Ask not what your country can do for you…

Responsibility, strategy, and leadership in Pakistan

The media during the past year or so has been interminably plagued with reports about the lack of security at schools across the country, and for good reason, too. The Peshawar massacre of December 2014 and following that the attack on the Bacha Khan University this year has given us all cause for grave concern but we must ask how does one go about remedying the ills of our so very stratified, not to mention convoluted, society while at the same time maintaining some semblance of discipline and order? Who is responsible for conceptualising, planning and applying the measures required in order make us citizens of this state of Pakistan, feel more assured – if not entirely contented – that our capital, property, friends and family have one of their fundamental constitutional rights respected: the right to be secure at their places of business, work, education, residence, or sojourn?

Many readers might believe, and rightly so, that it is the responsibility of the federal government to assure us Pakistanis  that we are safe; others might point vaguely toward the institutions representing provincial governance; some might think, well, responsibility is such an obscure, hackneyed, and utterly confounded term that it’s hardly worth including it in a sentence worth a penny. There we remain with that so very obscure term suspended like the blade of a guillotine right above our unsuspecting heads ready to slice us cleanly in two, and still we’ve no idea who has this responsibility. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’, is the historical line from John F Kennedy’s famous inaugural presidential speech which, I believe, was a remark made much less for Americans of the 20^th century than it is pertinent for Pakistanis of the 21^st.

Which brings us back to the ever shadowy term we began with: responsibility. Whose responsibility is it? In any civilised, progressive, and capitalistic society we might find that responsibility is a shared responsibility: it is as much a duty, and an obligation, for the guy at the bottom rung of the ladder than it is for the guy at the top. Responsibility is made an institutional, organisational prerogative and employees are made contractually bound to their responsibility for their actions, their roles, and perhaps most essentially in this era of efficiency and effectiveness, for their outputs. Which goes some distance to explaining where this ever elusive responsibility, to which I referred to earlier, may lie: with us all. It isn’t the sole reserve of any one individual, party, or organisation, but is a collective obligation. However, the instant one takes responsibility for an idea, a person, a situation, or whatever it is that one deems worthy of taking responsibility for, there’s something else that becomes essential: strategy.

What, might you ask, does responsibility have to do with strategy? What, indeed. Imagine, if you will, taking responsibility for a project, a sports team, or even a company; your priority suddenly becomes to increase stakeholder engagement, or to gain more corporate sponsorships, or to diversify your company’s portfolio, hence potentially increasing your company’s market viability, and subsequently its image. So you take responsibility for something but you do so in order to make a difference to it – ideally a positive one – and in order to make a positive difference with your newfound responsibility you now have to think about developing a detailed plan, a strategic pone, that will enable you to make the difference you would like to make in a timely, goal-oriented, and effective way. Wait a minute, where did all those words spring from? ‘Strategic plan’, ‘goal-oriented’, ‘effective’ – this seems to get more expansive by the sentence.

Taking responsibility for something usually means having a conception of what one is taking responsibility for: an image in one’s imagination; a goal-plan on one’s notice board; a defined aim. We thus far have a responsibility, a conception, and a strategic plan, but there is one even more fundamentally essential component that is missing: leadership. Alright, you take responsibility for something or the other, you form an idea about where you want to be eighteen months down the line, you even go so far as to write a plan – or a strategy – about how you’d like to take it all forward, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have the required managerial, technical, creative, and business skills required to make your plan a success: those capacities must be developed, honed, applied, and refined before you can effectively implement your plan because, more often than not, you’ll also need just one more indispensable thing: a team.

It takes a leader to implement a strategy, to form a team, to build relationships, engage vital stakeholders, bring in business, build an image, to develop a vision, and, most importantly, to create synergistic symbioses. Where are such leaders to come from to take charge in our country and drive our industries and our economy forward? You might agree we possess a wealth of talent here present in Pakistan – mounds and mounds of potential; what that talent lacks heretofore is direction: direction to lead in a region that is fast becoming a hotbed of global interest – and, for once, for all the right reasons. With the rise of China has come a breadth of opportunity for manufacturers in every industrial sector in the country; what have we done to capitalise upon this wave of prosperity? Can we increase our market outputs, increase employment opportunities, while, at the same time, giving back to Pakistan, enabling it to improve its standing in South Asia, even the world?

The institute I head, in conjunction with some of the most renowned and revered British higher education institutions, is bringing programmes for our managerial and executive cadre, that haven’t yet been introduced in this part of the globe. Through our commitment to improving our corporate, organisational, and institutional leaders, our persistence, and our perseverance, we seek to improve the lot not only of our market economy and our industrial output but, more importantly, we intend to alter the destinies of those who seek to follow our lead. It is on this note that I will leave you, for now, with JFK’s earlier so very appropriate question: What is it that you can do for your country?