Page 79 - The Ethics of ASEAN

Ethical leadership of ASEAN and in ASEAN

Gil Gonzalez: ASEAN business leadership
should contribute to governance and
development

Mr. Gil Gonzalez is Executive Director of the ASEAN Business
Advisory Council (ASEAN BAC), a private sector body
mandated by the ASEAN Secretariat. It provides private
sector feedback and guidance on economic cooperation and
integration. Gil’s expertise is in corporate governance, risk
management, strategic and corporate planning and advocacy
for reforms.
According to Gil Gonzales, ASEAN business leadership Figure 2: Gil Gonzalez,
experienced a highly positive economic growth of 5 percent Executive Director of the
before the Covid pandemic but also faced mounting pressures ASEAN Business Advisory
Council (ASEAN BAC)
on regional integration with the rise of protectionism across
the world. Global governance has been weakened worldwide
and there is a pullback from global dialogue and collaboration.
Business governance in ASEAN faces the same internal
stumbling blocks as political leadership. ASEAN business
leaders rarely make declarations going against traditional
infrastructure, policy and the status quo. In addition, there
is also the matter of bureaucracy. As ASEAN is a consensus-
oriented regional association, everything has to be ratified in a
lengthy process by a complex structure of summits, councils,
sectoral bodies, meetings, working groups, etc. Combined
with ASEAN’s consensus-oriented and non-interference
ethics, ASEAN encapsulates traditional ethics of business
leadership rather than creating strong and collaborative
regional governance.
The COVID-19 pandemic made business leaders
more inclined to explore new governance methods and
practices. But ASEAN is hindered by the lack of strong
executive leadership: the Chair of ASEAN rotates annually
among the ten Member States, making governance prone
to inconsistency. Gil Gonzalez proposes a high-level Special
Commission within ASEAN’s regional governance structure
that functions like an executive committee in a company.

Concerning business leadership itself, ethics often
depends on the individual’s own perspective and culture.
For Gil, ethical leadership in ASEAN is not only about making
tactical ethical decisions. An ASEAN ethic of leadership
should collectively improve the governance and development
of the region. This would fundamentally be a self-correcting
process for governance ensuring that leaders will be held
accountable for their ethics.

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