In the years shortly after World War II, the Philippines was a devastated young republic struggling toward rehabilitation and recovery. Business, which had been dominated before the war by American and other foreign companies, was seeing the emergence of young Filipino and Chinese entrepreneurs and professionals, many of them running new family-owned firms. With schools still rebuilding themselves and graduate programs wanting in qualified faculty, Filipino professionals who could run business corporations and provide vision and direction to the country’s economic development were a valuable but scarce resource.

In 1949, seventeen young business executives thought they could help fill that need by establishing the Executive Training Institute of the Philippines (ETIOP). These were the same executives, led by Ramon del Rosario, Sr., who organized the Philippine Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees) two years before. On behalf of ETIOP, del Rosario asked the Harvard University Business School to send a team of professors who could run an advanced management program in his country for one month. Harvard was not inclined to do so but referred del Rosario to Professor Harry Hansen, who gladly formed a team of Harvard faculty to conduct a program in the Philippines, on their own rather than as formal representatives of Harvard Business School.

The ETIOP’s Advanced Management Program was inaugurated in 1953 in Baguio City and drew participants not only from the Philippines but from Burma, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand as well. So great was the demand for the program that it was offered every year until the early sixties.

In the meantime, other prominent Filipino businesspersons and educators had started to realize the need to go beyond a one-month summer management program. Sometime in the fifties, Washington SyCip, founder of SyCip, Gorres, and Velayo (SGV), Asia’s largest auditing and management-consulting firm, expressed his wish for a quality graduate school of management in Manila to Stephen Fuller, one of the Harvard professors in the Advanced Management Program. So did Cesar Virata, a managing partner at SGV, when he became dean of the Graduate School of Business of the University of the Philippines.

In 1960 De la Salle College, which was recognized as the country’s leading business school, opened a part-time Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. Its traditional rival, the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, believing it could contribute to national development through business education, also established a Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration offering part-time programs. Ateneo president Father Francisco Araneta, S.J., an economist, invited the Harvard professors in the Advanced Management Program to join the faculty. Among those who accepted his invitation was Fuller, who was on leave as associate dean for external affairs at Harvard Business School. At the same time, the Ateneo sent two of its faculty members to Harvard for their MBA. One of them was Gabino Mendoza, who had majored in philosophy as an undergraduate at the Ateneo.

In 1964, to De la Salle’s chagrin, the Ateneo became the first Philippine institution to offer a full-time two-year degree program leading to a master’s in business management (MBM), similar to Harvard Business School’s MBA. The business community gave immediate support to a student loan fund for promising but cash-strapped applicants, and some companies sponsored their own outstanding staff members. Not to be outdone, De la Salle launched the following year a nondegree Management Development Program that offered management training classes and related professional seminars.

The two schools, along with the state-run University of the Philippines, soon realized that building a business program was a strenuous, time-consuming, and expensive exercise. Each approached the Ford Foundation for assistance. In response, the foundation urged the schools to collaborate on a single project that addressed faculty training as well as library building and the development of relevant course materials, particularly Asian-sourced case studies.

The result was a proposal titled "Interuniversity Program for Graduate Business Education in the Philippines," which the three schools submitted for funding in 1966. It was approved by the Ford Foundation and given a grant of U.S.$1.2 million for three years, with a possible extension of two more years. The approval, the foundation emphasized, was "premised on the conviction that the Philippines could eventually develop into one of the strongest, if not the strongest, centers for business education in Asia." A precondition for the grant was that all three of the participating Philippine universities had committed to playing a role in training the managers that the country badly needed for its economic development.

Ford Foundation stipulated that the project would be administered by Harvard University; Harvard, in turn, named Stephen Fuller as officer in charge. Under the terms of the grant, Harvard was to organize a team of faculty members to advise the three participating schools with case writing, faculty development, course planning, curriculum development, and teaching. The first Harvard Advisory Group arrived in Manila in August 1966. Headed by Professor Ralph Sorenson, the team of six academics was divided into three and assigned to each of the Philippine schools.

The following April, De la Salle president Brother Gabriel Connon, FSC, announced during the graduation ceremonies that the school was planning its own full-time MBA program. Neither Ford Foundation nor the Harvard Advisory Group welcomed De la Salle’s announcement, because they feared it would jeopardize the Harvard mandate to promote collaboration among the three schools. Furthermore, the Ateneo was already having difficulty sustaining its own graduate school. In a memorandum, Sorenson suggested a merger between the MBM programs of Ateneo and De la Salle. Meanwhile, the University of the Philippines withdrew from the project because of provisions in its charter that stood in the way of a merger.

Sorenson’s words in his memorandum were prophetic: "There is a good chance that the new merged business school—backed by the combined resources and prestige of La Salle and the Ateneo—could achieve a standard of overall excellence unmatched in all of Asia. In the long run, it is quite possible that the school could become the Asian center for management education, with students not only from the Philippines but from other countries as well…." His suggestion must have set the two schools thinking, for the following October their presidents, Ateneo’s Father James Donelan, S.J., and De la Salle’s Connon, asked the SGV for a feasibility study for a first-rate graduate school of management and what it might require in terms of faculty, students, facilities, and finances.

At the same time, a steering committee was created to pave the way for the planned institution. Its members were Donelan; Connon; the deans of the Ateneo and De la Salle graduate schools; Sorenson; and Roberto Ongpin, a partner in SGV’s management services division. Sorenson and Ongpin worked on the design of the feasibility study, the former focusing on the academic requirements and the latter on the financial. Donelan and Connon both promised to support the project to the extent of phasing out Ateneo’s full-time MBM program and giving up De la Salle’s planned MBA program, respectively.

Three drafts later, on 23 February 1968, SGV submitted a final report with the title "An Asian Institute of Management: A Joint Project of Ateneo de Manila University and De la Salle College." It was a proposal for the creation of a "single, new graduate school of management that can provide training of outstanding quality, be financially realistic and enjoy the undivided support of the business community." The concept was readily accepted at De la Salle but not at the Ateneo, where vehement objections from the faculty of the Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration prompted the board of trustees to convene for the first time.

The SGV report provided that the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) would open on 1 July 1969, initially in rented facilities, but would move into its own building the following year. That provision gave the steering committee only four months to raise funds for facilities and student loans, a daunting assignment because the practice of seeking donations for education was not a custom in the Philippines. The committee, however, knew just whom to approach about a home for the Institute. Eugenio Lopez, Sr., a prominent businessman and philanthropist and an alumnus of both the Ateneo and Harvard, pledged five million pesos for the construction of a building. With the increased costs of construction at the time, his donation eventually amounted to 6.5 million pesos. As to an appropriate site, the Zobel de Ayala family, developer of the burgeoning business district of Makati, offered to lease to AIM a one-hectare property in Legaspi Village for a token fee of one peso a year, and pledged to donate it to the Institute after fifteen years.

In April 1968, the dean of Harvard Business School, George P. Baker, himself came to Manila and pledged his institution’s wholehearted support to AIM. It was the Harvard Advisory Group that gave form to the AIM feasibility study, and the final report cited Fuller for having provided "much of the initial inspiration for the new school." Another significant player in the establishment of AIM was the Ford Foundation, which made possible Harvard’s participation in the interuniversity program that paved the way for AIM, and provided the funding for faculty training abroad and for some of the faculty chairs.

AIM became a legal entity on 27 June 1968, when the members of the steering committee formed a nonstock, nonprofit corporation subject to Philippine laws. On 5 August, AIM was registered with the Philippines’ Securities and Exchange Commission. Washington SyCip was invited to become the first chairperson of the board of trustees. Donelan and Connon were named joint vice-chairpersons. They invited eleven other men to comprise the board, all of them Filipinos except for Father John Doherty, S.J., and Brother Paul Hebert, FSC. Many of the trustees were either donors to the Institute, such as Eugenio Lopez, Sr. and Jaime Zobel de Ayala, or staunch supporters, such as Ramon del Rosario, Sr.

Upon SyCip’s proposal, AIM on its second year acquired a board of governors as well: fifteen leaders of government and business from eight countries of Asia. The board of trustees would function as the business board, and the board of governors as the academic board and advisory body to the board of trustees. From the very start of the Institute, however, all initiatives for both business and academic decisions would emanate from the faculty.

The Philippine business community did not disappoint the AIM trustees’ expectations of support. By the time the Institute opened, it had received actual donations and pledges amounting to about thirty million pesos, seventeen million of which came from the top Philippine corporations. The unprecedented generosity of private business was taken as a sure sign that the merger of the country’s two leading private schools had the community’s unconditional blessing—"just like Yale and Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, Keio and Waseda," quipped Gabino Mendoza, one of the first to join the AIM faculty after having initially objected to Ateneo’s merger with De la Salle. Twenty endowments for faculty chairs allowed the Institute to hire competent full-time teachers. In 1970, the United States Agency for International Development gave AIM U.S.$300,000 for facilities and audio equipment principally, but also for books for its library.

The Philippines’ Social Security Commission, from which the steering committee had sought assistance for a student loan fund, gave AIM a loan of three million pesos, payable at 7 percent interest. It was President Ferdinand Marcos himself who proposed the Social Security System as a source for the fund during a dinner hosted by the steering committee to honor Dean Baker. Members of the committee had spoken to the president about the proposed school and the need for a loan fund. As approved by the Social Security Commission, student loans were to be paid for over a five-year period after the beneficiaries’ graduation. As further government assistance to AIM, the National Science Development Board granted it tax-exempt status as a foundation and suggested that a separate corporation, to be called the AIM Scientific Research Foundation, Inc., be created to receive donations for the Institute.

The trustees chose Fuller to be AIM’s first president, indicating their wish that the Institute be patterned after Harvard Business School. Fuller had attended both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School and, before coming to the Philippines, had either taught in or helped establish business management schools in Korea, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Germany, and Mexico. He set two goals for AIM: to become an educational center for the training of managerial leaders and to become truly regional.

On 7 July 1969, classes opened for 143 students, AIM’s first batch of enrollees, at the Ateneo Business School on Padre Faura Street in Manila. Except for an Indonesian from Caltex-Pacific Indonesia, they were all Filipinos—ninety-four first-year students and forty-nine former Ateneo MBM students who were entering their second year. All of them were enrolled in the Institute’s MBM program, which replicated Harvard Business School’s MBA program, particularly its case method of teaching.

The AIM program was designed to impart skills in basic management: production and operations, marketing, finance, and accounting. Felipe Alfonso, an AIM professor in 1969 and later president of the Institute, says: "Even as AIM’s main objective was to develop professional business managers…we sought to develop ‘entrepreneurial managers’ who were not only problem solvers but opportunity seekers: job creators and not just job seekers."

From that first batch of AIM students, thirty-one graduated on 26 April 1970 in simple ceremonies on the grounds of the school-in-the-making on Paseo de Roxas in Makati. By the time classes opened the following school year, the new three-story building was ready.

Designed by the prominent Filipino architect Gabriel Formoso, it featured executive and faculty offices, special amphitheater-style classrooms, conventional classrooms for small discussion groups and other gatherings, a chapel, a library, a dormitory, an art gallery for Asian artifacts, a gym, a clinic, a cafeteria, and a sunken garden.

During his term, Fuller made AIM known in Asia as well as in North America and Europe. He invited non-Filipinos, among them a Japanese and a Pakistani, to join the faculty and he pushed, along with SyCip, for the creation of a board of governors. In June 1971, Fuller resigned after only two years in office. He wanted to return to Harvard to teach, but he continued to be supportive of AIM and sat on its board of governors for six years.

Fuller was succeeded by Professor James Culliton, a Harvard graduate and faculty member who headed the Harvard Advisory Group. In December 1972, however, AIM lost its second president in only four years when Culliton also resigned. In his letter to the board of trustees, Culliton said he felt that AIM’s "development and especially its Asianization will be enhanced if I relinquish all administrative responsibilities at this time." President Marcos had declared martial law in the Philippines just three months before. This was the seventies, when a wave of nationalism and a strong regional sense of community was sweeping Southeast Asia. It was time, Culliton believed, for the Institute to have a Filipino president.

The board of trustees believed so, too, and from within its ranks chose Sixto Roxas III, chief executive officer of Bancom Development Corporation, the Philippines’ largest investment house. Roxas, a trustee of AIM from its inception, was well respected in his country and abroad as an economist with a humanist orientation. His presidency has been described as one that brought to AIM "a truly social orientation and a clearly Asian dimension."

During Roxas’s term, the Institute’s administrative structure was changed such that the president functioned as chief corporate officer and the dean as chief academic officer. The deanship, a new position, was given to Gabino Mendoza, who was then dean of faculty. Gaston Ortigas, a faculty member who moved to AIM from the Ateneo with Mendoza, was appointed associate dean in charge of faculty and programs, another new position. The old position of dean of students and alumni was retained.

In the Institute’s early years, the issue of Asianization was a subject of contentious debate among the faculty. They were divided on what it meant to be an Asian institute of management and the extent to which their ranks and teaching materials should be Asian. Their discussions told them that being Asian meant not only being of the region but, more importantly, being sensitive and responsive to its culture and needs. In concrete terms, this included organizing periodic recruitment campaigns throughout the Philippines and the rest of Asia. The Institute also made plans to raise loan funds for non-Filipino applicants, since the existing fund was limited to Filipinos. Members of the faculty who had consultancies outside the Philippines or were visiting schools in the region helped out in these campaigns.

Hiring Asian faculty members was a more difficult goal because there were few professional managers outside the Philippines; moreover, the Institute had to compete with business and industry in other Asian countries. In April 1973, Mendoza proposed a five-year plan that would make the Institute self-sustaining and enable it to hire faculty from the rest of Asia. The plan called for additional faculty chairs and an extensive fund drive in the region. On both objectives, however, AIM made little headway. But through consultancies outside the Philippines, particularly with Indonesian and Malaysian companies in which AIM alumni were eager to inject modern management practices, Filipino faculty gained insights into management styles in other countries as well as opportunities for case writing. They became "Asianized" through their contacts with other business schools and business communities.

As early as 1971, Tun Ismail bin Mohamed Ali of Malaysia suggested that a one-year Master of Management program was better suited to Asian realities than the two-year MBM program at the Institute. The MBM degree, he had argued during the first board of governors meeting, was an Asian Cadillac; what Asia needed was a Volkswagen. As he explained to his colleagues, the problem was not only the prohibitive cost of the MBM program but also the two-year leave that managers had to take from their jobs to complete the program. Although Culliton had opposed the idea because it would dilute the quality of the program, he appointed a faculty committee to study it.

There was sharp disagreement even among the faculty on the concept and content of an abbreviated program. The first committee saw in the proposal a wider clientele that AIM should be targeting. The faculty hoped that the shorter time frame would not only help nonprofit organizations, as well as the government and government enterprises, but also increase the Institute’s contacts with Asian managers and its access to Asian case materials. Culliton, although outvoted, gave the new program his full support. The Master of Management (MM) program, designed for "mature students with authentic managerial experience," was launched in the school year 1974–1975 with a class of fifty-five.

The new program could not have been introduced at a better time. Egypt had invaded Israel in October 1973, triggering global inflation and recession and a worldwide energy crisis. The Philippine peso had been devalued three years before and the business sector was badly affected. Government had imposed a freeze on tuition and the costs of even basic commodities spiraled. Facing an operational deficit of almost one million pesos, the Institute had to cut its expenses, going so far as adjusting the thermostats of its air conditioners to economize.

To sustain the Institute, the faculty decided to expand AIM’s nondegree programs. That decision saved the day for AIM. With many companies no longer able to send their staff to the degree programs, the faculty designed short-term, executive development programs instead, as well as a two-month Management Development Program and a one-month Basic Management Program (BMP) for first-line to middle-level managers. The forerunner of these programs was an Air Transport Course that AIM first conducted in 1970 for the Orient Airlines Association. It was so successful that it was offered every year thereafter, along with the Program for Airline Company Executives. By 1973, AIM was also conducting a program for Agricultural Development, Evaluation, and Management in cooperation with the Southeast Asian Research Council for Agriculture.

The equally successful BMP was offered every three months for two years and would subsequently be marketed all over the region, with companies in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan among its most satisfied clients. The program, Mendoza recalls, was "a real moneymaker." The nondegree programs and seminars boosted enrollment at AIM by 70 percent, enabling it to achieve break-even point rather than to suffer the projected deficit for the school year 1974–1975. AIM also conducted short-term specialized seminars on, among other topics, Small-Scale Industry Development as well as Agricultural Project Development, Evaluation, and Management. Between 1974 and 1979, students from overseas comprised an average of 35 percent of total enrollment in the MBM program. When the Advanced Bank Management Program was launched in 1977 in cooperation with the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Banking Council, half of the participants were non-Filipinos.

Fund-raising, however, remained a problem for the Institute. The trustees, governors, and faculty realized that the nationality of AIM—legally and managerially, it was a Philippine institution—was an obstacle to fund-raising efforts. The Filipinos on the board of governors proposed conversion of the Institute into an international organization, but the other members felt that such a move would be too drastic. President Marcos resolved their dilemma in January 1975 by issuing Presidential Decree No. 639, which declared AIM a "foreign school of special character, with an international student body, faculty, management composition and control, funding support, programs, curricular offerings, calendar, fee structure and academic standards." AIM’s bylaws were officially changed the following March, and the board of governors became its highest academic policy-making body.

By the late seventies, it seemed as though AIM had weathered the worst and could now confidently plan its future. That future had to take into account the sociopolitical conditions that bind together the countries of the region, despite their cultural differences. These conditions include having predominantly agricultural economies, exploding populations, small rural communities, and close family ties. AIM had already started to discuss the idea of development management with three other business schools in developing countries: the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India; Instituto Centroamericana de Administración de Empresas in Managua, Nicaragua; and Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) in Caracas, Venezuela.

AIM had also been involved, since 1972, in the study of population as an area of management. The Institute sent Professor Felipe Alfonso to Bali, Indonesia, to look into its population control program, particularly the supply and distribution of contraceptives. That experience gave Alfonso material for case studies on population management, which became the first such case studies for rural Asia.

In addition to producing case studies and conference papers on population, AIM also administered nondegree workshops for population administrators. As part of its networking with the three other business schools, AIM helped establish the International Committee on the Management of Population Programmes, or ICOMP, composed of the heads of management institutes and population programs all over the world. Two AIM professors, Peter Garrucho and Eduardo Roberto, became executive directors of ICOMP.

From population management, AIM decided in 1977 to go into rural development management. It was a defining moment for AIM. By then, Alfonso recalls, "we had realized we were not Harvard Business School, we were an Asian institute of management. We were trying to do a good job of developing business managers but we thought we should also be much more Asian, and Asia is an agricultural region."

Rural development management was a field the faculty knew nothing about and, moreover, not everyone was enthusiastic about it. Many professors did not think it was an appropriate subject for a business school. But both Roxas and Mendoza were strong supporters of the idea. They encouraged the board of trustees to provide half a million pesos in seed money for a start-up project. A faculty team for a rural development management program was formed, headed by Alfonso and composed of mostly senior faculty. To familiarize themselves with rural development, Alfonso and three of his team members lived with farmers in their barrios and studied basic concepts of development management from community organizers that Alfonso hired as research assistants. Some of these organizers were on the Philippine military’s watch list of suspected subversives.

It would take years before development management was accepted by the entire AIM faculty and became an integral part of the Institute. The hardy band of professors who first espoused rural development management did so at some personal sacrifice since, in doing so, they gave up time that would otherwise have gone to private consultancies to supplement their faculty salaries.

Equipped with "management lenses, a willingness to learn, and good people from the Ford Foundation," as Alfonso describes their venture into the unknown, the Institute accepted a contract to assist in the reorganization and decentralization of the Philippines’ Department of Agriculture.

Then came the communal irrigation project in Laur, Nueva Ecija, which the Ford Foundation supported jointly with the National Irrigation Administration (NIA). Alfonso brought together farmers, social scientists, and engineers to learn from one another. His own observations of the project provided useful lessons for the rural development management program as a whole. Alfonso observed that there was a need to coordinate and integrate the technical and social aspects of such a project; that there is wisdom in listening to farmers rather than only to engineers; and that government policies, particularly concerning the bureaucracy, may need to be changed. Another professor on the team, Buenaventura Canto, Jr., summarized AIM’s contribution to the NIA projects: where the engineers contributed content and experience, the professors brought in business discipline and hard analysis. Starting with two pilot areas, the NIA project led to twelve more throughout the Philippines, as well as to increased funding for AIM from the Ford Foundation.

In fact, the broadening of AIM’s involvements ushered in new types of funds that it would otherwise not have received. Many of its initiatives in rural development management were supported by the U.S.-administered Ford Foundation and the German-based Konrad Adenauer Foundation. These two foundations, as well as the Canadian International Development Assistance (CIDA), also granted scholarships for participants in AIM’s one-month development management course.

Along with its developmental thrust during this period, AIM became involved also in areas of social concern. In particular, it assumed a leading role in the efforts of the Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference to find ways of reconciling the issues of human development with those of business and of integrating Christian social responsibility into business planning and management. AIM, often represented by Gaston Ortigas, moderated workshops and facilitated dialogues among business executives, church leaders, government officials, and the community at large, including the controversial Basic Christian Communities, which espoused liberation theology.

In January 1978, the leadership at the Institute changed again when Roxas resigned after having served AIM and Bancom concurrently for several years, the former at no compensation. Mendoza, who had been involved in the conceptualization of AIM, was elected to take his place. Mendoza was no stranger to the workings of the Institute, for even before Stephen Fuller assumed office in 1968, he had been running it under the direction of the board of trustees.

In 1978, too, Gaston Ortigas resigned as associate dean and went back to be full-time faculty. By this time, he had become deeply involved in a radical anti-Marcos organization, as the Philippines entered its sixth year under martial law. Ortigas left the Philippines in 1979 to evade an arrest order and went into exile in the United States. He was replaced by Meliton Salazar, also an MBA graduate from Harvard who had been with the Institute since its founding. Salazar took over the rural development management program as well.

Despite its growing involvement in Philippine political life, AIM continued to work toward Asianization. In 1979, it conducted its first program outside the Philippines upon the recommendation of Alfonso and Professor Francisco Bernardo, Jr. The program was to benefit Malaysia’s small- and medium-sized bumiputra (Malay and other indigenous) businesses whose executives needed modern management skills to make them more competitive. AIM became even more aggressive in promoting its overseas programs in 1983, when enrollment by Filipinos plummeted following the assassination of senator-in-exile Benigno Aquino, Jr. That pivotal event in Philippine history unleashed a nationwide antigovernment protest movement and triggered a two-year economic recession. Again, as in the late seventies, overseas programs bailed out AIM. Nondegree programs abroad grew from providing 28 percent of the Institute’s total income in 1984 to 36 percent by 1986.

The trustees and governors as well as the faculty, however, would soon realize that the issue of AIM’s Asian-ness went beyond offering programs outside the Philippines; more importantly, it had to do with the Asian way of doing business. A lecture series in 1989 attempted to answer the questions: Was there a unique Asian management style? If so, did it give Asian managers an edge? No one at AIM had a clear answer. Ortigas preferred to describe Asian management as a "convenient ambiguity." Mendoza, in contrast, observed that trying to describe Asian management or the Asian manager "is like staring into a kaleidoscope. Even as you gaze at it, concentrate on it, it changes on you." Instead of searching for a definitive answer, he suggested that "all of us (should) continue living in the question."

Years later, at a meeting of the board of governors, Masaru Ibuka of Japan, a cofounder of Sony Corporation, would have this to say about Asian and Western styles of management:

Traditional Asian relationships are built on trust, confidence, and friendship. In the West, our business contracts are not only placed in writing with disinterested third parties witnessing them; they are also made very explicit about safeguards. The general effect is to tacitly acknowledge that the contracting parties really cannot trust each other….

The Asian time frame is long range. Not three months as in the case of the Western manager. A long view allows us to keep sight of the future of consequences of actions we may wish to take at the present…. And Orientals are far more people-oriented…people must have a say in the affairs that will affect their lives.

These investigations into Asian management indicated that AIM was no longer merely a vehicle for the transfer of Western management technology but was now a supplier of Asian management technology. The Institute’s leadership in that regard was enhanced in 1986 when sixteen of the leading business schools in the region (from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines) came together and established the Association of Deans of Southeast Asian Graduate Schools of Management. Mendoza was elected as its first chairman, although he had resigned by then as president and dean of AIM.

Mendoza’s announcement in December 1985 of his decision to resign set off a long, contentious process of selection and election of his replacement. SyCip refused to accept his resignation unless he could nominate a successor who would be acceptable to the board of trustees. The faculty was sharply divided between two candidates: Salazar, who was dean for faculty and programs; and Ortigas, who had returned from exile after Marcos was ousted from power in February 1986. Ortigas won the election by one vote. He became both chief executive officer and dean, and Mendoza returned to the faculty as a full-time professor.

The People Power Revolt that ended the Marcos dictatorship generated goodwill for the new Philippine government in many parts of the world. At AIM, a grant from the Australian Embassy supported a series of weeklong workshops on environmental scanning, strategic planning, and systems management for key officials of President Corazon Aquino’s new administration. Meanwhile, foreign funders poured money into the Institute’s development management program.

It is not surprising, given Ortigas’s activist background, that under his politicized leadership AIM became an enthusiastic partner of the Aquino government. The faculty now ran workshops for the Office of the President, the leaders of Congress, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and the Department of Trade and Industry as well as selected local administrations.

Even nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and workers found a supportive ally in AIM. Ortigas himself took a keen personal interest in the work of many local NGOs. Catholic nuns and priests as well as NGO and government workers came to AIM for the Development Management Program (DMP). It seemed as though the entire Philippine ideological spectrum was meeting in the heart of the country’s business district, in the school that big business built. AIM developed "into a very human place," said Florencio Abad, who came to AIM as an NGO worker and became secretary of agrarian reform during the Aquino administration. "The farmers came to class. So did the urban poor, including the ones some said were communists," a young professor of development management told a journalist.

The new government’s stability was threatened by restive elements in the Philippine military from its very first day. On 30 November 1989, President Aquino’s administration faced its most serious test when renegade soldiers stormed the shopping and business district of Makati where AIM is located. The attempted coup d’etat lasted seven days. While much of Makati fell into rebel hands, forces loyal to the government occupied the AIM building, where an executive training program had just ended. Several participants and their families were stranded in a small business hotel near the Institute.

A faculty member with links to both loyal and rebellious soldiers assisted in negotiations leading to the rescue of the thirty-five stranded people. In a moment of high drama, twenty-two men from the group walked single file through rebel and government checkpoints, waving white handkerchiefs and their passports in the air. Meanwhile, AIM faculty members and their families escorted the women and children safely to another hotel.

Six months after the failed coup, in June 1990, a myocardial infarction forced Gaston Ortigas to resign AIM’s presidency. He had been warned to slow down after suffering a heart attack three years before. At the time, he and some of his faculty were busy crafting a master strategy for agrarian reform in the Philippines. In his last official act, he managed that July to present diplomas to the first batch of graduates in the master’s in development management program. He died on 31 August.

Felipe Alfonso, who had worked closely with Ortigas in the Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference and in the Development Management Program, was elected to succeed him as president. Francisco Bernardo, Jr., was elected dean. Alfonso has paid tribute to his predecessor as the man who turned AIM into "a true forum for all sectors—the left, the right, and the center." Ortigas, Alfonso believes, "led AIM to create a synergy between business and development management within one institution, a path no other business school has taken to date."

Since becoming president, Alfonso has expanded the Development Management Program and blended development with enterprise management. He says, "We strongly feel that development is too important to leave to the public sector managers alone. The private sector, particularly in the developing countries, has to get involved in the issue of development." By giving students management skills combined with value formation and social responsibility, AIM hopes to produce top-level decision makers who are sensitive to the challenges of development in the region, particularly to the issues of equitable distribution of wealth and preservation of natural resources.

The Development Management Program now includes short nondegree programs for executives, managers, officers, and specialists in development organizations and in government. The monthlong Program for Development Managers, the DMP’s longest running course, includes the environmental, social, economic, and political aspects of development at the operating and policy-making levels. Participants in the program have come from Southeast Asia, South Asia, the United States, and the Pacific Rim.

Alfonso compares the MBM program with the Development Management Program: "The contexts are very different. In terms of assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of the program, the measures of performance tend to be very different. In a firm you have your bottom line in terms of profitability. In the development area it is more difficult to measure some of these things. Then there is the whole issue of empowerment and participation of the people."

The DMP is not the only program that has undergone change in the last few years. In 1991, Mendoza shocked the faculty with a paper, titled "The New Paradigm: Japanese Management Technology," that suggested that AIM was teaching obsolete technology. He wanted his colleagues to realize that: (1) management had changed a great deal in the last ten years, Japanese management technology having transformed the science and art of management; and (2) there is no one best way of doing things. He explains: "The focus is on teams rather than on individuals, on process rather than on results, on the employee rather than on the stockholder. This kind of focus has changed how we teach marketing, production, accounting, finance, and so on."

In response to Mendoza’s critique, the faculty redesigned the MBM and MM curricula to make them reflect Asian management priorities or, in Mendoza’s words, "to make AIM more aware of the importance of people within the organization, to make it much more global in scope, much more interactive in the business community, much more cross-cultural in the way we teach." The new curricula were developed in consultation with the regional business community. There had been apprehension among AIM’s corporate sponsors and in its student recruitment centers that the Institute’s student composition, faculty, and teaching materials were becoming exclusively Philippine and that therefore it was losing its Asian-ness.

Although AIM has been criticized for its heavily Filipino character, it cannot but be concerned about, and affected by, the political, social, and economic developments in the host country. In 1991, with the promulgation of the Local Government Code of the Philippines and the rapid emergence of civil society organizations at the local level, AIM launched the Galing Pook (Outstanding Places) Awards together with the Ford Foundation and the Local Government Academy of the Philippines. The awards have since been given annually to outstanding programs of local government units that address urgent social and economic needs in provinces, cities, and municipalities.

A major issue in the Philippines in 1992 was the conversion to civilian use of the military bases formerly occupied by U.S. forces. AIM convened a forum to enable officials of the Philippine government to explain their plans to the business community, and organized a visit by potential investors to Clark Air Base. In 1994, AIM brought together government officials and community leaders in Zamboanga City to plan the city’s integrated development. For the Commission on Human Rights, it conducted a workshop to review the agency’s performance and develop strategies for the future.

On a regional scale, AIM launched in 1991 the annual Asian Management Awards for outstanding companies in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. The Awards cover the following areas of management: general management, marketing, operations, finance, information technology, people management and development, and development management. Winners are determined through a qualitative examination of management functions, culture and environment, and commitment to total quality.

More recently, AIM’s other regional involvements have included a joint case development program with Japan and Indonesia, a conference on cross-cultural management in Bangkok, a case-writing seminar for the Indonesians, and a joint research project on industrial environment management.

Exploring new markets outside the Philippines, AIM in 1992 welcomed program participants from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for the first time and discussed with its government ways of helping the country’s schools fill the need for management training. To strengthen its hold on its traditional markets, AIM appointed representatives for its new overseas offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. These representatives recruit and process students for AIM’s programs, help run programs, coordinate the faculty’s research and marketing trips, and keep the Institute in touch with its alumni and clients. AIM also communicates with its alumni in sixty-four countries and keeps them abreast of Asian management thought and practice through the Asian Manager magazine.

The success stories of many alumni reinforce the Institute’s emphasis on entrepreneurial management. Mendoza defines an entrepreneurial manager as "a job creator and innovator rather than a job seeker," one who looks at the totality of a situation and perceives needs and thinks of solutions in relation to the whole. AIM students are encouraged to work on entrepreneurial projects for a year in place of a thesis.

Another innovative feature of both the MBM and the MM programs is the "walkabout," patterned after the practice among Australia’s aborigines of taking a break from their regular work to wander the bush. In AIM’s "walkabout," students immerse themselves in managerial projects for two to three weeks. For example, the vice-president of a shipping company chose to trace the movement of dried fish and looked at the margins being made at each stage. As a result of his project, he incorporated a trading company for dried fish. Another student visited a prison for two weeks to learn about jail management.

On the international level, AIM’s response to the trend toward globalization is an exchange program for both students and faculty that helps to promote the Institute abroad as well. Through this program, students may attend, and faculty may be invited to teach at, any of AIM’s partner business schools for one term. The partner schools include the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the University of California in Los Angeles, the University of Western Ontario and McGill University in Canada, the University of Melbourne in Australia, Keio University in Japan, the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, and Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas (ESADE) in Spain.

In its twenty-seven-year history, AIM has produced twenty-three thousand graduates from sixty-four countries, many of whom now occupy key positions in business and industry, mostly in the financing and manufacturing sectors and in government. Enrollment at the Institute is higher than ever: in school year 1995–1996, a total of five hundred students enrolled in the three degree programs and, for the first time in AIM’s history, there were three, rather than two, sections of sixty students each in the first year of the MBM program. Of these 180 MBM freshmen, fifty were from India and three from the People’s Republic of China. Filipinos still compose more than half of the student population, and Indonesians and Malaysians the largest groups of non-Filipinos. Although AIM has drawn mostly Asian students, it has also had a number of Europeans (British, Swiss, Dutch, Germans, and Norwegians) and Americans over the years.

Except in the one-year course, students are graded according to the Harvard Business School system: unsatisfactory, low pass, pass, high pass, and distinction. In the one-year program, only one grade is given: pass, fail, or distinction. In AIM’s quarter of a century of existence, only a handful of students have graduated with highest distinction.

Women make up from 30 to 35 percent of program enrollees today. Since 1988, the role of women in development has been an area of concern to AIM. It has looked into the issues that women managers face in organizations and enterprises and has sponsored gender analysis workshops and management training seminars for women managers. Two books published by the Institute document the experiences of some of the region’s most successful women managers. For women in the public sector and in NGOs, AIM has produced a gender analysis framework for women’s role in development work.

In the Master of Management program, 50 percent of the enrollees are from outside the Philippines, mostly from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Taiwan. Korea and Japan occasionally send students.

The master’s in development management program is dominated by civil servants, particularly from South Asia. Executive programs, such as basic management, management development, top management, transport course, construction management, manufacturing management, strategic marketing, and advanced bank management, take up 110 weeks of the AIM calendar. Half of the programs are conducted overseas, most often in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and India.

Alfonso says that the Institute has entered a critical period because the more developed countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Singapore in particular, but to a certain extent also Thailand, have stopped sending participants to AIM’s programs, and Malaysia is hardly represented in the MBM program. He observes that business schools in Europe and the United States have been aggressively promoting their programs in Southeast Asia. "An institution like AIM has to benchmark itself against the best in the world and be able to convince the clientele that we are in fact as good as the better schools in the other countries," Alfonso says.

Mendoza rues the lack of enthusiastic, consistent support for the Institute in the rest of the region. "Here," he says, "is a country that is poorer than most of its neighboring nations. The business community establishes a business school of world reputation and it is willing to share it with the rest of the region, but the region is not willing to contribute to its sustenance." While Mendoza acknowledges the support of other countries, he wishes it were as substantial as that being given by the Philippine business community.

Washington SyCip had alluded to that problem during a joint meeting of the boards of trustees and of governors in 1988. In many other countries, he said, governments fund business schools and in the United States they enjoy the support of alumni and donors from the business community, among other funding sources. In AIM’s case, according to SyCip, the responsibility for its financial viability was passed on to the deans and the faculty after the initial fund-raising campaign.

AIM has a full-time faculty of fifty-four professors who teach from about 120 to 140 sessions a year. They supplement their salaries with consultancies or membership in corporate boards. In theory, they give 70 percent of their time to the Institute and the remainder to consultancies or board seats. The faculty is still predominantly (85 percent) Filipino, a fact that Alfonso says is the "single weakest point of the Institute." Only six are non-Filipinos: two Indians, two Japanese, one Malaysian, and one American. The problem is economic in nature: the Philippines has the lowest compensation rates for executives in Southeast Asia , and AIM is unable to pay international rates because faculty members have always objected to having a two-tiered salary scale that would entitle non-Filipinos to higher salaries than Filipinos.

Alfonso is cautiously optimistic about AIM’s long-term financial viability. He cites the difficulty of keeping competent faculty in the face of competition from the business sector. "Our competition," Alfonso concedes, "is not other schools, it is business itself."

Mendoza, in contrast, is extremely confident about AIM’s future. He says, "We are just about to explode. We don’t have any competition.… The demand and the need for our product are endless." He believes that so long as the Institute responds to the needs of the business community in the Philippines and in the rest of the region, it will continue to be viable and to move on, assured of the institutional support the boards of trustees and of governors will bring in.

AIM, Mendoza summarizes, teaches two things: the technology of management and the national and regional culture of management. Alfonso speaks of AIM’s social responsibility not only to its students but to their countries and their region as well: "AIM’s mission is basically to turn out managers who are socially conscious and who will make a contribution for sustainable growth to the societies in which they operate."

A primer that defines the values of AIM expounds on this mission. AIM believes that it has a responsibility to develop managers who are: professionals "committed to striving for excellence in their work and to using their talents not only for themselves but also for others"; generalists, not technical specialists; entrepreneurial managers—initiators, leaders, not followers; innovative and confident self-starters, whether they are in business for themselves or as members of an organization, movers rather than the moved, job creators rather than job fillers; Asian managers "who are sensitive to Asian values and sensibilities, and who are committed to the development of Asia and its peoples, particularly the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, and the poor"; and socially responsible managers "who possess integrity, honesty, and high ethical standards and who will try to humanize the corporation, understand the ethical implications of every management decision, and feel a personal sense of responsibility for their workers."

Lorna Kalaw-Tirol