AIM’s Dean Nieves Confesor: Beyond Business

It may not be common knowledge, but the current Dean of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) is a woman. Former Secretary of Labor and Employment Ma. Nieves Confessor now holds that illustrious position and stands as the very first woman to do so. If the arena of business management and entrepreneurship has traditionally been a bastion of male supremacy, Dean Confessor sees her appointment as a statement that, while not necessarily heralding feminist sentiments, at the very least signals the potent wind of change.

Woman empowerment is often talked about, and while more prevalent in the West, the fact that more and more women in the Orient are taking on major corporate responsibilities is an inescapable fact. On the entrepreneurship side, it’s not uncommon to find women setting up ventures and proving themselves more than competent at handling people and businesses. That someone as eminently qualified as Dean Nieves has now taken up the cudgels for an institution as hallowed as AIM is only just desserts. In fact, she downplays the gender issue and would rather be seen as part of a continuum of concerned individuals ready to commit their time and effort to maintaining AIM’s lofty reputation.

The Asian Institute of Management has had to evolve and be responsive to what’s happening within the global context. While retaining its Asian perspective, it has to understand that while globalization surmounts and brings down old barriers, it also creates and runs up against new problems; problems that have to be defined, understood and overcome within the parameters of an Asian response. Time and again, it’s been mentioned how foolhardy it would be to simply expect the Western business attitude and ethos to be adopted in toto here in Asia. It’s institutions like AIM that can be the effective bridge for communication, the exchange of ideas and the phasing in of solutions that bring together Western management practices and Asian business practitioners.

As Dean Nieves avers, "The devastating Asian crisis, the changes wrought by unstoppable globalization, liberalization and the technology revolution... we have embarked on a radical transformation of the AIM into a broad spectrum management institution– global in thinking, Asian in presence. My predecessor, Dean (Eduardo) Morato, initiated AIM’s response to all these changes in the business environment; and so now we’re a multi-school system."

Besides AIM for Big Business, AIM for Development Managers, AIM for Entrepreneurs and Asian Family Corporations and AIM for the New Economy and Technology, the school recently put in place the AIM of the Humanities, Humanism and Human Development. Programs within this new school include Managing the Arts, Education Management, Health Care Management and Environmental Governance.

"It’s a matter of continuous learning, of ‘raising the bar’ of knowledge. We recognize that Asia will need leaders at all levels of decentralized governments, of small and medium-sized enterprises that operate globally, of multinational companies (some of which hold resources greater than some nations) and of civil society organizations. For all of these, AIM must position itself as the management education graduate school of choice. The vision is that we must become the training ground that provides the education for a ‘democracy of leaders’ in Asia– persons who can lead organizations and simultaneously create value and wealth in and for society."

This all makes for great sound bites, but when you run up against the image of an mba student as someone who’s out to maximize his earning potential and get ahead of others in the paper chase for the almighty dollar, it seems rather utopian to ascribe such lofty ideals to a Business Management institution. Critical path be damned, but most students would be happy just finding the quickest way to improve their business revenues and profits, and pulling out the fat cigar.

And perhaps this is why we have to hope that somebody like Dean Nieves will make a difference. Poverty in this region is on a scale that most people in the West do not experience on a daily basis. Here, you auto-lock the windows of your Beamer and pump up the volume of your car CD player, drowning in Vivaldi, Bocelli or Chicane; but when someone taps on your window, you know that even if you don’t look up from your newspaper or sales read-out, it’s someone begging for attention….literally. Begging, that is. So if Dean Nieves would like to strive for a school of business graduates with some kind of conscience or sense of social responsibility, I know I’d give a silent prayer in the hope that she gets somewhere with her Holy Grail. That she considers it a priority to imbue the faculty and the methodology with these aspirations is worth noting.

This is still a region where great numbers of the population live below the poverty line, where social exclusion threatens peace and prosperity as a significant percentage of the populace have no access to global markets and the opportunities these provide to maintain decent standards of living and working. As an educational institution, AIM has to constantly maintain a reality check of what is the environment into which we send our graduates. The faculty also has to be aware of this situation and respond to it. The core competency of graduate management education has to provide a clear and concise framework for addressing the specific Asian markets and helping shape expectations into expertise.

"Many management education providers now exist within the region, having come both by land and in cyberspace. Our IT infrastructure is still several generations behind; our human IT resources decimated by periodic raids from a young industry hungry for its own growth. One of our core resources, the faculty, is still generally at the doorstep of the New Economy; our delivery system, still brick and mortar. In this regard, we are heartened by the establishment of a major Global Distance Learning Network facility center, funded by the World Bank, to service the region. With this, we will better deliver e-learning to our stakeholders in Asia and in the global economy. Our biggest challenge in this aspect is developing the academic agenda to be enabled by it. Here, time is of the essence; there’s a lot of catching up to do, then raising the bar so that we put ourselves at a level that’s globally competent."

But it’s not just theories and abstract programs that captures Dean Nieves’ attention. "I referred to the faculty and this is another area we are challenged by. We have to find and develop the right faculty–the ‘practitio-demics’ –a special breed of faculty who are academically qualified and are also seasoned entrepreneurs. This is so essential for our Entrepreneurial Management program as entrepreneurship is not a course or business entity–it’s a way of thinking integral to finance, marketing, accounting and operations. It’s developing thinking in an arena with considerable unpredictability and ambiguity. To think otherwise would be foolhardy, as two of the keys of being a successful entrepreneur is the ability to anticipate and to react favorably to the unexpected."

It’s the relation between the Institute on one hand, and the alumni and business community on the other, that becomes integral to the relevance the Institute can continue to enjoy. There has to be a ‘right fit’ between the offerings of the school and the requirements of the business community. To achieve this, AIM needs to bring the community in as partners/advisers for academic review, for the placement of graduates and as clients of the Institute. The non-degree programs, the customized executive offerings–these all form part of AIM’s response to being relevant to the business community at large and raising much needed revenues at the same time.

If there are some things Dean Nieves will have to learn, it’s not to be so accommodating and to consult her calendar. Her staff joke about how she can never say ‘No’, and so appointments pile up on top of each other and they’re thankful for her irrepressible way of making people forget they had to wait for her. She maintains an open door policy, one that is transparent and infamously informal. Promising I’d withhold her identity, one staffer even remarked that Dean Nieves was very ‘makuwento’; even if you’re there just to ask her one solitary question, you’ll end up sitting for 20 minutes, entertained by stories of her recent sorties abroad or just shooting the breeze. One refreshing change to the ambient noise that’s particularly AIM’s is that every so often you’ll hear her booming voice exclAIMing greetings to some professor or staff member… even if she’s some 50 feet away.

Put simply, there’s a lot of things afoot at the AIM; it’s on several fronts and it’s in response to the need to continue evolving in line with the times and the demands of an educational institution of AIM’s stature. Putting a woman at the forefront of these moves is secondary, it’s what Dean Nieves Confessor brings to the table in a personal capacity that’s integral to the vision and direction under which the AIM remains a potent force in the development of our Asian leaders, whether in government or in business.