From the Cockpit to the Startup: Former British Army Officer Dougie Lord Speaks to AUK Entrepreneurship Students

Students in ENTR 313: Managing Entrepreneurial Ventures at the American University of Kuwait welcomed guest speaker Dougie Lord on Wednesday 28 October. He shared how the discipline of military life applies to building and managing a new venture.
 
Lord served in the British Army from 1987 to 2013 and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He is a qualified helicopter pilot. He held senior roles with the UK Ministry of Defence, including managing a defence helicopter programme with a budget of more than £2 billion. He also turned around a struggling £150 million procurement project, which earned him a commendation. In 2009 he served in Afghanistan as Principal UK Liaison Officer to the US Marine Corps, where he received a personal commendation from the Marine Corps’ commander there.
 
After leaving the military, Lord moved into the private sector. As Principal Consultant at QinetiQ, and later as Head of International Business Development for Europe and NATO, he won major contracts and built new international markets. He holds a Master of Science from Cranfield University. He is currently based in Kuwait, where he mentors and trains senior military officers from across the Middle East and beyond in strategy, leadership and operational planning.
 
The session was organised by course instructor Taiba Al-Humaidhi. It looked at what military service and entrepreneurship have in common: planning carefully while expecting plans to change, making decisions under pressure with incomplete information, building trust quickly in diverse teams, managing risk, and keeping going when motivation fades.
 
“We often talk about entrepreneurship as a story of ideas, but it is really a story of discipline,” said Al-Humaidhi. “Dougie has lived that discipline in the most demanding situations imaginable. When students hear it from someone with his experience, it stays with them in a way a textbook can’t.”
 
ENTR 313 brings in practitioners like Lord to connect classroom theory with real-world experience, so students are ready for the challenges they will face when they launch their own ventures.

Images from the event