The first time I heard of it I was captivated

ONE MAN’S MEAT By Benjamin G. Defensor, November 18, 2007

AT the “twilight of his years,” marketing guro [teacher in Filipino], Manoling de Leon, has written Pinoy Pilgrim: In Search of Filipino Identity, which is a marketing text, a memoir and a spiritual journal and Baedeker rolled into one. When martial law was declared in 1972, the Manila Chronicle, then one of the four major broadsheets, was in the middle of a marketing drive masterminded by Manoling. “I’m a veteran marketing man after all. I think along the lines of satisfying a need or filling a demand,” he says. The book may be divided into three major sections: business, family and faith. And Manoling wove them all together seamlessly. But let me start with his encounter with faith, with Opus Dei, as a matter of fact. Manoling first heard of Opus Dei while working in Madrid but did not get to really know it until he met Fr. Joe Cremades in Manila. After that, “I was convinced that God was calling me to Opus Dei, or the Work, as a supernumerary member. “For someone with my background, a married man with a growing family who climbed the corporate ladder following my own style of daring, hard work, and ambition, prepared for professional work by self-study and intense personal experiences, I felt that it was a personal privilege to discover that all of my past life had a certain direction. “God wanted me to be holy. “The first time I heard of it, I was captivated by what seemed like a goal worth like no other. “It seemed impossible, which is why it challenged me.” But we have to go back a little farther to understand what he is saying. Manoling was one of the first of our OCWs—overseas contract workers. As a teen-ager he worked with the US army in Guam. As a whiz kid, the US Army proposed him for special training in the US but after going for a vacation before leaving for the US, he decided to stay home and work his way up from there instead. Manoling never went to college. The only MBA training that he received was eight-hours—one working day—watching the late Francisco Dalupan, the founder of the University of the East, work. Here’s how Manoling summed up Dalupan’s eight-hour MBA course: “Being an executive is hard work. You need to take very good care of the details. You need to think, know what questions to ask, find out problems and suggest solutions. Or, you can get others to think of solutions, and make sure they are done. “Your job is to do or execute the plans. That’s what an executive’s job is. You may also be part of the planning, thinking of the future based on the decisions you make today. “Following up is one of the most difficult jobs of an executive, but if you do it well, you’ll be successful. “Anyone can try to be an executive, but only the good executives finish what they start. They are the one who succeed. “That’s it. My MBA, the only schooling I received about being an executive. In eight hours, I was convinced that I learned what an executive’s job is and I liked it. At the end of the day, I was tired but happy, my mind full of ideas to try out.”