Furqan Qureshi

Furqan Qureshi spent thirty years building and selling technology, more than twenty of them in C-level positions. He started as a systems engineer at IBM in 1981 and finished his corporate run as Chief Commercial Officer at PTCL, where the business he led closed a year above half a billion dollars.

The list of firsts is long: the country's first remote disaster-recovery site, its first bank IT outsourcing, its first real-time internet share-trading platform, the first LTE service on the market. He architected the Federal E-Government Programme and sat on the State Bank's task forces for electronic clearing and real-time settlement.

Then he stopped and went back to school. Design Thinking at MIT, business model work with Strategyzer and IDEO, and a second practice built around innovation, entrepreneurship and start-up mentoring. He calls himself the perennial learner, and he means it as a method rather than a compliment.

He has since trained more than five hundred people in Pakistan in design thinking and mentored over two hundred start-ups, as Mentor-in-Residence at the National Incubation Centres in Islamabad and Peshawar and at NUST's NSTP. The forty-five women he coached in pitching for Karandaaz went on to raise over PKR 500 million.

With Torque his subject is what he calls dual transformation, doing the digital change and the design change at once, because an organisation that does only one of them has bought a system and not a different company.