ABS-CBN Leadership Speaker Series: Stories That Travel Beyond Origins

Thirty years in one building teaches you where all the shortcuts are. But walking back in as a guest is a different feeling. That was February, at the ABS-CBN Leadership Speaker Series.

On 18 February 2026, I returned to ABS-CBN to speak at the ABS-CBN Leadership Speaker Series on Becoming a Global Storyteller. ABS-CBN is the media company where I spent about three decades, most of it with ABS-CBN Global and The Filipino Channel, the service that carries Filipino programming to viewers overseas. Then I left in December 2023. So this was the first time I came back to that room as an outside speaker.

The session ran at the Collab Space on the thirteenth floor of the ELJ Communications Center in Quezon City, with a Microsoft Teams link for staff who could not be there in person. Mark Nepomuceno, a consultant on transformation and innovation, moderated.

Stories That Travel Beyond Origins

My session was the second in the ABS-CBN Leadership Speaker Series. The series looks at the strategic side of taking content global, across digital and traditional platforms. Still, my part was narrower. What happens to a Filipino story when it crosses a border?

The easy answer is to file down the local details until the story feels neutral enough for anyone. But that does not work. Audiences abroad are not asking for a Filipino story with the Filipino parts taken out. They are asking to understand it. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them leaves the story worth telling.

So I walked the room through the Culturally Intelligent Storytelling Bamboo Framework from my book. It reads a story through four parts: StoryRoot, StoryCraft, StoryPulse, and StoryLeaf. Together they show where culture is sitting inside the work, and how far the work can travel before the meaning starts to break.

The first ABS-CBN Leadership Speaker Series talk after the book

This was also the first talk I gave after the book came out, and the ABS-CBN Leadership Speaker Series was the room that got it first. Culturally Intelligent Storytelling for Southeast Asian Creators launched in Santa Monica, California, in November 2025. Three months later I was standing in front of my old colleagues with it.

There was something fitting in that. After all, the ideas in the book were shaped over thirty years inside that company. The first room I brought them back to was the same company.