Over the long and illustrious corporate career of Cezar Consing that saw him move up from the corporate planning office of the Bank of the Philippine Islands to the Hong Kong and Singapore offices of J.P. Morgan and back home again to head BPI and then Ayala Corp., he has seen how some people advanced to become C-suite executives while others failed to reach their potential and eventually fell by the wayside.
Reflecting on what he has witnessed and his own personal experience working with and running different teams and organizations over 42 years, Consing shared his thoughts on cultivating personal leadership and relationships that endure. The 63-year-old president and CEO of the country’s oldest conglomerate did so with students during the first Master Class in Business Leadership mounted by Mapua University in partnership with Arizona State University, its partner in delivering world-class university education to Filipinos.
1. Keep learning throughout your life.
Scientific knowledge doubles every five to 10 years. Artificial intelligence will make many jobs obsolete. Continuous learning will keep you relevant. To be truly successful, Consing tells the students to learn every working day of their life because there is always something new to learn and master. What is state-of-the art today can easily become passe tomorrow.
2. Become an expert in something.
Practice makes perfect. You will always be sought after if you have special knowledge. Before The Beatles became the world’s most influential band, they honed their skills in Germany. They practiced for years, shares Consing, and eventually became masters at their craft. He thus advises students to also practice and develop special knowledge so that people will go out of their way to seek them out.
3. Do the little things well—they are essential in the workplace—but focus on what will move the needle, since this will mean the difference between growth and stagnation. Being busy does not necessarily mean you are productive, Consing stresses. What you want to do is focus on the things that truly make a difference, things that move the needle. In all your busyness, do not lose sight of what will make a difference. In life, there are very few things that actually move the needle for you, for the market, for the customers. Focus on that, he says.
4. Have a bias toward action, because only action can produce results. Be the man in the arena, not the critic in the cheap seats. The easiest thing to do is do nothing and hope things will just sort themselves out, he says. But you have to believe that you have to do something. Make a difference. Don’t be a bystander that just makes comments. Put yourself out there, take a risk, Consing advises the students. “I have very little respect for people who will just stand in the corner and criticize people who do things,” he says.
5. Give energy to a team or an initiative; don’t suck energy away. Those that do the former lead; those that do the latter get fired. Consing encourages the students to spend more of their time with people who will give them energy, make them excited. He shares that in the workplace, they will have to collaborate, work in teams. But as they do so, they will always find one or two people who will stay in the corner and just complain. Ignore them, Consing says. Don’t waste precious time with them.
6. Tolerate errors of judgment but not of principle. We will all make judgment errors, and we can learn from them; but cheating, lying, stealing are cancers. Everybody makes mistakes, he shares, and the hope is that the right calls will compensate for the errors in judgment. However, the errors must not be errors of principle such as lying or cheating, he stresses. If these are tolerated, then over time you will lose sight of who you are. “You may become wealthy but then you will not have the one thing we all want, which is respect,” Consing says.
7. Perfect is the enemy of good. Good is great. Striving for perfection can lead to inaction or can take too long. In a world where there is little growth, there is time to make the perfect call, develop the perfect process. But in a volatile and uncertain world where everything changes so fast, speed trumps perfection, shares Consing, so go ahead and experiment and fail quickly. Sometimes, perfection just takes too long.
8. The more senior you become, the more people you serve. Servant leadership builds open, strong and enduring work cultures. When one thinks of leadership, it is almost always top-down, which means there is a chief executive on top with a lot of vassals underneath. This makes no sense for Consing.
“I think leadership is the other way around,” he says. “The more senior you become, the more people you are responsible for. People are not there to serve you.”
For him, the concept of servant-leadership is critical in any organization. When allowed to take root, it helps build wonderful work cultures.
9. Fail gloriously. Much can be achieved with noble failure. Timidity can produce mediocrity. Consing shares that mistakes and failures are inevitable. But if we will fail, then let’s fail gloriously, he says. That means not failing because we were timid, or took half-measures, did not apply all of ourselves or allocate resources properly, he says. Rather, let’s fail because despite everything we tried, perhaps we were wrong or the markets were against us.
“There is a nobility to failing gloriously. If we’re timid, all we can do is be mediocre and mediocrity does not produce business leaders. It produces vassals,” he says.
10. Aspire to do great things, but value people most of all. Great relationships trump great achievements and great relationships can produce great achievements. As a final word, Consing says what you don’t want is to be successful and yet take nobody with you. What is the point, he asks, of not having created opportunities for other people, or having hogged everything for yourself or not sharing your fortune?
“When you think back at your long career and you will one day, I bet you won’t think about the best business deals you’ve done or the targets reached. I suspect most of you, if you’re in the right frame of mind, will think of the people you’ve met, the company you’ve enjoyed, the people you decided to spent time with, how you made a difference to them, how they made a difference to you,” he says, “Relationships will matter. And the right relationships can produce great things. Great collaborations can produce great things,” he adds.
Note: Article from BlueChip Magazine
Philippine Daily Inquirer
July 19, 2023
(reprinted with permission)
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