On the Road with Art Tan

For Art Tan, taking a risk and hopping on that motorcycle for the first time brought him to new adventures, new places, and new ways of becoming a better leader.

They say that life is a series of adventures. For Art Tan, AC Industrials President and CEO and IMI CEO, the exhilarating feeling he gets when he takes his motorcycle for a ride to seek roads less traveled and gaining new experiences sends him back on the road every time.

Art has always been fascinated with motorcycles and cars but has never gone on a motorcycle ride until he joined Ayala. So, who convinced him to finally give it a shot? “We have to blame our chairman, Jaime, for that. I never rode before in my life! I turned 40 that year when I joined Ayala in 2001, and Jaime just started riding again,” Art recalls, amused.

He remembers our Chairman, Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, asking him if he rode motorbikes, but at that point, he had been into diving, which he did frequently back then. He told him this, and he remembers JAZA saying, “I will go diving with you if you go riding with me.”

Mexico

For his maiden motorcycle trip, Art went on a seven-day off-road ride in Baja, Mexico with a group of about 12 motorcycle riders. Armed with confidence and determination, he went there without having any prior experience going on an off-road ride.

It was a 1,800-mile ride, composed of mostly rocks, sand, and gravel, and some stretches of highways in between. He calls this ride his “baptism of fire”. He remembers falling off his motorbike nine times just on the first day. Art survived the ride, but he was not unscathed. Still in one piece, he found himself kissing the ground as they reached the end of their trip in Cabo, San Lucas.

China

In motorbike rides, Art and the group would usually chart out a path not normally taken—off-beaten roads that even vehicles would have a hard time traversing—and find cities or towns in between stops that have at least some clean and adequate facilities for them to rest and stay in. However, this wasn’t always the case for a lot of their rides.

He recounts another memorable ride near Tibet, China, where they had to stay in a hotel that had no electricity and running water for a few days. With the temperature inside the hotel close to 10 degrees centigrade, they resorted to wearing their riding gear to sleep to keep themselves warm.