Leadership mindset and fall of once giant family-run textile exporting companies

Abstract

Pakistan’s textile sector has played an utmost salient role for thriving country’s economy and has attracted greater investments by local and foreign investors. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain three once giant textile exporters, run by family-owned companies, which were chosen by global brands for outsourcing, but then they became extinct. Based on a qualitative inquiry, and departing from phenomenology and grounded theory, it uses the result of nine interviews to former companies’ leaders, applying a multiple-case designed method in the context of family business governance to ascertain the role and importance of leadership and strategy issues for their decline. The front burner issues included leader or ‘Seth’s’ (the indigenous term for owners of big businesses in South Asia, particularly India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) management styles and policies (with dearth of professional and operational hierarchy, the hiring of ‘Yes Men’ and ‘Yes Boss’ type executives), firm’s culture and politics, human resource policies (i.e. working environment and employees’ motivation), management of financial portfolios, and other operational strategies like technology, operations and marketing, which eventually led to disastrous failures to filing bankruptcies by these three firms.