Corporate history in a tapestry of a nation’s checkered story

“Firebringer”
By Raul Rodrigo
Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 2001



The engine of socio-economic growth, private industry, is hardly mentioned in a nation’s — or world — history. Our historians preoccupy themselves with political events and people that make them, if not political movements and leaders that drive them.

Review history books — and these are filled with the sounds of the drums of war, the voices in parliament, the screams of gunfire and of street parliamentarians, and the deadly cadence of soldiers on the march. History, in general, does not pay attention to industrial breakthroughs or corporate revolutions: these are left to corporate biographers and industry chroniclers — tidily apart from the “real” history of humankind.

On hindsight, however, you know that much of the advancement of the human community as we know it is due to the discoveries and innovations driven by industrialists — or inventors funded or employed by industries. General Electric gave us the incandescent lamp, Ford gave us the car assembly line, Kodak popularized the camera, Xerox triggered the paper revolution through copiers, etc.

Once you take a long considered look at the impact of these inventions, you know that they are more powerful than army tanks, mightier than foot soldiers, and more eloquent than the most stirring speeches in parliaments around the world. Corporate histories, in fact, become even more interesting, if they are interwoven into the larger epic of global or national life.

This is the case of “Firebringer” — subtitled “Forty Years of First Philippine Holdings” – an epic story of the Lopez Family’s role in the business and corporate world. Whether they wanted it or not, the Family’s corporate involvements, were intertwined into the tapestry of the Philippines’ socio-political history — marked by political turbulence, corporate upheavals, unceremonious exiles and dramatic comebacks.

It is rare enough that a corporate giant like the Lopez Group was, at times, embroiled in the political upheavals of the time, principal of which was the takeover of the Meralco Securities by a once powerful man in the Marcos regime. It is rarer that its top heirs and executives were taken prisoners, and then staged a dramatic escape — then lived to tell the story on television, print media — and in a blockbuster movie.

This is the narrative stuff of “Firebringer,” whose book jacket explains it as “another name for Prometheus, the Titan who brought fire down from heaven as boon to mankind.” It is actually a takeoff from a Greek myth where once man lived without fire — and thus was consigned to coping with darkness at night and surviving, yes, without cooked food by day — to say the least.

This book tells the story of First Philippine Holdings — with huge ventures in power generation and distribution, property development, electric utilities, agribusiness, manufacturing — and, yes, broadcast media. Firebringer is also the story of the patriarch of the Lopez family, Don Eugenio Lopez, who founded First Holding’s forerunner, the Meralco Securities Corporation (MSC), and his sons and heirs.

As corporate history would have it, MSC was actually the holding company formed in 1961 by Don Eugenio, who, as the book says, declared his faith that Filipinos could run a power company like the Meralco “at a time when most Filipinos didn’t think they had what it took to acquire and run a world-class company.” His son, Oscar Lopez says that it was his father’s “vision, audacity and competence” that completed the Filipinization of Meralco acquired from its American owners.

The book is both history and biography, proving a sage’s view that history is actually biography. Firebringer is history punctuated with riveting accounts of hostile takeovers, buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, ambitious financing packages, backroom negotiations, and grand projects with epic proportions. It also presents a cast of characters (young then) who initiated and forged agreements and who implemented ambitious projects like laying pipelines cutting across provinces and less than friendly communities.

Firebringer is also a story of many more “firebringers” — young men schooled in the leadership style of the Lopez patriarch — and who became leaders of this country or who now occupy the helm of top corporations in the country as “captains of industry.” Stories are told of how Don Eugenio recruited promising young men to work for the company when they were yet in their early 20s and who fulfilled their potential by rising to become CEOs of some of the country’s top 100.

Don Eugenio wrote years before taking over Meralco “that human values are superior to material values… that our success should be measured not by the wealth we can accumulate,” but by the amount of happiness we can spread to our employees.” Heartwarming accounts about the patriarch pepper the pages of this book — handing a check as bonus or a letter of promotion.

He also had a knack for people’s names. The book narrates that, when Filemon T. Berba, Jr., a very new employee at MSC, and other MSC executives were at the airport to meet Don Eugenio. “There was no reason he should remember me. But when he passed by me, he held out his hand and said: ‘O Berba, how are you?’” Jun Berba cannot forget that in his lifetime. He muses now: “If that doesn’t grab your loyalty, nothing will.” Berba, now with Ayala Corporation, is now dubbed the CEO’s CEO.

As bringer of fire, the Lopez Group has been positioned as one being a channel of man’s greatest blessings like “fire.” After all, fire represents the benefits of modern civilization like electricity, information via broadcasting, and telecommunications. More than these, it has gifted our country with corporate leaders who knew how to survive and thrive in times of peace and conflict, in eras of certainty and discontinuity.