Message from the Chairman

ACE CENTER FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

Today, we mark the beginning of the new ACE Center for Entrepreneurship and Management Education. We spring from the womb of the Asian Institute of Management, which gave birth and nurtured the original Asian Center for Entrepreneurship. What people may not know till today is the original inspiration for ACE. While I was preparing to write a proposal for a book on entrepreneurship, an insight struck me. Why write a book when the harvest in entrepreneurship is plenty but the workers are few?

Twelve years ago, I came upon the statistics that there were only 2,000 large businesses in the Philippines, 2,000 medium-sized, 25,000 small and 400,000 microenterprises. Today there are just 3,000 large enterprises, 3,000 medium, 70,000 small and 730,000 microenterprises, without counting the informal sector. I realized that AIM was catering to only a very small segment of the Philippine economy. These are the 2,000 large firms who could afford to send their managers to AIM, or the very rich parents who could invest in their silver-spooned offsprings. Right there and then, I was determined to democratize, just a little bit, the AIM brand of education by researching on and developing a course geared for small to medium sized enterprises. In 1999, the Master in Entrepreneurship was launched. In just eight years, and 14 ME offerings later, it has become the most popular degree course for Filipinos, for there are more Filipinos who entered the ME in school-year 2006 to 2007 than all the Filipinos who newly entered the MBA, MM, MDM and the EMBA combined. According to the CFO of AIM, ACE gave a contribution margin of P57 million to the Asian Institute of Management over the last five years. This contribution margin includes the many certificate courses on entrepreneurship run by ACE. Indeed, ACE has become a very viable, a very relevant and responsive school catering to the specific needs of a very hungry market.

However, the entrepreneurship market is a different dish altogether from the standard AIM programs. When I was designing the Master in Entrepreneurship or the ME program, the then AIM president told me to go to the so-called best exemplar of entrepreneurship, the Babson University in the United States, and “borrow” from their learnings. I was also encouraged to visit other notable schools in enterprise development around the world. I refused the junket entreaty. In the first place, nobody in the world had a master’s degree in entrepreneurship, only undergrad courses for would-be entrepreneurs. Everybody thought, at that time, that a master’s degree in entrepreneurship was an oxymoron. Many still think so today. Secondly, I rejected the idea of copycatting any Western model based on the say-so of academics who think that entrepreneurship is a business course adapted to small, start-up enterprises. Thirdly, I wanted to hear what entrepreneurs all over Asia had to say, “get it from the horse’s mouth”, as they would put it. What I came out with is a revolutionary design for a new type of education, one custom-built for entrepreneurs.

Many of the highly successful entrepreneurs I interviewed were scared shit about IQ tests, long comprehensive exams, higher level mathematics and “burning their brains in the midnight oil”. They were looking for knowledge and skills they could immediately apply. They were more interested in making things happen in their businesses rather than in the classroom. They said they could sell anything, manage people well, woo customers, run factories, negotiate with suppliers and create new products and services. However, they were keenly interested in the systematic and professional methods and the proven management processes of a master’s degree. I attributed this interest to the Confucian tradition of Chinese entrepreneurs who believe in the power of good education.

The challenge for me then was how to marry the two concepts of professionalization and immediate practical application. An insight hit me when I was in India for my interviews. India, like China and Japan, still practice the “guru” system where a master-apprentice relationship is struck. The apprentice is groomed and nurtured to become a master himself through self-discipline, full immersion in the field to be mastered, constant practice and application, total dedication to the craft and strict adherence to the way of the master. No ifs and buts. It also dawned on me that the original title of master in the European guild system came from such a tradition. In fact, I realized that the present-day master’s degrees that we have proliferating in the universities are the academic aberrations and bastardizations of the original master concept. They are the false masteral degrees. Intuitively, I knew that I had to extol and emulate the original intent, spirit and nature of a master’s degree. And voila, the ME.

The formula became, no IQ tests, no exams and quizzes, no scary grades. However, the entrepreneur must endure and pass the ultimate gauntlet of entrepreneurship, which is to transform the business into a highly productive, profitable and professional enterprise. The entrepreneur must be able to change his business paradigm into an industry best practice. Finally, the entrepreneur must be able to craft a five-year business plan that would catapult his business to his visionary dream. If the entering ME entrepreneur had completed his college degree and was running his business well, then he must have enough functional intelligence to make it through the ME. If the entrepreneur continuously and consistently applied what he learned in the classroom to his business, then he must be able to make a phenomenal business transformation. Thus, the rigor in the ME cannot come mainly from the depth of case analysis, which is a rather nerdy endeavor, but from the brilliance of how classroom learnings are applied to business situations.

The gurus of ACE decided that the ME degree should not to be given lightly to all who aspire for it. The entrepreneur-apprentices must prove their worth through their businesses and through their business plans. They must truly become masters of their craft. That is why the ME has the lowest graduation rate in the entire AIM. On the average, only 60% of an entering ME class graduates. My last ME class only had 40% graduating. In contrast, AIM’s other degree programs graduate 90 to 95% of all who enter their courses.

In short, ACE developed a winning design: part time classes, full time learning. Over the 18 months of the ME program, there are only 90 days of classes but a full 540 days of application. While there are common cases and topics for all, each ME student has access to a guru and a drillmaster for customized mentoring and coaching. While there are no theoretical exams, there are real-life tests that would weed out the men from the boys, the women from the girls. Today, the ME design is being sought out by China, India, Malaysia and Indonesia. But we do not yet have the overseas gurus to run them.

The uniqueness of the ME offering has caused some academic debate within AIM. Hence, today, the new ACE Center for Entrepreneurship is being established by five fierce advocates of entrepreneurship and experiential education. The new ACE brings to the marketplace a new paradigm of education, one which seeks to fuse the real world of business with a learner-centered academy of management gurus and practitioners. ACE believes that learning, particularly in the world of enterprise development and management, must summon all the faculties of the brain. This includes the ability to think analytically, critically, creatively and integratively, the ability to intuit or “sense” things and people, and the ability to be aware of one’s own feelings, to empathize and to “manage” other people’s emotions. Whole brain management also demands that entrepreneurs and executives learn how to implement or do plans and programs well, to communicate accurately and appropriately, and to lead people to the heights of their potentials. Finally, it means that the learner must learn to be the best person he or she can ever become. In essence, ACE believes that the foundation of all great learning is Self Mastery.

The new education paradigm of ACE begins with the classroom but goes beyond that classroom as it transports entrepreneurs and business learners back to their real-life laboratories. The application of the learnings in these laboratories are then brought back to the classroom for further processing and refining to new-found management wisdom. This paradigm opts for seamless learning between workplace and studyplace.

The new education paradigm of ACE recognizes that learners have multiple intelligences and debunks the old paradigm of narrowly focusing on one or two intelligences, of overdependence on very high IQs as the one and only criterion of educational eligibility, of relying on only one method of instruction (whether it be case or lecture method), of believing that there are standard ways of learning for all men and women. In fact, some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs have found the very structured school systems of today quite limiting and severely constipating, especially when it comes to developing their creativity and their spirit of innovation.

The new education paradigm of ACE believes in the power of mentoring and coaching. ACE refuses to accept the prevailing practice of most schools, which is to accept large numbers of students for processing into graduates following a common curriculum. ACE believes in teaching students rather than teaching subjects. There is a big difference between the two. To teach a student is to really educate a student. In fact, the word education comes from the Latin “educare” or to lead out of. Thus, education is not merely filling up the minds of students with knowledge. It is coaxing that mind out of its shell to aspire for greater knowledge, greater skills, greater competencies, greater values, and the greater living of life. The only way to do this is to mentor and coach students, meaning to bring out the best in them. In contrast, teaching a subject is to ensure that students know the subject matter without regard for its relevance, its applicability and its importance in the lives of students.

The new education paradigm of ACE fully accepts the findings of neuroscientists that learners learn best when they experience multi-sensory stimuli. Most learning is absorbed and retained if it goes beyond the written or spoken word. The other senses must be awakened such as visual imagery, tactile contact, olfactory sensing and taste. This means translating traditional classroom materials into full sensual experiences by tapping into the learning cornucopia of both simulated and real world laboratories, of computer and live human interactions, of vicarious and virtual lessons. ACE sets no boundaries on learning methods and stimuli. Its only philosophical commitment is to the full blossoming of the total human being.

The new education paradigm of ACE stakes its existence on the excellence of its gurus, its mentors, its education philosophers. We cannot fulfill our highest dreams and aspirations for society if we cannot convene the best faculty to march with us in our glorious quest. We must be able to attract the best minds with the largest hearts because we are not in ACE only for ourselves but for the greater welfare of our entrepreneurial and developmental communities. We are establishing the new ACE to propagate and propel a movement towards honest-to-goodness nation building through entrepreneurship and management education.

To make sure that only the best faculty teach and mentor in ACE, all of our program offerings must draw their revenues from the prestige and following of our gurus. No drawing power, no revenues, no revenues, no pay. But beyond this prestige-based model of institutional sustainability, ACE expects its gurus to play larger roles in society. We expect them to be chairmen and presidents of universities, foundations and superb businesses. We expect them to have social and economic advocacies. We expect them to have a deep sense of mission and a profound belief that we must all transcend our personal and institutional ties in order to serve the greater good. We expect our gurus to be highly recognized in their chosen fields of endeavor. We absolutely have no right to be in ACE if we ourselves cannot be paragons of excellence for others. To further our cause, we shall be highly selective in inviting gurus. But we shall also take time to nurture future gurus by mentoring promising candidates.

To whom much is given, much is expected. This is the enlightened challenge for the champions of the new ACE. Our deepest commitment is to transform the socio-economic landscape of the Philippines, not just through the continued offering of the Master in Entrepreneurship program and the various certificate courses on entrepreneurship, but also through the upbringing, upgrading and upscaling of academic, financial, and developmental institutions dedicated to the upliftment of the lives of our fellow Filipinos. We, in ACE, intend to replicate and clone ourselves through licensing, franchising, partnership and joint venture arrangements using our innovative learning methodologies, systems and materials. We shall be the fountain of intellectual capital in both entrepreneurship and management education. We shall reach out to the large universities as well as the small parochial schools. We shall assist all financial institutions committed to serving the business development needs of start-up, growing and diversifying enterprises. We shall walk with like-minded corporations and foundations who share our dream of a robust and highly entrepreneurial Philippine economy. We shall usher in a new era of collaboration rather than competition among those who wish to serve the higher nationals interest. We shall not be an ivory tower of intellectual elitism, but the growing grass of a widespread movement out to disseminate, propagate and proliferate the entrepreneurial message to all sectors, to all segments and to all nooks and crannies of Philippine society.

ACE shall be the world model for entrepreneurial education. We shall be the world template for dazzling innovations in the institutional development of all those dedicated to entrepreneurship and management education. We shall bring our education philosophy and nation-building mission to the great countries of China and India. We shall be the center of Southeast Asian intellectual ferment in enterprise creation and procreation. We shall be the envy of staid, conservative and myopically antiquated Western education systems that have stuck their heads inside the ostrich holes of 20th century thinking. We shall be fully Asian and proudly be part of Asia’s claim to be the leading continent of the 21st century.

These words are not words of ambition but of prophetic vision. We, in ACE, are humbled by the keen interest of our Master in Entrepreneurship graduates to crusade in the name of ACE. We are elated at the offers of partnership extended by schools and development foundations. We are exalted by the enthusiastic entreaties of investors and potential funders. We do not even know where to begin but we sure do know where we are headed.

As we, the five stalwarts of the old ACE, lay down our AIM banner, we hoist a new one, one that promises to fly all above the rest because the world will see the nobility of our cause, the intensity of our spirit and the wisdom of our ways.

- Dr. Eduardo A. Morató, Jr., Chairman of ACE-ME, Inc.