Keynote Speech: 5th PSTD Mentoring & Leadership Summit 2026
October 29, 2026
Let me start with something that probably would not have looked very impressive on my résumé.
I was a C student in high school.
I flunked my English entrance exam.
And I ended up going to La Salle partly because,
during a senior class sharing session, two classmates sitting in front of me announced that they were going to UP and Ateneo.
I thought, I should probably say something impressive too.
So I said: “I’m going to La Salle.”
There was just one problem. I hadn’t even applied.
Fortunately, my math score was high enough to compensate for my English score.
So I got in.
And somehow, the student who flunked his English entrance exam eventually became an author of 20 bestselling books.
Long before AI.
I’m not telling you that story because I think my biography is particularly interesting.
I’m telling you because of what that experience taught me about how we judge people.
If you had looked at me at different points in my life, you would have come up with very different descriptions.
C student.
Failed English entrance exam.
La Salle student.
Entrepreneurial marketer.
Theology student.
Strategist.
Teacher.
Author.
Which one was the real me? All of them.
But none of them, by itself, told you where I was going.
And that is what I want to talk about today.
A snapshot tells you where someone is.
A trajectory tells you where someone may be going.
I think that distinction is especially important for everyone in this room.
We spend a lot of time assessing people.
Grades.
Credentials.
Performance ratings.
Assessment scores.
Interview results.
Leadership competencies.
Potential ratings.
These things have value.
But sometimes we take a piece of information about someone’s performance today and turn it into a conclusion about what that person can become tomorrow.
That’s where we can get into trouble.
Imagine if someone had looked at my English entrance exam and said:
“He’s weak in English. He probably won’t become a strong writer.”
At that moment, the assessment might have been accurate.
The conclusion would have been wrong.
I’m not saying assessments don’t work.
I’m saying we need to know what an assessment actually tells us.
Performance is data. It is not a verdict.
And that leads to a question I think is worth reflecting:
How many people are we accurately measuring today, but inaccurately predicting for tomorrow?
Because what someone is today is not necessarily what that person can become.
And that brings us to the theme of today’s keynote:
What we learn.
What we give.
What we leave behind.
Let me look at those three questions from the perspective of someone who has spent much of his career thinking about business, learning, strategy and people.
WHAT WE LEARN
I started my career as a working student, then I joined a local company.
Three years later, I was invited to be managing partner of a start-up business. I started practising entrepreneurial marketing. I didn’t have the resources of a large multinational.
So I learned something very quickly:
You can’t always outspend. So you have to outthink.
You look for leverage. You question assumptions. You eliminate things that don’t add value. You find a different way to solve the problem.
Over time, I started thinking of this as strategic thrift.
It’s not simply about spending less.
It’s about being more deliberate about where you put your resources.
And that idea eventually went beyond money.
Every organization has limited resources. Money. Time. Attention.
But one resource is particularly important: human judgment.
So perhaps the question for leaders isn’t just:
“How much are we investing in people?”
It should be:
“Where are we investing human judgment, and what are people becoming better at because of it?”
That question changed how I thought about learning.
Later, I went on to graduate studies and spent eight years studying theology.
Business strategy and theology don’t exactly look like natural partners.
But one thing I learned from that experience is that you don’t always know the value of something when you’re learning it. Sometimes you only discover its value years later.
You encounter a problem. You remember something you studied years ago. And suddenly it gives you a different way of looking at the problem.
That’s one reason I’ve become less interested in simply teaching sales and marketing. I’m much more interested in how people think.
How they make decisions.
How they recognize opportunities.
How they deal with uncertainty.
How they innovate.
How they think strategically.
And underneath all of that is a fairly simple question:
How do we help people think better?
Because knowing something isn’t enough. You have to be able to use it.
And then you have to be able to make a good decision when the situation isn’t clear.
And eventually, it has to become part of how you operate. So I think about development this way:
Knowing → Doing → Deciding → Becoming → Impact
Knowing is the starting point. Doing is application. Deciding is where judgment comes in. Becoming is when capability starts to become part of who you are. And impact is what happens beyond you.
That’s a progression. And the further you go, the harder it becomes to measure.
But that doesn’t make it less important.
In fact, it may make it more important.
So when we think about learning programs, we often start with:
“What training should we conduct?”
I’d suggest starting somewhere else.
What needs to be different when this is over?
What problem are we trying to solve?
What capability is missing? Whose decisions need to improve? What behavior needs to change? And what difference will that make?
Because you can run a very good program and still solve the wrong problem. The facilitator can be excellent. The materials can be excellent. The attendance can be excellent. The evaluations can be excellent.
And the organization can still end up in exactly the same place. So perhaps the better question isn’t: “Did they learn?”
It’s: “What became possible because they learned?”
WHAT WE GIVE
The second question is: What do we give?
If you work in HR or L&D, you probably give people a lot.
Training.
Feedback.
Coaching.
Stretch assignments.
Assessments.
Mentoring.
Succession plans.
But think about your own career for a moment.
Who actually changed your trajectory?
Maybe it was a boss. Maybe a teacher.
Maybe a mentor. Maybe a colleague.
Maybe someone who gave you an opportunity before you thought you were ready.
Maybe someone who told you something you didn’t want to hear.
Maybe someone who simply believed you could do more. What did that person really give you?
Maybe knowledge.
But perhaps it was something else.
Perspective.
Confidence.
An opportunity.
A challenge.
Access.
A second chance.
Sometimes the most valuable thing another person gives us is the willingness to say:
“I think you can do this. Let’s find out.”
That’s what good mentoring can do.
It can expand what a person thinks is possible. And mentoring isn’t just about being supportive. Sometimes the best thing a mentor can do is challenge your thinking.
A mentor should be able to say:
“I understand why you see it that way.”
And then: “Now let’s see if that idea holds up when we test it.”
That’s part of the job. We don’t need mentors who simply make people feel good about their existing thinking.
We need mentors who help people think better.
And a mentor shouldn’t be trying to create another version of himself or herself.
Instead of “How do I make this person more like me?”
It should be: “Who could this person become that I could never be?”
That’s a very different idea of mentoring. We’re not trying to reproduce ourselves. We’re trying to help the next person go further.
HIGH POTENTIAL IS A HYPOTHESIS
This is also where I think we need to be careful with the phrase “high potential.”
There’s nothing wrong with identifying people who may be ready for greater responsibility.
But what exactly are we measuring?
Sometimes we call someone high potential because they are already doing very well in the environment we have created.
But what happens when the environment changes?
What happens when the problem is unfamiliar?
What happens when the rules change?
What happens when there isn’t a clear answer?
Maybe that’s where potential really becomes visible.
So I like to think of potential differently:
Potential is not a fact.
Potential is a hypothesis.
And if it’s a hypothesis, we should test it. Give the person a harder problem.
Give them more responsibility. Put them somewhere unfamiliar.
Let them make a decision without having all the information.
Give them feedback. See what they do with it.
See how quickly they learn. See what happens when things don’t go according to plan.
Instead of asking: “Is this person high potential?” we should be reflecting: “What evidence would convince us?”
That’s a much more useful conversation. Identifying talent is only the beginning. The real work is developing it.
WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND
Now we come to the third question:
What do we leave behind?
Eventually, all of us leave.
We leave a role. An organization. A title.
Someone takes over. Processes change. Programs get redesigned. The PowerPoint slides get replaced. That’s normal.
So I don’t think legacy is about keeping everything exactly as we left it.
The more important issue is:
What capability remains after we are gone?
If everything falls apart when you leave, you may have created dependence.
If the team continues to perform without you, you’ve built capability.
But if the people you’ve developed go on to develop other people, something much bigger has happened.
The capability has multiplied.
That’s where mentoring becomes bigger than a one-to-one relationship.
You develop one person. That person develops another.
That person develops someone else. And you may never know how far it goes. That’s one of the interesting things about leadership.
You don’t always get to see the full return on the people you invest in.
But that doesn’t mean the return isn’t there.
Legacy is what multiplies because of us.
So perhaps the goal is “How much more capable are they without me?”
That’s a very different measure of leadership.
A SIMPLE TEST
So when you go back to your organization, I’d suggest asking five questions about whether the work is actually making a difference.
(Mansmith 5-Questions Impact Filter)
First: What needs to change?
Not what program do we want to run.
What actually needs to change?
Second: Who needs to change?
Whose capability, behavior or judgment needs to improve?
Third: What should they do differently?
Make it observable.
Fourth: What difference should that make?
For the customer.
For the employee.
For the leader.
For the business.
For society.
And finally:
What will continue because of it?
That last question is easy to overlook.
Because the real test isn’t always what happens during the program.
It’s what happens six months later.
Or two years later.
Or after you’ve moved on.
DON’T CONFUSE THE SNAPSHOT
Let me go back to that C student.
The person who flunked the English entrance exam.
The person who, at that point, had no idea what his career would eventually look like.
I wasn’t proof that every prediction is wrong.
I was simply a reminder that a snapshot has limits.
It can tell you something about today.
It doesn’t tell you everything about tomorrow.
And none of us can know the full trajectory of another person.
So I don’t think our job is to predict people’s futures perfectly.
Our job is to give people enough opportunity to discover what they can become.
Give them a difficult problem.
Give them room to think.
Give them a chance to decide.
Give them honest feedback.
Give them someone to learn from.
Give them another opportunity when it makes sense.
And sometimes, give them something very simple:
someone who sees more in them than their current results show.
There may be a C student in your organization right now.
Someone who isn’t polished yet.
Someone who didn’t come from the usual school.
Someone who doesn’t look like the traditional high-potential candidate.
Someone whose current performance may be telling you something real, but not everything.
You may never know how far that person could have gone.
But you may be able to influence the direction.
And that, I think, is where our work becomes important.
We’re not just filling capability gaps.
We’re helping people become more capable.
And we’re helping organizations become less dependent on any one person.
Eventually, every leader leaves.
Every mentor leaves.
Every HR executive leaves.
Every L&D professional leaves.
Every CEO leaves.
The organization continues.
So the issue is: What remains?
What remains when you’re no longer there?
Does the team still know how to make decisions?
Can people develop other people?
Can they solve problems without waiting for you?
Can they keep learning?
Can they take what you taught them and make it better?
If the answer is yes, then you’ve left something behind.
So let me return to today’s theme.
What we learn.
We learn so that we can think better and make better decisions.
What we give.
We give so that someone else can see possibilities they couldn’t see before.
What we leave behind.
We leave behind people who are more capable because we were there.
Think of the person who changed your own professional trajectory.
See that person in your mind.
What did they actually give you?
Was it knowledge?
Or an opportunity?
A challenge?
A belief in you?
A second chance?
Maybe an uncomfortable truth that you needed to hear?
Now think about your own organization.
Who needs that from you today?
And here’s the harder question:
Are you that person for them?
We cannot always control where someone starts.
We cannot know exactly where someone will end up.
But we can influence the trajectory.
And maybe that is what leadership really asks of us.
Not to produce people who look like us.
Not to make ourselves indispensable.
Not even to make sure that everything we built remains exactly as we built it.
But to leave people and organizations more capable than we found them.
What we learn becomes part of who we are.
What we give becomes part of who others become.
And what we leave behind is what continues after we are gone.
So when you think about your career, your team, your organization, and the people you’ve mentored, I would leave you with one question.
Not: “What did I accomplish?”
Not: “What did I build?”
Not even: “What will people remember about me?”
But: What became possible because I was here?
Thank you.