What a metric-pass businessman taught a PhD about education

Five degrees of memorisation

The conversation Muzamil planned is not the one he got. He invited Dr. Shahid Qureshi, the rector of GIFT University in Gujranwala, to talk about how private academia performs in an emerging Pakistani city. What he received instead was a life story that doubles as an indictment of how the country teaches.

Qureshi was born in Faisalabad and spent three years of childhood in the United States, where his father did a PhD at Urbana-Champaign. He remembers the American classroom as the fun part: creativity, activities, behaviour points he could trade for candy at a school market, even a one-on-one Urdu teacher the school engaged so a Pakistani boy would not lose his mother tongue. “Your mother tongue is your bird in hand,” he was told — a phrase that returns, transformed, decades later.

Back in Pakistan, the system narrowed. A government technical high school taught him to work a lathe and wire a circuit, but the message from teachers was that boys with good numbers should leave the workshop alone and focus on grades. “When I look back,” he says, “my classmates whose numbers were low — they did something in life on the basis of those skills.” The misconception that the workshop was for the weak students was, in his telling, the country quietly mistaking the real work for a distraction.

From there it was the same engine, over and over. Government College Faisalabad, then UET Taxila for mechanical engineering, then a master’s, then an MBA. “We were hardwired,” he tells Muzamil. Whatever question came, relate it to the past, find where you’ve seen it, reproduce the answer quickly. He topped class after class doing exactly that. He also remembers what was never there: not one teacher, dean, or head of department in five years of engineering asked him why he had come, what was relevant to him, or how they could help. “It was just a mechanical process. An assembly-line process.”

The exam he was supposed to fail

The first crack came in Bangkok, at the Asian Institute of Technology, on a full scholarship in 1992. The exam had eight questions and you had to attempt all eight — in Pakistan you picked five — and none of them looked like anything he had seen. He answered, assumed he had failed, and scored seventy per cent. The faculty told him the point was never the right answer. “Every human being is unique. Bring your uniqueness out. That’s what we want to see.”

It took him two years to understand the instruction. His training had no slot for it. He notices the cultural layer too: an Indonesian couple who once stayed with Muzamil were surprised Pakistan called itself a Muslim country, given the state of its sanitation, when half their religion was cleanliness. Qureshi’s read on what went wrong across South Asia is less about government and more about a missing sense of purpose, drilled out early and never replaced.

The deeper transformation came not in a classroom but at a power plant. After two years of ceremonial desk work at a state thermal station — where the real knowledge lived with the staff and the manuals were forty years gone — he joined KAPCO under British managers from National Power. They told him to drop the protocol, to consult his team of ten every morning before he consulted his boss, and to treat the operator nearest the machine as the one who knew it best. A matric-pass operator told him an eighteen-year-old plant rated at fifty tons an hour could reach a hundred; it did. Years later Qureshi would learn this had a name — fluctuation theory, create a small effect with whatever you have — but on the plant floor it arrived as a feeling. When his staff’s cooler broke in the heat, he carried his own from his office rather than file a request. Productivity moved on smiles, consultation, and ownership. None of it was in any curriculum he had passed through.

A businessman who was refused by every college

The pivot of the whole story is a man named Anwar Dar. Qureshi came to LUMS at thirty-seven to do an MBA and become a multinational CEO — he had sold his plot, driven himself on CNG, and put two kids through it. He finished with a 3.3, the shyest person in the room, and five thousand rupees to his name. Then he met Dar, a businessman sitting in a LUMS professor’s office.

Dar’s pitch was personal. “I’m matric-pass. No college gave me admission. I hire LUMS graduates, IBA graduates, PhDs, accountants. I’m the chairman of seven or eight companies.” He was building a university in Gujranwala and he wanted it to do something the system refused to do: take the second- and third-division students nobody wanted and make them feel they could win. Dar’s instruction was blunt — interview them, weight the test at ten per cent, ask whether they’d raised a goat or worked with their father, and bring them up. “When you give an A-grade student a challenge, you make a play-star. We did it with third division, second division.”

So Qureshi and a dozen LUMS colleagues did. They sat with the chairman in one room because that was what the British plant had taught — no distance between boss and team. They abandoned American English for what they called Urglish, Punjabi and Urdu, swapped Unilever case studies for two-page stories of local families, called every student by name, and carried the fan into the room themselves when the power cut. The three or four hundred students who came through that small Gujranwala nursery, he says, scattered to London, America, professorships abroad. A matric-pass man had built the platform; the grades had been there all along, waiting for space.

Bird in hand

Qureshi left for a PhD in Germany — his mother insisted he needed a terminal degree — and there the pieces acquired a theory. He had assumed it would be easy. Instead he was handed unstructured work, told the degree was his responsibility and his alone, and made to find his own road. The German professor cycled to campus at seventy, crossed rivers swimming, charged no airs. Relevance ran the place: undergraduates took six years, called it a diploma, did seven or eight internships, and nobody minded a delay if the contribution was real.

The intellectual jolt came at a 2008 conference, hearing Saras Sarasvathy — who, with a Nobel laureate, had argued that most of what business schools teach is barely relevant. The standard model assumes you begin with a given goal and given resources. Entrepreneurs don’t. They start with the means already in hand and create an effect that multiplies — bird in hand, affordable loss, the lemonade principle of using surprise, self-selected partners who arrive like filings to a magnet. Taught this way, Qureshi says, success rates approach ninety per cent; taught the causal Harvard way, around five. “Low risk, high return. That’s creativity,” he says — inverting the finance-class mantra he’d been fed for years. It rewound his whole life: the plant, the Gujranwala nursery, the small things that worked when the big plans didn’t.

He found the same idea everywhere once he had the lens for it. Iqbal — “Khudi ko kar buland itna” and a verse he keeps returning to about fresh worlds being born from fresh thoughts, with bricks and stones arriving last. Clayton Christensen’s yardstick that God will measure your life not in dollars but in how many people you helped become better. A Harvard professor wishing for an undergraduate degree in humility and gratitude. “All the good things came to me from the West,” he says, half-rueful. “Why was I not told this in Pakistan? We are the champions of Islam, and I had to rediscover it abroad.”

Twelve years of practising what he preached

At IBA Karachi, running its Centre for Entrepreneurship, Qureshi refused the imported template. When the foreign funding that was supposed to seed an incubator got diverted, he applied his own theory to his own problem: teach with the bird in hand. He took on ten or twelve courses a year — against the LUMS norm of two a semester — because the undergraduate classroom was the means he actually had. He mined the family-business students for their grandfathers’ cases, built a vocabulary of his own (the “JNP strategy” — don’t let the opportunity slip), and watched fifteen to twenty per cent of students start real businesses.

The stories he tells are deliberately small. Hassan, a below-average student who ran food deliveries on a motorcycle from the centre, went to Babson on exchange and so impressed the faculty that a venture-capitalist professor, Bob Stringer, flew to Karachi during a US travel advisory — and ended up investing fifty thousand dollars in a Pakistani pharmacy startup he met on the trip. Qureshi got Stringer there not with a paid contract Babson demanded but by becoming useful: hosting him as a personal guest, funding the visit with a corporate workshop for Karachi’s wealthy. “I’m a professor of entrepreneurship. I have to practise what I preach.”

His women’s and mothers’ programmes refuse the World Bank model too — the one that has a woman dream big, ask for five thousand dollars, sell her gold, and fight her family. Instead: silver jewellery designed from the calligraphy and gem knowledge already in her household, sold first to her mother, then through living-room exhibitions. He calls it the Khadija model — the entrepreneur as a centre who engages her husband and children rather than competing with them. “We don’t bring our women into confrontation with their male members. They’re complementary.” Roughly a thousand women came through. Fathers came too, after one woman arrived in tears, beaten for attending.

Why Pakistan optimised for the wrong startup

When the conversation turns to the country’s incubators — the NICs, the Plan 9s — both men land hard. A NIC manager once told Muzamil his proof of success was that graduates got jobs within a minute. “That’s not success at all,” Muzamil says. “You can do the same thing ten other ways.” Qureshi agrees the centres raised awareness and helped a few, but calls them an elite bubble that picked up Silicon Valley’s language and threw it onto a country without the fundamentals.

The damage, as Muzamil frames it, was specific. The imported high-growth model told a kid doing real product or manufacturing work, who lacked scale, that he was running a bad business. “The need of Pakistan is not a high-growth startup. The need of Pakistan right now is hard industries, soft industries, services industries.” Qureshi’s answer is the inversion he has spent two decades on: a milkman who grows five buffalo to twenty-five and hires four people is the entrepreneurship, even though the causal model files it under low value. Make a hundred thousand people self-sustaining first; the billion-dollar companies, if they come, emerge years later from that base. Going to the VC early, he warns, is a vicious trap you have to pass through the pain to escape.

He borrows Henry Mintzberg to name the institutional flaw. Confidence minus competence equals arrogance — business schools inflate confidence, the jargon and the difficult mathematical model, while competence belongs to whoever stays in the field. Such graduates don’t last more than a few years anywhere, he argues, because the moment their expertise is tested they’re exposed; to avoid it they import a class system, keeping accountants and engineers beneath them. Muzamil extends it from his own experience: the insecurity of a graduate who feels the tag is worth more than the person, and so spends a career chasing the next tag rather than the value he produces. Both are careful to add that LUMS and IBA are remarkable institutions — the issue is direction, not quality.

Mindset before money

At GIFT, now as rector, Qureshi has tried to hardwire the opposite. Eight thousand students, every one of them — engineering, computer science, social science, Islamic studies alike — required to take three mindset courses. The first is entrepreneurial mindset, opening with videos of a spider’s web and a beaver’s dam as worked examples of building an ecosystem from what’s already in hand, then the bird-in-hand exercises he carried back from Karachi and Germany. You must add value over a semester without borrowing money — stitching, birds, cakes, tuning air conditioners — using only what you have. Four hundred students through it so far have made around seven and a half million rupees in small amounts: fifty thousand here, twenty thousand there.

The second course is service: time with your grandparents, washing dishes and kneading dough at home regardless of gender, kitchen gardening, water conservation, visiting a hospital patient with a gift, even helping bathe the dead — a graveyard exercise he found at Babson, meant to teach humility. Parents have written in to say the household changed once the course began. The third is manners — how to greet, how to dress, how to carry yourself into an office or a business.

He insists the chairman has dissolved the usual hierarchy that mirrors the bubble he’s fighting: no fixed office for the chairman, a deliberately modest one for the rector, a campus arranged around the student rather than the administration. “This university is for the student. Why do I want to show?”

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest — how he sees Pakistan years from now. Qureshi answers through the effectual lens rather than the causal one, leaning again on Iqbal: build your own world if you are among the living. He doesn’t put his hope in politicians or bureaucracy. Train a few hundred thousand people in this mindset — self-sustaining on food, water, solar, and strong family ties — and they will, in his telling, end up influencing the institutions above them rather than waiting on them. Muzamil, who came expecting a conversation about academia in a second-tier city, admits he has not seen this kind of work happening anywhere else in Pakistan.