A summit of ‘malasakit’

How many people succeeded because we succeeded? How many businesses grew because we grew? And how much stronger did the communities and ecosystems around us become?”

Doris Magsaysay Ho asked these questions at the first Business as a Force for Good Summit of the Phinma-De La Salle University (DLSU) Center for Business and Society, held on Oct. 9 at the Makati Shangri-La. The nearly 300 people in the ballroom could answer from every side. Br. Bernard Oca FSC, president of DLSU, had opened the afternoon by naming who came: people who run companies, people who teach, people who decide where a foundation’s money goes, people who write the rules, and students who will live with what all of them decide. By the end of the day, I had a Filipino word for what bound them: malasakit, the care that takes another person’s burden as one’s own. The summit also showed that malasakit lasts only when it is built into how a business runs.

Phinma chair Ramon R. del Rosario Jr. gave the day a working definition in two steps: find a societal need nobody serves well, then build a business that serves it. “Doing good,” he said, “means building something that works.” Launching ”Ventures for a More Humane World” by Raymund Habaradas and Ian Benedict Mia, publisher David Jonathan Bayot added that “business” once meant care in Old English. Somewhere along the way, he said, we kept the busyness and forgot the care.

Siklab means spark, and this year’s Ramon V. del Rosario Siklab awardee, Reese Fernandez-Ruiz, told a history that is mostly failure. In 2007, she met nanays in Payatas who earned P10 to P16 a day weaving rags. When Rags2Riches (R2R) landed its first big corporate order, the weavers said no. She left vowing never to return, and came back the next day. Trust took four years of home visits. At the 2016 Christmas party, she told the artisans over a karaoke microphone that it might be their last; the company was about to close. She had long called herself “not a numbers person.” She learned the numbers anyway. R2R is profitable today, and she serves as chief financial officer for other companies. One weaver who started with her put her children through school. The daughter now buys R2R products for her own clients, and the mother still weaves, for the love of it.

Her fireside partner, Chito Salazar, told the same story at a different scale. A Phinma Education school the board once wanted to sell, with about 5,000 students, now enrolls 42,000. Phinma Education still requires its executives to visit students’ homes.

Then the sectors sat down together. The Management Association of the Philippines, the League of Corporate Foundations, the United Nations Global Compact Network Philippines, and Phinma’s finance team shared one panel on how capital can follow social need. Phinma’s Andre Ramirez remembered a professor bringing his class to visit R2R; 19 years later, he and Reese spoke from the same stage. On the panel I moderated with Philippine Business for Social Progress’ Elvin Uy and the Development Academy of the Philippines’ Airon Bonifacio, Pandayan Bookshop founder Jun Cabochan said he wants every cashier and bagger in his 187 stores to own a house and lot one day. He had management books translated into Filipino after noticing his people absorbed perhaps a tenth of Drucker in English. Pakikipagkapwa, he said, needs no long explanation.

Building the nation fell to Doris herself, the 2026 RVR Nation-Building Awardee and the first woman to receive the award. The Magsaysay Group’s inherited philosophy fits in two words: “We Care.” The company trains seafarers and hospitality workers for careers, runs a savings and loan cooperative for employees and their families, and treats one goal as a leadership key performance indicator: everyone who works there should own a home before retiring. Retirees have come to thank her for exactly that. She then widened the circle. When large companies buy from small suppliers and help them meet standards, she argued, they create jobs beyond their own walls, as Jollibee has done with smallholder farmers. Startups, she admitted, have told her they do not trust business or the government with their ideas. Her reply was an invitation: “Let’s describe the elephant, then let’s all do good in the little parts of the elephant.”

Her questions deserve answers, and Br. Bernie had shown us where to start. He asked each of us to leave with a taya, the stake you put down while the outcome is still unsure. Reese placed hers in Payatas and nearly lost it. Doris’ company places its taya every time an employee retires in a home of her own. Cabochan’s is a house and lot per kapwa panday. Ours can be smaller: one supplier we help meet a standard, one student we bring to Payatas to see for herself. A spark catches when someone keeps a hand cupped around it long enough.

Ikaw, ano ang taya mo?