LITO TAYAG…AN OLD BOY’S CINDERELLA STORY
By Ana de Villa – Singson
In this month of fathers, we are featuring not an Old Girl, but an Old Boy. His is the poster story of Assumption San Simon. This story is reprinted with editorial permission from Assumpta “Coming Home”, 2019.
His life is the proverbial Cinderella story; from the humble farmlands of San Simon Pampanga to the top echelons of corporate society as president of the 70,000- strong Accenture Philippines. When I met him in his office, he was trim, suave, confident, quick to speak, rapid to engage. There seemed little of the boy from Pampanga that presaged his meteoric success story; until he spoke of Assumption’s Assumpta Tech, where his incredible story began.
As a boy, he would work the fields at 4 a.m. “ and arrive home with the night. I mince no words. My father is a farmer; not the haciendero farmer but the real farmer…he fought his landlords to be able to own his land. He started the land reform program in our village, San Simon.”
Life was primarily agricultural for Lito. Even then, his father had loftier aspirations for him and his 3 brothers. “My father told us: “I would teach you how to farm, but I don’t want you to become farmers. “ Lito mused, “That was part of my aspiration and also my inspiration, to be more than where I came from.”
Life took a big turn when he enrolled in Electronics as one of 50 scholars in Assumpta Tech in 1974. Assumpta Technical School in San Simon, Pampanga started out as a technical mission high school. Children of farmers and fishermen who passed the entrance exam were accepted as scholars. Vocational offerings included electronics, carpentry, agriculture for boys and cooking, dressmaking, typing for young ladies. For Php 10 ( ten pesos) per month or Php 100 (One hundred pesos) per academic year, Lito received an education. “My Assumption education was a complete approach. It has always been not just an education of the mind, but it is an education of the heart. And in San Simon, it’s also the (vocational –technical) education of the hands. That was a major differentiator for us. And you throw in the education of the spirit, the religious education.”
He has fond recollections of his days in Assumpta Tech. He remembers earning his first ever pesos by making parols which were sold in the San Fernando Christmas Lantern Parade. Most vividly, he remembers Mother Anna Melocoton (Sister Anna is one of 3 Assumption nuns whom he calls Mother) who drew him aside when he was in third year and told him: “You’ve been focusing a lot and you’ve been relatively successful in your academic accomplishments in school. But there’s a lot more to you than simply academics. You have to have some visibility in order to help the rest of your school and your classmates.” That was Lito’s first lesson in leadership. It catalyzed serious soul-searching as he asked himself what role he wanted to assume, what kind of impact he wanted as his legacy in Assumpta. “ That was like a trigger point.” He ended up being the core commander in Citizen’s Army Training ( CAT) and became the student body’s de facto leader. His conversation with Mother Anna “ defined my definition of leadership today. It has a lot to do with what you can contribute, what difference you can make and how you treat the people who work with you, how you make results as a leader and as one of them.”
Graduating from Assumpta Tech, Lito was one of the select few to pass the rigid college entrance exam of Ateneo Loyola School. His doing so is testimony to the education he received from Assumpta Tech. Though coming from a vocational school, “there was never a compromise in our academic education.” That he was accepted into the Management- Engineering course, one of Ateneo’s most gruelling and intellectually elite courses, is further testimony to his innate intelligence and the quality education he received in Assumpta Tech.
“When I was in Ateneo, I remember feeling some level of insecurity. Let’s face it, there was that inferiority complex. I was a scholar. I had barely enough food for the week. I barely had enough for clothes and whatever.” He would go home every weekend because it was cheaper to go home to Pampanga than to spend on food for 2 full days in the campus. Heartbreakingly, the scarcity defined the relationships he made in Ateneo. Throughout college, he did not attend a single party for want of clothes. It defined his social and civic direction as well, joining retreats in stead of parties and prodding him to volunteer with the Office of Social Concern and Involvement. “There’s an irony to it…the way that I would help others was to help Ateneans to be concious of people who in essense ,like me…didn’t have money.”
Lito describes his career as a “journey to the unfamiliar”. He made his mark in his first job in an IT company as lead analyst for the conversion of manual electric reading books to hand-held computers-cum-meter readers called the the Rover. He moved up the corporate ladder quickly, recognized for his innovative approach for identifying quick solutions to problems. His career took him to Wall Street where his Filipino talent “when given the platform, could compete head-on against the best technologists that Wall Street money could buy.” He was offered a permanent position in Wall Street, but in an “early attempt at nationalism,” he came home. Today, he has 30 years of solid experience in outsourcing, having played key roles in driving country strategies, growing clientele, developing technology capabilities while promoting global awareness for the Philippines along the way.
Lito has had his failures too. Young, aggressive and ambitious, he promised more than he could deliver within a very abbreviated timeline , and a Japanese project incurred financial losses. He made other mistakes, and could have been fired for each one of them. “But after each failure, I took to heart the lessons I learned. The failed projects were in fact among my best teachers.”
In 2002, Lito Tayag joined Accenture Philippines. In 2010, he was appointed as its Country Managing Director. He leads over 70,000 employees in providing services in this “ increasingly digital economy and building new skills in the new and emerging technologies.” He has gone full circle. From being a scholar of Assumpta Technical High School, he now sits as the Chairman of the Board of Mother Rose Memorial Fund which owns the Assumption-run school in San Simon. He likewise chairs the Information Technology Business Process Association of the Philippine and sits in the Boards of Makati Business Club, Ateneo Professional Schools , Ateneo Graduate School for Business, Philippine Business for Social Progress, Philippine Business for Education and a score of Assumption organizations in Pampanga and Antipolo.
From the farmlands of San Simon to Wall Street and the most august halls of the world of corporate technology, Lito Tayag has come a very long way in a very short span of time (He is 57!). From commuting home to Pampanga every week, he now motors into his own reserved parking space in a spanking black BMW ( this was pointed out to me by Rain, his very attentive EA. Lito himself made no mention of this). He has the polish and confidence to enter any corporate boardroom and be the cynosure of attention, showing no traces of the young man who shied away from college socials. From being a beneficiary, he is now the corporate benefactor of over 3,000 reprocessed computers distributed by Accenture to public schools nationwide along with a complete educational handover to train the end users on computer usage. He is likewise Accenture’s Corporate Citizenship Head for ASEAN, overseeing all Corporate Social Responsibility programs in the region, including a program where young graduates are taught “upskilling” in an online Skills Academy made available to anyone for free.
In his Cinderella tale of achievements, I expected to hear a rattling off of his career accomplishments. Surprisingly, no matter how I tried to draw him out , he barely mentioned his career milestones. In stead, he rattled off the names of people who deeply touched his life. “ It’s the people along they way. I’m going to talk about Mother Anna who taught me about leadership, Mother Josefa, about Sister Iris whom we call Mother Williams. She was an American assigned to San Simon. She was my electronics teacher and she honed all of us in English. I remember Sister Irene ( now the Paris-based General Councilor of Assumption, also a scholar of Assumpta Tech, San Simon). We remember the people along the journey.”
When asked of his greatest achievements, he laughed at my Miss Universe Pageant question. But he answered gamely : “ Some stand out. Graduating from Assumpta Tech HS is something I am very grateful for. Graduating Ateneo through scholarship set the direction for the rest of my journey. My being head of Accenture. But truly, it’s the graduation of my two daughters. They are my bragging rights. Both were Management Engineering students from Ateneo and it is a matter of pride that both were also students of Assumption Antipolo.” It is telling that he sent his daughters to Assumption when there were other schools much closer to his home. It is telling too that he deliberately chose Assumption in Antipolo for having a more middle class profile. It speaks of his parenthood and role modelling that his children, since becoming wage earners, have joined him in funding scholarships in Assumpta Tech. This too he cites as one of his greatest successes!
Throughout our 80 minute chat, he would often say: “If it were not for Assumpta Tech, it would have been completely different for me. The values reflected in our song: fidelity to duty, love of simplicity, those are the values of my Assumption education. Probably our lives would be very different if it were not for that. From this school, I obtained my foundation, both moral and academic. From this school, I first learned the meaning of kindness and generosity, especially for the underpriveleged. I must express my gratitude to Assumpta Technical High School for my Assumption foundation.”
Lito Tayag. An Old Boy, one of our few. Never having worn the plaid, his heart nonetheless beats for the same things that our Old Girls’ hearts collectively beat to. It matters not that he never wore the plaid, that his education had the vocational –technical education of the hands that ours did not, that his journey is the atypical stuff of fairytales. What matters is that he dreamed, he strove, he succeeded and is succeeding still. What matters more is that he is succeeding with Assumption values as his Northern Star. What matters most is that while forward-looking, he does not forget to revisit his past and help others along the way, in the same way that he too was helped.
Lito Tayag: an Old Boy, a rare breed, but like any true Marian Old Girl with his heart which beats plaid.