April 3, 2006	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 4, 1427

THE chairman, PAEC, has said at the first national conference on ‘Engineering Education’ that Pakistan’s industries were “facing paucity of capable human resource due to which they were behind their regional competitors.”

The question that immediately crops up in the mind is that how on earth had Pakistan made the Nishan 4-wheel drive vehicle/jeep entirely indigenously despite the much talked about shortage of human resource (HR). The project was shelved soon thereafter and one still needs to know why.

And, how is it that the automobile industry was achieving high levels of indigenization in all categories of vehicles? And, how is it that fans made in Gujrat could last a generation or more? And, the country’s steel mills could be managed technically mostly by countrymen? And, Taxila could house complex mechanical complex as well as rebuild tanks in a factory dedicated for the purpose?

And, how is it that the country could even venture into aircraft development not to forget the shipyard which capability got eroded? And, the country can now make weapon systems that it puts up on display for exports? Certainly, none of this was done without indigenous technical capability and acumen. Those who have had a brush with Pakistan’s engineering industry will find no dearth of talent and skills whatsoever at various technical levels.

The unskilled workers demonstrate an innate desire to learn and pick up skills from the skilled workers. For, mostly those who join the technical workforce have a technical aptitude and a natural flare for things technical. This is true for technicians in the public and private sectors alike irrespective of the scale at which they are operating. There are technical cities in Punjab as well as technical neighbourhoods in Karachi too where any original component can be replicated with ease. Such talented technicians can be found in big factories and small motor workshops alike.

While there is a system by which they learn on the job, formal organization-specific training would certainly help augment their skills. Formally qualified polytechnic graduates and qualified degree-holding engineers are a further enhancement of the technical asset-base and these are being developed in droves. The question is, how well is the country equipped to utilize the technical talents that abound?

For, to utilize the technical and engineering talent, there is a need for administrative and managerial talent to turn technical skills over into competitive advantage.

If Pakistan’s regional competitive ability is hamstrung due to a certain dearth of human resource, it is administrative and managerial talent that we lack. That is, the talent to set up institutions that inspire to pursue lofty goals. For, no branch of science and technology can find meaningful expression not until the institutions are engineered and social capital developed.

These managerial skills will, however, remain scant for as long as the only motive force of societal life is greed and pursuit of material goals for self even if it is at the expense of the interests of others around us. Under these circumstances or disvalue system, we will excel in managing for self but not for managing for collective organizational, sectoral, economic, and societal gain.

For as long as this disvalue system prevails, we will keep upstaging all principles of good management. We will then keep legitimizing all short cuts to illicit material pursuits in a bid to look competitive not at the collective but at the individual level. Profiteering then substitutes healthy profit-making and price profits instead of profitability through customer satisfaction are viewed as “smart.” All of this is recipe for competitive disadvantage, both at home and abroad.

To gain competitive advantage internationally as desired by the PAEC chairman, there is a need for human resource soaked in values and principles that reverses not only the life cycle of the products and the services offered but also of the organization. It is, therefore, not just human beings with job skills that we need but skills immersed in a sense of ethics, values, and purpose that would render human beings resourceful enough for success in a competitive terrain.

For, to excel in a competitive environment, there must be a drive to excel through the quality of products and service offered which is diametrically opposite to a penchant for profiteering through price profits and other short cuts.

If the ‘quicker’ route remains the dominant outlook, no amount of training programmes and/or degrees can leverage a human resource for competitiveness. For, it will alternatively be utilized for individual gains of a few through the short route that brings material gain to a few at the helm but not necessarily competitive advantage for a long, healthy, and responsible organizational life.

So, non-availability of human resource should actually be a euphemism for non-availability of a value-driven human resource that will be competitive in service delivery thereby making the organization competitive.

And, to continue to excel in service delivery, it must be a value-driven human resource that is also hungry for internal and external environmental knowledge required to devise and embark upon competitive strategies.

Competitiveness is an ability to serve effectively which is possible only if the business is under-girded by principles that alone can generate repeat sales, market penetration, and market development. Otherwise, due to lack of competitiveness, it is government protective cover that might be sought eternally. And, the government might also be held responsible for all those failings that could be addressed— privately at the individual or at the collective level.

So, in this populous country that keeps adding a large number of men to the workforce and churning out engineering and business graduates every year in numbers large enough to even absorb productively within the country, availability of human resource is hardly an issue.

What is at issue, however, is availability of that human resource that brings competitive advantage. There is no dearth of job-related skills that are already imparted to the human resource or there is no dearth of workforce that is not developed enough to absorb more skills, if the same are to be imparted to them.

Why then can all these hands put together not bring us competitive advantage? This is simply because they are not integrated into a whole geared for the purpose through a system of values that are shared across the organization to provide utility and service to the customer. Lack of customer satisfaction—both quality-wise and price-wise—-is thoroughly discounted in most organizations that must make quick profits somehow.

This becomes a recipe of competitive disadvantage that individual gain maximizers are unable to see. The upshot is that individual gain may be maximized for a few in the short-run but long-run gain gets pushed further into the future. For, the same workforce whose skills have been used to maximize short-term gain could be alternatively used to build and sustain competitive advantage over the long haul only if the organizational system rested on an infrastructure of values for the mutual benefit of all the stakeholders.

Unless a win-win value system drives our organizations, no resource will be able to provide the competitive advantage we seek through a human resource whose skills too may not be honed on values and principles.

For as long as our educational systems focus only on imparting skills in a value-neutral environment, all the graduate men and women will not be able to make a difference in the sectoral and national lives. For, capability is a function of not just training but training based on a principled outlook for the benefit of the community and the society.

A workforce may graduate after training but will remain incapable for as long as it fails to see beyond own immediate gain. Such a myopic workforce is unable to appreciate the good or bad difference it can make through its actions and can hardly be viewed as a resource unless its horizon is broadened and it can see the big landscape it can impact through its small acts. The onus lies largely on the business schools who must impart both values and vision to the raw hands they try to convert into future administrators and managers.