What Does Digital Mean for Your Business?
Rey Lugtu 
One senior executive of an organization pronounced during a planning session I was involved in that “one assumption for our 2021 plan is that we can have face-to-face engagements with consumers and customers by the fourth quarter.” This assumption was plugged into the 2021 financial budget. Last month, news about a more contagious strain of … Read moreForecasting in uncertain times
“The coronavirus will peak in March and will die down in April.” These are the unanimous pronouncements from a medical doctor and an economist when I attended a business lunch seminar in early February 2020, about the prospects on the coronavirus. I must admit that it was comforting to hear those words from experts, exactly … Read moreThe biggest business lessons of 2020
“Hope is not a strategy.” – Anonymous The holiday season, and 2020, ended with little fanfare. Messages of hope from world leaders and ordinary people abound at the end of the old year and the onset of the new one. A cursory look at the search engine counted 1 billion of such messages, expressing … Read moreHope and strategy
As we approach the end of the year, we also approach the season that many finance leaders and staff dread the most: the yearend financial closing. For a large number of companies that follow the calendar year as their fiscal year, this is when they toil long hours to close the books for the preceding … Read moreVirtual financial close
Learning, be it academic or corporate, has almost entirely migrated to the online realm in just a few months after the coronavirus pandemic started. Schools hurriedly implemented learning management systems (LMS) to deliver blended learning, combining synchronous and asynchronous modalities, to students. On the other hand, corporate learning moved from a predominantly classroom setup to … Read moreLearner journey mapping
Collaboration is a skill required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where artificial intelligence will replace menial tasks. It is where two or more people or organizations work together to achieve or realize a goal or project successfully. Collaboration in the workplace has been found to drive workplace performance, according to a Stanford study in 2017. … Read moreVirtual collaboration
The last decade before the pandemic, we had seen good times in the global and domestic economies. The world gross domestic product growth rate had been hovering in the three percent level. In the Philippines, we had seen a range of six to seven percent growth. During these prosperous times, companies would just ride the … Read moreStrategic planning in this time of crisis
Note: This is a speech delivered by the author during the Digital Banking Online Event Asia on Nov. 10, 2020. As chairman of the Digital Banking Online Event Asia Philippine Track, I welcome everyone to this exciting, relevant and timely event to talk about the prospects, challenges and opportunities in digital banking across the … Read moreThe acceleration of digital banking
Nowadays, one will often hear from businessmen and managers alike how difficult and tough it is to manage their companies and businesses. Understandably, they lament and complain of lackluster revenues, rising costs, or a plainly slow market due to the lockdowns. But what does it mean exactly when they say business is difficult? For managers … Read moreManaging in difficult times
The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has put extreme pressure on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). In the US, data from Yelp shows that 97,966, or 60 percent of business closures due to the pandemic are now permanent. In the Philippines, at least 90,000, or 6 percent of its 1.4 million MSMEs remain closed … Read moreSocial responsibility in times of crisis
