What exactly ails the Sows? Insight into the situation reveals that the public sector faces a plethora of problems right from the initial fixing of the mission statement and the subsequent objectives. The Sows are in a fix about the route to be taken or the processes to be adopted. Thereafter, comes the issues of creativity and inventiveness - which also includes the capability of adaptability in a given situation.
As there are a huge number of variables which affect the day to day working of different entities and when the expectations of the clients, or customers being served are similar , there is a strong requirement for the particular department or organisation and in extension it's management to retaliate or counteract. It is also a fact that sometimes happenings and extraneous factors can also require the organisation to change midway or change the spots all together.
This can be in face of sudden or better competition or a change in clientele etc. This is the time when the corporate structure would need to be changed or at least re-engineering to be undertaken. Another normal happening- away from the abnormal is the availability of newer technologies and systems. As these new sciences are user-friendly, easily adaptable and certainly economical for production and end results, these cannot be ignored or left for another day. As a consequence, the enterprise in question should be able to accept the new sciences.
Another logical requirement would be the enlargement in the face of more clientele sales or the other way around due to a dip in demand. As both the above requirements cannot be kept pending for longer periods, the organisation has to be adaptable in these eventualities too. It would also be apt to expect the SOE in question to be able to implement larger national policies without loosing the core- responsibilities and profitability. Questions of integrated services dovetailing with each other or UN-bundling also appear of consequence once in a while.
The later of these prepositions stands true for WAPDA these days which is in the final throes of UN-bundling and facing great many problems- specially those pertaining to its human resource.
The aforementioned twelve points thus become the normal requirements of any management worth it's salt and as the Sows are basically technical in nature with engineering being the prominent expertise in action, we can easily zero in our search of the needed professional to this discipline. In other words, any one possessing other than engineering skills is out. At the same time, as each SOE deals in or produces a different service product, so would differ the area of the experts of the management.
Summing up all these pre-requisites, we see that the management would thus need to comprehend the mission statements and objectives, fix the route(s) to be followed, be creative, have an unbolt capability to adapt, the ability to retaliate or counter any forces assailing the basic core-responsibilities of the SOE in question, a strength to change course, be able to garner the needed technologies, be able to extend or contract itself and the services being offered, understand national policies and even be amenable to the requirements of UN-bundling or integration.
All this translates into the fact that the management should be able to understand the evolution of the SOE, it's production line, the technologies being used and the processes for change management etc. This further proves that in this era of specialisation, the best management would be a specific one with no space for the generalist. Here it may be argued that sometimes a novice would appear on the horizon and force a turn about, history has some interesting episodes to tell.
And indeed some generalists are able to adapt quickly and have also been instrumental in re-floating many a loss making unit in the past, but the fact of the matter remains that exceptions do not make or break the rules and the rule is that only a specified professional can lead the way.
The question that now arises is as to why cannot all this be understood and then implemented. Also as to why the generalist keeps on being thrust on the sows is another of the questions needing an answer. As the assault is an ongoing process with no respite in view it is most necessary to make an attempt to unravel the dynamics of the issue.
On the basis of precedence and historical data, it is seen that predominantly the sows have been managed by the competitioners up to the late 1950s and as it was a low-tech era then, these gentlemen did quite well. However, the sows then could not be put under minute scrutiny because the initial years of any organisations are always fairly good and the drag starts manifesting itself after some time period has elapsed.
The 1960s started off with the first handing over of the state owned enterprises to the serving and retired senior officers. This experiment too did well in the eyes of the public, but was probably the period when a long term stagnation set-in due to the non-induction of new technologies and processes. It is because of this that most of our sows stand still mired in the 1960s. Here the example of South Korea readily comes to mind which till the 60's was behind Pakistan in all respects and thereafter leap-flogged to the 2000s in pace with the West.
It must thus be understood that had things been properly tackled way back in the 1960s, the state of the country's economy would have been different. Actually, this period could have been a watershed era.
Then Bhutto's ill-fated nationalisation sealed our fate and whatever initiative the private sector then possessed was duly curbed. The newly expanded public sector was handed over to petty but party faithful, so-called technocrats. The results are there for all to see. This was followed by huge closures, an expanded labour forces with no relevance to needs and the eventual handing over of the sows again to serving and retired army officers - that these were not the best the army had was another fact to reckon with.
It all would have continued, had it not been for the IMF/WB, which tied up it's aid with reforms. These reforms entailed the corporatisation of the SOE's indeed an appreciable step and in fact a call for professional management to take control from the generalist of both the bureaucratic or the Army versions. This was during the 1988 to the 1998 decade.
Unfortunately, the pressures from within and without did not allow things to improve with the reform hitting it's nadir when WAPDA - the biggest of all the sows, was handed over to a purely non-professional group.
This was a step backwards and five years of such operations and stupendous losses ensured that this Utility be broken-up or unbundled without ever the professional management trying it's prowess or luck to correct things. Had WAPDA been handed over to the cadre in 1998, things would have improved for good.
There is also a need to discuss small time periods when a semblance of professional managements was put in place only to suffer the same ignominy as the generalist faced.
This was the period when, under extraneous pressure and due to little understanding of the issue, a mixed bag was introduced. An apt example was the placement of Army's engineering corps officers to manage technical areas. As the areas of operations were totally different with no equation with each other, the new incumbents spent a great time in the learning phase and the rest following the cadre - as it was belatedly found that the later was correct and surely knew more than the new entrants.
As a consequence, we saw that it all led to a stagnation of experience as the outside semi-professionals possessed altogether different experiences while the cadre was left to rot at the most up-to the mid-senior level. The fiasco in WAPDA of 1998 to 2003 is a good example to quote. Another example has been the, once in a while, situation when professional engineers are posted as technocrats, a strange term as it just denotes a technical person with no bar on the area of specialisation and one who holds a position which controls or manages a technical department or activity.
This is even more of no consequence when we see that on the urgings of the PEC (Pakistan Engineering Council), the then President during 1979 had required all technical divisions of the GoP- numbering thirteen at that time, to be headed by engineers. The word engineer was quickly changed to technocrat and since then the generalist holds sway because he too insists on being called a technocrat.
We also need to consider the old boys network in operation which excludes the professional from the management. It is seen that the ability to reach various tiers of government on the basis of networking is considered as professional expertise, whereas it is nothing but near nepotism.
On the other hand as professionals have been continuously kept away from the corridors of power, their lesser access to the same is considered as inaptitude and a negative trait. And instead of correcting this attitude the same has been further buffeted.
Thus through this exclusion Pakistan is unable to progress or enter the comity of developed nations. As such, in order to place all things in their true perspective and in view of the past experiences, it is more than evident that the professional has to be allowed to manage things - otherwise the losses would continue.
Another issue that needs consideration is the continued hegemony and bias - a sinister issue, of the bureaucrat against the professional and the former's opinion that the later may not be able to manage well. It is sadly a trite and totally incorrect perception but also true because of reasons beyond the sway of the professional.
Actually, HRD - a continuous process is denied to the professional and indeed, in some cases he is not fit to manage to the needed level. A brief study of higher HRD activity reveals that the bureaucrats responsible for the arranging of training of professionals in the country end up being trained themselves - and in areas with no relevance to their areas of operations.
We see some gentlemen garnering Phd's in musicology and toxicology when such adventures are not needed at all. HRD is a specific area and thus needs to be treated as such - this can be through dedicated HRD experts and surely not through the ubiquitous generalists. Additionally, low HRD activity is otherwise too hurting Pakistan, which basically abounds in this resource and which needs to be placed at the top of the list.
From the above, it can safely be concluded that the generalist and the professional are breeds apart, which fact needs to be understood in its totality. And thus the expert's prescription for Pakistan would be the handing over of the sows to the professional -thoroughly from the cadre concerned and implementation then of a rigorous follow-up HRD programme.
The HRD programme, otherwise too, is needed because of the Country's take-off stage in modern infrastructure building. It is all the more so because it has been after four decades that such mega-projects are in the offing and it would be suicidal to waste the opportunity at the altar of non-professionalism.
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