You Can't Save 80 Million Filipinos! But You Can Build Me a Park

Matthias Mendezona is a prize-winning poet and accomplished author of a personal memoir "How Sweet the Mango, No?" but he now co-authors a book with his late friend and business associate Roberto "Bobby" Aboitiz, with the intriguing title, "You Can't Save 80 Million Filipinos, but You Can Build Me a Park." In this pithy tome, Mendezona recounts the experience of working together with the Aboitiz family (an influential Filipino business clan based in the central Philippine province of Cebu) and a Japanese partner to build what would become one of the biggest ship-building sites in the region. The book is valuable from several perspectives-as a personal memoir relating the difficulties of establishing a greenfields industry in a developing country with its peculiar hydra of tradition, politics, bureaucracy, corruption etc. while raising one's family and building one's own career; as a case study which could be taken up in a business school; and the detailed observation of dealing with the many factors and varied role-players involved in the transformation of an underdeveloped town into a competitive global role-player in the shipping industry. With a modern approach of including telling and relevant personal e-mails, detailing ruminations on the factors which keep a country uncompetitive in a global economy, recording poignant moments of struggling towards success while grappling with social and even personal problems, the book could have a broad audience of Filipinos and foreigners alike as well as businessmen, investors and laymen.