This piece I wrote for the Ateneo de Manila University website, conducting the necessary interviews via Zoom as I was working from home during the coronavirus pandemic.

New Dean for a New Decade

January 27, 2021

The Ateneo Graduate School of Business (AGSB) ended 2020 with a change in leadership and welcomed Jowett “Jet” Cecilio F. Magsaysay, MBA, PhD as its new dean. 

“Let’s heed the call to reimagine management and leadership education for the future-normal; let’s embrace the invitation to transform ourselves and our School to be adaptive and agile; and let’s renew our commitment to service,” Dean Jet said in a letter to the AGSB faculty at the start of his tenure.

The selection of Dean Jet was no surprise, given his all-encompassing background, which he called his “five-part” journey to the deanship - the academe, corporate background, content development, technology, all leading to the top post of the AGSB.

The “five-part” journey

Dean Jet’s journey began in 1994 when he first began working with the Center for Continuing Education (CCE) of the AGSB.

“I was there at the very start of CCE. We developed and taught the first programs at CCE. I was first involved with the Ateneo – BAP Institute of Banking. That's how I got involved with the Ateneo,” Dean Jet said. He explained that at that time he helped develop and teach a course in bond and securities trading.

In his involvement with the academe, he “developed various curricula both for Ateneo and for client organizations of Ateneo. We innovated new programs and courses.”

Since 2017, Dean Jet has been a presence at the Loyola Schools since he was part of the PhD Leadership Studies program, where he teaches the LEADS 305 course (Strategic Leadership, Innovation, and Change) for the PhD Leadership Studies program.

He also teaches in Japan’s Kyoto University, Graduate School of Management, Asia Business Leader where he mentored Japanese managers in their internship programs with various Philippine organizations.

In addition, he said his MBA (Masters in Business Administration) from the Asian Institute of Management in 1989 and PhD in Leadership Studies, Major in Organizational Development from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2016 give him the formal graduate educational background for his new role.

He said that “for much of my career I was a practicing manager, I was a corporate executive to the point where I led an international business unit across Asia, leading teams in different countries in Asia and developing and leading organizations. 

Since 1996, Dean Jet has headed his own management consultancy, Strategic Directions Inc., where he “develops, directs, and presides over consultancy projects for strategy and organizational development for various top organizations in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and China.”

Dean Jet has been able to parlay his academic and corporate backgrounds into developing content for what he calls the “future-normal” as opposed to new-normal. “I don't call it new normal because it's not yet here,” he said.

“My publishing background provided me with experience in writing, editing and content development, and in curating information and knowledge from publications all over the world and delivering them to managers,” he explained.

He also said the technology aspect of education has always been one of his interests “even from the dawn of internet in the Philippines.” Dean Jet proudly said “my team won the very first Webby Award for online content. In the early 2000s,I was already developing e-learning programs for Pan-Asian applications for clients who needed to deliver education and training to their people across Asia, who could only be reached by e-learning.”

When the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID, or simply the IATF) shut down all schools in March 2020, Dean Jet was among the first teachers to be on Canvas, where he taught the LEADS 305 class online during the Intersession.

All of these paths have converged, Dean Jet said, towards the AGSB.

Three Horizons

Dean Jet’s short-term goals include further refining the Canvas teaching method at AGSB. 

“We're getting feedback towards establishing a system of constant evolution and improvement, so that we keep on improving it, towards higher levels of excellence in online learning,” he said. “I believe this is a golden opportunity to create a competitive advantage for Ateneo.”

In the medium term, “we'll shepherd students and participants back to our physical campuses with confidence, when it would be safe to do so.”

In the long term, they would revive the effort to innovate new programs. After all, they now “have the chance to see what are possible program innovations.”

AGSB would continue to explore the natural synergy between the degree programs and the executive education programs at CCE, so that AGSB would be offering programs “in all stages of a manager’s career.”

Until then, Dean Jet offers his invitation to the AGSB community to continue to bring back all courses online - summarized in a hashtag for the future normal: 

 

#nocourseleftbehind

(Link to published article: https://2012.ateneo.edu/aps/gsb/news/new-dean-new-decade)