Fellow in Focus Dr Kamal Munir

Dr Kamal Munir is a Homerton Fellow, Reader in Strategy and Policy at the Judge Business School, Academic Director of the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy and a Race and Inclusion Champion for the University of Cambridge.

Born in Sheffield, where his father was studying, he grew up in Pakistan, and came to Cambridge in 2000.

In April 2021 he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor with responsibility for the University Community and Engagement, a role which he will take up in October.

Your research interests are very multi-disciplinary. What was your starting point?

My first degree, in Engineering, took five and a half years to complete. It was the days of the first Afghan war, and Pakistan served as the pipeline for American weaponry meant for the ‘Mujahideen’. All universities were flush with the latest American and Soviet (captured) weapons, and different student factions had armed themselves so there was often cross-firing between dormitories. Every year an innocent student would be killed and the university would shut down for six months.

During my engineering degree I worked in an engineering design office, working on buildings and bridges, before moving into management consultancy.

How did you move into academia?

I then did an MBA, followed by a PhD in Strategy at McGill University in Montreal. I didn’t know very much about what I was getting myself into, and it was a bit of a long, lonely road. Canada’s a great place but the winters are brutal. When I moved to the UK people would ask me what brought me here and I’d say the weather and they’d assume I was joking but it’s true!

After completing my PhD I had a job offer from Cambridge. Basically, they gave me a tour of the cricket grounds and I said ‘where do I sign?’. I began a lectureship at the Judge Business School, which has now been my home at Cambridge for 20 years.

Apart from the Judge, I have also supervised PhD students in Geography, Development Studies and Politics. It’s one of the big charms of Cambridge, that it has so much to offer.

You describe your research focus as “Strategy in turbulent and disruptive competitive environments”. Could you unpack what that means?

We’re living in a very turbulent time. Businesses are a key stakeholder at JBS, and they’re under attack from lots of different directions.

We used to talk about industries, but now if you ask someone who works for Apple or Amazon what industry they’re in they won’t know – these huge organisations sprawl across multiple industries. Anticipating competition is much tougher when you don’t know where it is going to come from. How to anticipate and adapt to changes, and position yourself strategically in ecosystems is what I focus on.

In particular, I am fascinated by how organisations either cannot see change coming, or are unable to adapt to it. Think about Kodak. They pretty much created popular photography (before Kodak, there was no ‘Kodak Moment’!), but although they had a quarter of a century to adjust to digital, they couldn’t. I see the same thing now in banking. It’s very difficult to persuade companies that threats are real. Faced with uncertainty, we double down on what we know how to do best.

I advise businesses, but I also learn from them. At the end of the day I’m a researcher and when I spend time with businesses it all feeds back into my understanding. Businesses are often overly focused on one thing but as an outsider I am able to see similarities across widely different industries.

Recently, with a PhD student, I’ve been working with a large NHS trust and it’s been fascinating seeing how they’ve adapted to the demands of the pandemic. Hospitals have mechanisms in place to deal with change, but something as prolonged as Covid requires adaptation on a different scale. Hopefully our research will make them much better equipped to handle such crises.

What have you been concentrating on over the past year?

I’ve mainly been looking at inequality in organisations. Organisations can very easily become vehicles for perpetuating inequality, so I’ve started focusing on what we do in organisations that exacerbates gender, race and class-based inequality. All organisations claim to be meritocratic, but in everyday practices, that can be far from true.

You’re also the Academic Director for the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy at the Judge. What are its aims?

The CSP came about thanks to a donation from a philanthropist and businessman based in the Middle East. Its focus is on emerging markets, where we want to track and shape how philanthropy happens. While philanthropy is not the only solution, it has traditionally played an important role in society. People want to give in a way that has impact, but we lack data on who is giving to whom and how much impact it is having.

We set up the centre at the beginning of 2020, and almost immediately Covid happened. The pandemic has had a huge impact on patterns of giving, and also on our own operations. Our former centre manager joined in March 2020 and left in January 2021. She’d never set foot in the building, and I’d never met her physically! As if two jobs weren’t enough, you have a further role as a Race and Inclusion Champion for the University.

Yes – I’ve been doing it for four years now, but it’s been much more noticed since the Black Lives Matter movement. I hope things are changing in the University. Certainly, we’re having conversations that just weren’t happening a few years ago. We’re collecting data, which was previously very patchy, on representation. There’s a whole team of us working on diversity and inclusion, and we’ve come a long way, for which a lot of credit must go to the ViceChancellor. We used to get people saying “It’s great what you’re doing, but try not to use the ‘r’ word,” meaning racism. The ViceChancellor has never been shy of putting fighting racism on the agenda.

We act on behalf of the University, so we can’t tell the colleges what to do, which is why I’m so thrilled by how proactive Homerton has been.

You were part of the University for a long time before you became affiliated with a College. How have you found that relationship?

There’s an extremely friendly, welcoming community at Homerton, and I really cherish that. It adds a different dimension to life in Cambridge. You also get to know more students through being part of a College, and discover other issues that you can contribute to.

You’re about to take up a new position, as one of the five Pro-ViceChancellors providing academic leadership to the University. What are you most looking forward to?

The role has been restructured with a greater emphasis on diversity, which is quite exciting. We started doing some work on this a few years ago, but it’s really intensified over the past year. We really want Cambridge to be a leader in terms of how diverse, forward-thinking and progressive it is.

I am also working with the university museums on the legacies of enslavement project. The conversations we’re having will problematise the collections we have, but they will also become a bridge for the museums to engage with the wider world.