Ten years ago Mr. M – a young entrepreneur from Karachi - joined his decades-old family business after passing his CFA exams, which he completed while doing his MBA from Karachi’s top business school. After years of hard work, today he is looking for a job in a bank so he could buy treasury papers and go golfing in the afternoon.
During the last ten years this young man tried to bring modern management practices in his family business to bring efficiency gains; he came up with new business plans to diversify and expand; he tried to invest money in technology and related systems to streamline operations; and he also tried to clean the books and become formal so he could use sell some of the shares in the business and raises finances for ventures that are lucrative by all metrics. All he got in return was a stigma that “you do not know anything”.
Mr. M’s story is not unique. This story is seen and heard across the hundreds and thousands of family owned businesses in the country, whether they are from steel, pharma textile, furniture, or retail sectors. The frustration of young educated Pakistani youth from the privileged class is not they that are not earning money; in fact far from it, for they have enough money already to last another two to three generations.
Their frustration is that they are prevented from changing the status quo, expanding the business boundaries, formalizing their business to stay abreast with global world and become the corporate giants they may be destined to become.
These voices do not reach the government, the development community or the academic circles. Nor do these concerns become a part of any economic or business index or any discourse on the media. The world is indeed focused on how to help the poor (or at least claiming to do so).
While helping the poor implies better distribution of the economic pie (inter alia), it also means expanding the pie itself. That expansion is not just a function of government polices but also of the behavior of firms. In Pakistan these firms mostly happen to be family-owned businesses, the very kind that are keeping the economic growth potential locked in the ‘status-quo mindset’ which the likes of Mr. M have been facing for the last ten years.
If it were any box standard public policy issue, one could have come with up interventions, consultative dialogues, seminars, conferences, publish a report, hold press conferences and what not to convince the stakeholders from public and private sector.
But even if this problem of ‘status-quo mindset’ makes it to the laundry list of movers and shakers of the policy community, at the end of the day, both the boardroom table in office and dinner table at home are chaired by the father – the head of the family and the head of the business. And the father, we know, is always right.
Comments
Comments are closed.