Jack The Scribbler

TWO professors from the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) are expected to file a complaint against school officials after both were suspended for demanding salary hikes for employees worth nearly a billion pesos.
Emmanuel A. Leyco, who specializes in public finance, told BusinessMirror that he, together with fellow professor and Harvard Business School graduate Victor Limlingan will file a complaint Friday at the Department of Labor and Employment, claiming that both of them were victims of “illegal suspension,” arising from an order issued July 9, 2007 by AIM President Francis Estrada.
In a text message sent to BusinessMirror, Leyco said that the case, which will be filed against the school’s Board of Trustees and its President, will demand “compensatory, moral, and punitive damages,” owing to their suspension which will end July 8, 2008. Leyco failed to indicate an amount for the said damages.
Leyco and Limlingan, President and Chairman, respectively of the Asian Institute of Management Faculty Association (AFA), were suspended after both submitted a letter to the school’s board of trustees last February, demanding additional compensation.
The letter asserted that a law—Republic Act 6728—entitled AIM’s 40-strong faculty members and 100 or so employees to receive 70 percent of the school’s tuition fee increases.
According to its calculations, the AFA document said that AIM employees should receive some P985 million. The said law, enacted in 1989, amended Presidential Decree 451, issued in 1974, increasing employees’ share from 60 percent.
For its part, an AIM statement faxed to BusinessMirror said that the claim had “no substantiation whatsoever.”
“The distribution of the faculty share was effectively restored in February 2007,” the same statement said, adding that the institute “has accordingly not violated PD 451 and RA 6728.” The statement failed to elaborate.
Moreover, the AIM statement said that the AFA letter was submitted during AIM’s Leadership Week, a special event regularly attended by the school’s trustees and board of governors, which allegedly led the school’s stakeholders to express deep concern over the issue.
This, in turn, caused Estrada to suspend Leyco and Limlingan, citing “dysfunctional behavior.”
In a faxed statement sent by AIM to BusinessMirror, the two foreign-educated professors were suspended because “management received several letters of concern from various stakeholders who believe that the large unsubstantiated claim in the AFA letter and the timing of its release and the manner of its distribution show that the letter was intended to embarrass or damage the institute rather than raise a legitimate claim.”
For his part, Leyco said that the suspension orders against them were implemented without due process, forcing them to seek temporary relief from the National Labor Relations Commission. The relief was not granted.
The document which sought a temporary restraining order from the NLRC said that the suspension order “should have been undertaken by a committee convened by the Institute’s Dean.”
“Francis Estrada has exercised arbitratriness in managing the school,” Leyco told BusinessMirror in a separate interview Wednesday night. “There has been no consultation, no due process and he comes up with unilateral decisions that hurt individuals.”
Moreover, Leyco on Thursday said that a separate order issued by Estrada barred him from entering the school and using the facilities. In a separate text message, Leyco claimed that “[Estrada] did not want the graduate students ‘distracted’ from their studies.”

From the Oversight Department. Although this piece was published Friday, September 14, 2007 at BusinessMirror, the paper I work for, it contains a few errors, all of which are mine. First, I failed to mention that tuition of AIM, Asia’s first business school, is based on the US dollar to give readers a perspective vis-a-vis the billion peso salary claim. Second, I also failed to indicate that I have undertaken all possible attempts to get the side of Francis Estrada, AIM President. Although I was already writing the story as of six-fifteen in the evening of Thursday, September 13, 2007, I was still hoping that Estrada—or any of the school’s representatives—would call me for a phone interview. Instead, what I got was a statement which was faxed as soon as I emailed Estrada—through AIM’s Edythe Bautista—a set of questions. As of this writing, the same questions have yet to be answered. Third, and perhaps more important, Leyco and Limlingan didn’t file their complaint at the Department of Labor and Employment. They filed it at the National Labor Relations Commission, an agency under the DOLE. Previously, the two asked the NLRC to stop AIM from enabling their suspension. Since they were unsuccessful, they converted their earlier case—which was a request for a temporary restraining order—into a case against their illegal suspension.

THE Asian Institute of Management (AIM) does not give anything for free.  

Although the prestigious Manila-based business school is a champion of free markets and an exponent of free trade, it does not believe in the proverbial free lunch.  

So what was it’s business sponsoring a five-day seminar for journalists — lunch, snacks, and wireless internet access included?  

Nobody knew.  

And no one bothered to find out.  

Especially not this deadline-beating deadbeat who got invited to the event held end-July, together with print and television journalists from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and of course, the Philippines.    

Called the Language of Business Seminar for Journalists, the event was a crash course in economics, finance, accounting, and eating, perhaps the only activity many of us participated in eagerly.   

However, for the selected AIM faculty who agreed to deliver lectures on these subjects, the seminar was a test of their tolerance for hopelessly stupid people, such as, for instance, myself.  

Since professors Federico Macaranas, Felixberto Bustos, Ricardo Lim, Richard Cruz, and Mao Bolante took time off from their classes and their consultancies, this numbskull took it upon himself to ensure that he came to the sessions on the dot.  

After all, it was the least that was expected of him, besides gorging on the snacks that they served and happily consuming every drop of beer that was available.  

(And since we’re on the subject of beer, which is best taken ice-cold with freshly-cooked camaron rebusado, let me just say that the whole class felt that the beverage’s availability was severely inadequate, especially during the last day.  

According to certain participants who refuse to be identified, the beer shortage discouraged the pursuit of higher learning, an activity made possible only through a vigorous exchange of ideas while drinking the very best kind of beer in the world: free.    

These same participants expressed hope that by next year, the oversight will be rectified by the event’s organizers, headed by Ms. Edythe Bautista, who has promised to invite me again for another LOB series.)  

And so, to continue: owing to the tremendous sacrifice made by the professors, I myself made a corresponding contribution to ensure the seminar’s resounding success.  

For five days straight, I got up at five in the morning to beat the morning rush so that I could be at the AIM’s
Makati campus by eight. (I live in
Quezon City, the jologs capital of the world.)  

Unfortunately, promptness is but one among many prerequisites of the seminar.  

Like many other forms of learning, the seminar requires large amounts of intelligence from its participants.  

Since I was not the quickest one on the draw, so to speak, it took awhile before I could fathom concepts such as the price of goodwill, the cost of depreciation, and the importance of capital budgeting.   

Fortunately, no one expected me to read, let alone professionally evaluate an income statement after five days.  

If it took two years of pain, suffering, and millions of pesos to produce an MBA graduate, what could the organizers hope to derive from a five-day program attended by a self-proclaimed journalist who woke up with a hangover every morning?  

A lot apparently.  

Hours before we formally finished the seminar, the whole class was split into six groups and assigned to play a DOS-based computer game in what was to become our last activity before graduation.   

Besides playing against the computer, each team was assigned to manage a robot manufacturing company.  

After every round—which involves making a business decision regarding the company’s inventory and its advertising budget—each team was ranked in terms of how much money was earned or lost.  

Our team, the second group, went by the name of RobLab (Robot Laboratories) Inc. and was headed by Connie Fernandez of the Cebu Daily News. Not only did she agree to become RobLab Inc.’s chief executive officer, she was also willing to take the blame in case the company turned belly up.     

Fortunately, when the final results were validated, we emerged a close second, an achievement which was by no means ordinary.  

Another group, which had the misfortune to count Manila Times’ Rafael Santos as a member, was bailed out by Professor Lim.  

Unsold inventories of
Santos’ group were so huge they were forced to sell their excess at a discount. According to sketchy reports, it was
Santos’ faulty decision that did his group in.   

Meanwhile, even though we lost by just $200,000, it still rendered us ineligible to receive AIM jackets, which was the grand prize.  

This was patently unfair.  

But since we enjoyed ourselves, we decided against lodging a protest in our behalf.  

Despite our defeat, we remain convinced that we were the true winners, the legends in our very own minds.  

As for myself, I remain privileged to have been considered to attend the AIM’s 2006 Language of Business Seminar for Journalists.   

And what do I have to show for it?  

Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about assets and liabilities, my friend.