Download - Institute of Business Management

Motif
Business Ethics and Social Responsibility
opportunity to advance through ‘shifarish’ or favour. Insist on
getting it on merit because you deserve it.
Let us also remember that Allah has ordained for all of
us a limited time on this earth. Don’t waste any of it and make
sure you leave this earth better than you found it. Here it is
worth recalling an excerpt from the convocation address to
Stanford University graduates in 2005, by Steve Jobs, the head
of the Apple Corporation and inventor of Mackintosh, iPod and
iPad. He said the following with the knowledge that due to a fatal
cancer, he only had a few years left on this earth. “Your time (on
this earth) is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of
other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the
courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already
know what you truly want to become. Everything else is
secondary.”
It is gratifying that this University is now planning to
establish not only a new faculty of engineering but is also
contemplating a programme in the arts and sciences. I cannot
emphasize enough the importance of imparting a general
education in the arts and humanities to graduates in every
discipline. Only through this wider understanding of the world
around us will we educate a rounded individual fit for purpose of
the 21 st century and not just another professional who is too
narrowly focused on his or her discipline.
This brings me now to my second theme, which is how
important it is that you use your education to serve your nation
and your society. Let me recall an anecdote about Quaid e Azam
at the time of the Delhi conference on partition. Before and during
this meeting, he had to work extremely hard to convince his
protagonists about the creation of a separate Pakistan; and he
7
PAKISTAN BUSINESS REVIEW APRIL 2012