature, zing for learning, his enthusiasm for social equity and his energy for wellbeing and health. He's a man of not many words and once in a while ever shows his endorsement (just his dissatisfaction, and on that we'd get an earful) yet he drove us effectively through his effortlessness and his model.
I'm doubly regarded today since he and my Mom are here distantly to impart this second to me.
Let me share with you that the day after the information on your Management Man of the Year (MMY) grant, my significant other Monina, my child Robert, and I were as yet in dismay, declining to praise given it might have been a mix-up or a "Steve Harvey Miss Universe" second which may in any case be withdrawn.
You'll locate this odd yet in spite of the glow I've generally experienced from individual money managers and the business associations I have a place with, I've generally felt like an outcast or exception in the realm of Philippine business.
Part of this probably originates from a waiting misgiving I've held that I never completed my Harvard MBA. After I rashly left grounds in 1988 and joined my dad in the assignment of remaking a close bankrupt FPH, I idea I'd re-visitation of complete my investigations following 3 to 4 years in the business world.
I never did.
This was likely on the grounds that the circumstances I experienced at work persuaded me that drenching in the realm of genuine business was preferred for my advancement over intruding on it with one more year of school. I never settled whether I'd made the best decision and gone through the most recent 33 years without the three letters "MBA" embellished on my CV and contemplating whether I'd recently wasted an open door not accessible to many.
After today, because of MAP, the three letters "MMY" more than compensate for that and resolve this incomplete objective in my psyche unequivocally.
To be completely forthright, albeit I read a ton and have consistently savored the way toward learning new things both in broadness and inside and out, formal tutoring in my childhood never functioned admirably for me. While I was never the raucous child at the rear of the class, my Zen-like quiet during dull class addresses gave a false representation of a psyche that was occupied and as of now dashing in numerous ways toward future life plans and undertakings.
Obviously, such appeared in unremarkable evaluations and scholastic battles. A conclusion at that point may have labeled me with a learning incapacity; the more edified today may rather have accurately distinguished this as a learning distinction.
Whatever it was, the world I generally felt so comfortable with was the universe of water. I grew up a serious swimmer and my shortage of scholastic distinctions was route made up for by the bounty of serious swimming awards and records broken.
Water was forever my element,which later meant an affection for the ocean. I sadly concede however that in my prior days as a scuba jumper, I was additionally an ardent lance angler and we'd legitimize this by asserting that we'd skewer just what we'd eat. At that point one day while spearfishing off the Verde Island Passage in Batangas, known as the "Focal point of the Center of Marine Biodiversity in the World", I was drawn closer at short proximity by a singular 14-foot Great Hammerhead Shark whose interest was energized by my skewering movement.
Luckily, I wasn't on this present shark's menu and had no bloodied fish to shield against this massive hunter so he nonchalantly left in the wake of choosing we didn't have anything energizing to bring to the table. Yet, at seeing something this wonderful, this incredible, and this excellent, my steel-shaft speargun didn't just feel like a toothpick pointing at a shielded tank yet additionally that it didn't have a place there.
I resigned the speargun always after that jump and traded it for a submerged camera all things being equal. My following a very long time with a submerged camera carried me much closer to the ocean I had grown up cherishing and at last carried me eye to eye with a comparative estimated Tiger shark in Fiji. There were at first just two of us jumpers submerged when this beast estimated shark started revolving around and his very presence avoided the wide range of various Bull sharks, Gray Reef sharks, Nurse sharks, Whitetip, and Blacktip sharks that had been with us the past four days. That ordering air characterized precisely what a pinnacle hunter was.
In any case, what I found in that cageless experience with a shark, notoriously marked among the three generally liable for assaults on people, was something totally not the same as what I had anticipated. He was rarely threatening or startling, however more wary, delicate, and even energetic. As he straightforwardly moved toward me unexpectedly, I could feel his nose skim tenderly a foot or so over my head, kind of playing with the air pockets ascending from my controller. Naturally, I delicately lifted my gloved fingers to contact his underside as he passed.
At that point, many years of dread roused by the film "Jaws" essentially evaporated from my psyche and my viewpoint of sharks changed for eternity. I composed an article about that experience which turned into a magazine cover a couple of months after the fact. Obviously, it helped that my cousin Ernie turned out to be its distributer at that point.
I never had shark's blade soup until kingdom come. A couple of years after the fact I had a comparable experience, additionally in the Verde Island Passage Batangas, with a surprised Octopus that hurried underneath a stone, carefully watching me. As we measured each other up from a good ways, I remained with it for the following 20 minutes, edging nearer as time slipped by. At long last, as I tranquilly positioned my hand out a couple of creeps from where he was, out came a limb tenderly contacting my hand in what resembled a work to interface, saying, I want to confide in you.
The great many hours I've spent in the submerged world in the course of the most recent 33 years were invaluable. I once in a while keep thinking about whether the grandness and magnificence of what I've encountered will at present be there for my child, and his own kids sometime in the future, to see and feel similarly as I have, as even only a 1.5 °C hotter world (which is as well as can be expected trust in now) will clear out 70% of every coral reef; and in a 2°C hotter world (in spite of the fact that hailed in Paris COP 21), they'll everything except evaporate and go wiped out.
I'm struggling getting my brain around the size of what humankind is losing, and the speed at which it's occurring. Tenaciously drenching myself in new universes was the wizardry that widened my points of view dramatically. Be that as it may, these groundbreaking bits of knowledge possibly unfurl themselves for you in the event that you approach those new universes with deference, compassion, a learning psyche, and above all with a receptiveness to being defenseless.
Past the submerged world, I've taken this equivalent example of deduction with me as I mountain trekked secretly, and once in a while alone, into off-network barangays and sitios in the mountains directly outside the city.
In these networks there are no streets or extensions as we probably am aware them. At the point when the downpours come, the streams grow and seclude barangays from each other for quite a long time, or even days all at once. Flows are sufficiently able to move gigantic rocks that modify the scene and courses en route. I'd catch troops of completely furnished PNP exceptional powers on the lookout, completely decked with wilderness camo and explosive launchers, with bandoliers of powerful ammunition threw around their chests. Inert talk around town was they were searching for got away from detainees. Not certain why all the powerful equipment however.
Once, I experienced the inert body of a man enclosed by banana tree leaves hurriedly being conveyed down the path from the mountains with just a bamboo shaft. This in the wake of being slaughtered in a resource mining quarrel with his accomplice. Life is crude, questionable, momentary, and delicate only hours from our doorsteps in Metro Manila.
However in sharp differentiation, the glow by which I was invited into numerous homes there brought me innumerable discussions that showed me one significant detail of life under these conditions. What's more, that will be, that life flourishes in the midst of neediness and brutal conditions on the grounds that the components oblige individuals to manufacture a solid feeling of network and thinking about each other. Life might be hard, however not really miserable in light of these inconspicuous bonds.
I met a Dumagat lady, I'd even call her a genuine woman, who benevolently decided to bring up the five offspring of a neighbor whose spouse passed on during labor. This so he could keep on working in the fields. Aiding without considering the consequence easily fell into place for some individuals I ran over. Thoughtfulness, tenderness, thankfulness and correspondence for basic things was all over.
It changed my conventional financial specialist's perspective on destitution, and gave me a brief look at the wealth of life past GDP that is not generally estimated. All the more critically, it discusses our indiscretion of being caught in a solitary story.
To rather observe past dark or white, past great or malevolent, rich or poor, glad or despondent, and to encounter the world through the eyes of others that assist us with seeing the large number of shades and shadings genuinely out there.
I worth those encounters immensely, as to
Engage with Us