Yale School of Management - Dawood Ghaznavi '82

"Yale SOM gave me the ability to think outside the box, to apply a critical eye to the complexity inherent in real situations and come up with practical approaches to managing those situations. SOM also taught me that at the end of the day, it is the people that actually count the most in any given situation and the effective management of human resources is critical to managing any organization — large or small."

Dawood Ghaznavi has held a variety of positions in the private and nonprofit sectors since graduation. His career has taken him from the United States to South East Asia and Europe. After graduating from SOM, Dawood joined Glaxo Laboratories in Pakistan where he was asked to take on the position of factory manager at the Lahore factory.

After five years at Lahore, he took on the entrepreneurial challenge of transforming WWF Pakistan from a paper organization into the largest environmental NGO in the country. In 1994, he became the Asia Pacific program director for WWF International based in Switzerland where he and his family spent 5 delightful years managing and expanding WWF's presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

While in Switzerland, Dawood became the country manager for Cambodia at Nestlé where he stayed until 2002 before returning home to Pakistan. He was invited to teach social enterprise management and the management of change at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the country's premier university. In 2006, Dawood had the opportunity to take on an Asian Development Bank (ADB) project establishing a sub-regional center for promoting the collective sustainable development of the sub-region's natural resources. He served as chief operating officer of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) until the end of 2009.

Today, as associate dean at the Karachi School for Business & Leadership, Dawood is working to bring business school faculty from Cambridge University and other international institutions to Pakistan, focusing particularly on delivery of executive development programs.

Dawood graduated from the Yale School of Management in 1982 after receiving his master's degree in engineering from the USSR.