Academics ponder business strategies at KSBL seminar

Discuss strategic guidance, financial systems and technology.

KARACHI: The Karachi School for Business and Leadership on Thursday welcomed corporate leaders from a cross-section of businesses to a seminar on “Intrapreneurship, Entrepreneurship and Innovation: reshaping the business landscape” on its newly-built, environment-friendly campus.

The highlight of the seminar was a keynote address by Dr Christoph H Loch, dean of the Cambridge University’s Judge Business School.

In a presentation delivered in typical management-speak, Loch spoke about ensuring strategic guidance for projects by ‘steering committees’. He spoke in detail about the challenges facing senior executives who supervise strategic organisational initiatives while serving on its steering committees. “The two main challenges of major projects are uncertainty and stakeholders’ agreement on goals,” he said. Biased and incomplete status reporting, bridging multiple areas of expertise and conflicting interests, according to Loch, make it impossible for an executive to understand all ongoing processes in a growing organisation in detail.

In smaller companies with only 200 employees, he said, there is likely to be unity of knowledge and control. On the contrary, he noted, knowledge and control gradually become less concentrated in a growing organisation.



Based on interviews with a number of CEOs, venture capitalists and company executives, Loch presented many recommendations for steering committees related to their structure, project information, target setting and measurement of progress. He also compared oversight approaches in successful companies with experience in managing major projects, against the oversight approaches of venture capitalists.

The comparison revealed, among other things, that while a number of companies considered that giving respect to employees was crucial, most venture capitalists held the opposite view. He also observed that venture capitalists had retreated from investing in early-stage ventures as well as small businesses after the internet bubble of the 1990s.

While responding to a question, Loch said family businesses did not generally survive beyond the third generation. “Succession and growth are points of vulnerability for most organisations,” he said.

In his presentation on technological change and the wealth of nations, KSBL faculty member Dr Nadeem Javaid explored the role of the financial system in technological change, and noted that financing mechanisms affect the production and export of new or new-to-the-market commodities. Presenting a qualitative analysis of South Korea as an example, he said the economy provided a realistic representation of financial institutions that supported innovation, confirming that the financial system’s flexibility was a necessary condition for technological change.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 14^th, 2012.