There really is no other place to start in an organization than at the top. Meet the leaders for a bit, talk to a few of the key members of the team, align the conversations and you’ll get a good idea of where the company is headed and how long it will take for them to get there. Believe me when I say this works. No matter what the culture is in the rest of the organization, if the commitment, drive and passion don’t flow from the top, there isn’t going to be a lot of progress taking place.

We chose to feature Sajjad Syed, the Managing Director at SAP Pakistan, on the cover of CEO’s second issue for a lot of reasons. SAP’s investment into its own office and setup comes at a time when you wouldn’t expect a lot of foreign investment. He chose to setup and lead a team to work with Pakistani companies during a time, according to him, that is ripe for investment. Throughout the course of our long conversation, Sajjad kept emphasizing his commitment to building Pakistan and had the stats and numbers to support his vision. We believed in his optimism and did what we do best: asked more questions.

There have been a number of discussions on our various forums about how the CEO needs to be dealing with the current economic condition and it essentially comes to this critical strategy: if you can plan efficiently, you will be able to come up on top, any time of the year. If a CEO, young or old, can make it through these tough times, it is to assume that they will be able to get through anything.

I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate the winners of the PASHA ICT Awards who will go onto represent Pakistan at the APICTA Awards later in November. Each of your nominations on the ballot give us one more insight into the tremendous innovation Pakistani companies are capable of generating. The least we can do is dedicate a portion of this issue of CEO, to lend our support to them. Do

We’ve got a number of events that we’re already announcing through the ciopakistan.com website, so please be sure and check up the ‘events’ link to see what our calendar is like.

Until the next issue,
Signing out,

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