Page 290 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

were appreciated by a boss like that. The second thing that struck
me was that she took a call from a headmistress saying that a
couple of computers had stopped working and could she replace
them. How could she run the country’s biggest fashion house –
which had to be an eighteen-hour-a-day job – and manage 180
schools and deal with day-to-day problems like broken computers?
To my surprise, she didn’t refer the headmistress to an IT
department somewhere; she simply called up her head office and
asked someone to put two computers in a rickshaw and take it to
the school. I was very impressed. It reminded me of a lunch I had
had in London with the head of one of Pakistan’s biggest telecoms
companies: a customer had phoned up and complained about his
broadband connection. I was learning that in Pakistan it is
customary to go straight to the top with any problem. In the UK,
the chairman of a company is protected by layers of receptionists,
PAs and lieutenants, but in Pakistan the chairman is completely
accessible.
Seema showed me a mixture of her schools: some she had
started from scratch, some she had taken over five years before-
hand, and some she had just taken responsibility for. The
difference between them was striking, and from then on, whenever
I went back to Lahore to check on the progress of my school, I
would call up Seema and she would take me to see another of her
schools. As I got to know her, I started to tell her the problems I
was experiencing with my school and she would discuss hers.
Whatever difficulty I had, she always knew the right person to call
to sort it out. I also discovered that running a school and running
a business aren’t that different. When I have a problem at the
school, I find it helps to ask what I would do if it were a business.
Seema asked if I would manage one of the state-sector schools
on behalf of CARE, and now, as well as my own school, I also
fund a much larger state school, paying for everything from
teachers’ salaries to uniforms to PE equipment. I also now work

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