Mr. Sabbir Hasan Nasir, Executive Director of Aci Logistics Limited, shares some valuable insights from his super successful corporate career about the to-do’s and not to-do’s for students to shine in their job life.
Q: First we would like to know where you were born and brought up, your school and your academic background.
Sabbir Hasan Nasir: I was born in the Khulna district. I had my schooling in Khulna Saint Joseph High School. Then I moved to Dhaka for higher studies. I did my undergraduate from BUET in Chemical Engineering. I did my MBA from IBA. After that, I worked in some multinational companies. During those times, I got the chance to receive much training from abroad. I also did some post-graduation certificate courses from the USA, including Industrial Engineering and Retailing.
Q: Where did you start your career?
SHN: I started my job life in Bata Shoes. I worked for about 6 years there. At first, I started in the engineering sector, and then I moved into the marketing side. Then I joined an American company as a general manager. That was a part of IBE. They formed a private sector company to lead an arsenic removal project. I was the pioneer of removing arsenic from the soil of Bangladesh. After that, I moved to Africa and joined a company named Golfrate in their marketing sector. The company was basically a licensee of Unilever, Nestle and Kraft in the African market. My job was to look over all the brands of Unilever, Nestle and Kraft. But over there, I faced the language barrier as I wasn’t very fluent in Portuguese and for this reason, I moved into manufacturing. So I had to look after Unilever’s manufacturing operations. Eventually, I moved to the marketing side of those famous brands. Then I worked for Tetra Pak. Tetra Pak is a multinational food packaging and processing company. I used to look after Tetra Pak’s operations from an account manager’s perspective. My accounts were like AbulKhair, Danish, Horlicks, Sajeeb Foods, and Acme. So most of the brands except Pran were my clients at that time. We initiated a lot of new products into the market. You see all this juice and milk in Tetra Pak is our contribution. I was also the CEO of Otobi Ltd. for some time. I was the first and the last non-family CEO of that company. I was there for 5-6 years. During my time, Otobi went through a big corporate transformation and emerged as a giant corporate brand – a global brand I would say. Since then, I have been working here.
Q: You did your graduation from engineering and after that you moved to the marketing or business territorial sector. Tell us about that journey. Did you face any sort of obstacles?
SHN: Well, I think being an engineer, I would say, my skills in marketing science could have been utilized in all these MNC. So I saw marketing from a scientific perspective initially. In doing a lot of market research and segmentation study or positioning study I tried to use my analytical and mathematical skills. Along with these, I used my statistical knowledge in shaping up the market and setting out the market strategies. Eventually, I moved on to the CEO level and I could look after both manufacture and marketing simultaneously. This combination is fantastic. Here I can understand what is happening in the supply chain and what is happening in the market. But with time I became more creative in terms of marketing and I moved into the emotional parts. So for the last 10-12 years or more, wherever I went, I became the creative director for that brand. Besides the agencies, I chalked out the brands’ initial roadmaps also, a lot of the time I wrote the storyboards. All the Fashion Billboards you see for Swapno – I gave the direction for them. I became the stylist. I would say I’m more into the emotional part rather than the functional part of the brand nowadays – at least for the last 10/12 years.
Q: You have been in so many different genres of multinationals, so you have a lot of experience as well. So what you see, right now the young people who are coming, obviously you get so many CVs from the young. What do you see in them? What do they lack most?
SHN: Well, I don’t want to say what they lack most; rather I would like to say what they bring in most. I think the new kids are very talented; very different from our generation. In our times, we were freer into the practices and practical knowledge. We used to learn what was there in the templates, in the books, and in the manuals. We were kind of manual people. That’s why in our generation, you would find a lot of people who tried to conform to the set methodologies, so we became very, very methodical. The new generation, I mean this generation is more entrepreneurial, and they are very, very open and they want to think digitally and in a lot of ways they are actually global. And I really feel that they are better than our generation. But what they lack of is consistency.
Q: What I mean by lack is, now there are a lot of people who are not having a good job. There are a lot of students who studied from business, BBA. They are graduating pretty well, but they are not getting the jobs they deserve.
SHN: Well, we definitely want good people in every division of the company. I think what sometimes they lack is writing skills, in terms of English writing. Somewhere I found people who are really bad in it. Sometimes they are not really persistent and consistent in the job. Even when they get into the job, they waver and move around. They try to switch. They are not really hard workers a lot of the times. But you know, regarding their student life, I would say that, the coordination between the industry and the institution is still lacking. Back in our time, especially in the engineering sector, there was no co-ordination at all. We used to learn from organizations. But I would say, the condition of MBA is much better and the students get a proper understanding of the industry. Especially IBA used to give us that kind of direction; like what we would face in the industry and in the companies – the coordination was there. That’s what’s missing nowadays. The freshers have a different mindset about the world. But when they get into the field, they find different things. I think a lot of analytical skills are missing that we used to have in our times.
Q: There’s a big debate about the importance of the institution these days. There are a lot of students from IBA and NSU and there are a lot of students from various other universities. Just because of not being able to study in a good institution like NSU, IBA or BRAC his CV is under- mined from the students of these universities, even though they have some good experience.
SHN: Well, it’s not to me at least. And I’m sure it’s not like this to a lot of other CEOs in the country, as we talk to each other. We really don’t consider university or that kind of thing. Rather, we prefer to talk to the person directly and we try to see how good a person he is as a human being; what are the values that drive him. And on account of skill set, we don’t expect that they will be skilled because we would actually train them. But we try to judge that, are they trainable? So, we judge their analytical skills and creative skills. If he is into creativity, we try to see how good he is as a designer or as a photographer or anything like that. But in the case of analytics, we try to see how good he is with numbers and how well he is in reasoning and in intellectual and logical thinking.
Q: And one more thing following this – the CGPA and the co-curriculum experience, do you think both should work simultaneously? What should be the balance actually?
SHN: I never look at CGPA. And I have given strict instruction to my HR manager to never discriminate anyone based on his CGPA. Because, CGPA is something which indicates how good they are in their institutions in terms of their academic activities. So that’s just one small indicator. A lot more depth is untapped that the institution couldn’t find. So, I never look at CGPA at all. Rather I want to see one’s maturity as a human being in terms of how he looks at this world. That’s more important.
Q: There’s one more issue that has caused some controversy in recent times, that the universities over here are referring the books from USA. It creates a problem as there are many faculties which are adamantly following only those books. The contextual balance in the US regarding marketing is not quite the same as that in Bangladesh. So many students face the problem. When they come into the job, they see that what they have studied in books, the condition is not the same when they are in the job. What do you think about this? How can we solve it and what to do in this regard?
SHN: Yes, even we faced the same problem when we were students. To improve this, we can bring in more professionals from the industries and we can incorporate the case studies from those organizations to the institutions. Like, the MBA students still go through case studies. But those case studies could be based on Bangladeshi contexts from different organizations.
Q: Do you really think that this is creating a problem when you are recruiting freshers?
SHN: Not at all. That’s not a big problem. The bigger issue is, how good are they in Excel? How good are they in PowerPoint? How good are they in analytical thinking? How good are they in holistic thinking? How good are they in understanding good ideas? How good are they in appreciating a good picture?
Q: What do you think – is it better to do MBA or to do post-graduation from a single subject? I mean the subject on which one wants to build his career on. If somebody wants to do MBA, or if he wants to do post-graduation in economics, marketing or finance – which one is better?
SHN: Well, I think that’s not a major issue. MBA is fine. But besides MBA graduates, we also recruit ACMA, chartered accountants. We also recruit graphic designers, architects, interior designers, and supply chain experts, engineers, especially experts in production. I think, in engineering, they should have some understanding about the industry. So IPE is a good subject besides Chemical Engineering. Still computer Science and Engineering have a good prospect everywhere. Civil engineers have their jobs in government sectors and private sectors. For business, I think MBA is still the most preferred degree from our side. Because it’s a blend of everything. Then if somebody wants to specialize, I recommend the institutions to come up with new degrees like fashion design, retail design, probably FMCG business like sales and distribution, supply chain management. Even procurement – that could be a degree in itself.
Q: What would be your advice to a young person who wants to build a career like you or who takes you people as ideals?
SHN: I think, the most important thing is, they have to have all the skills that are needed to improve their lives every day. Not just the skills in terms of what they can do on their computers and with their hands, but what I’m saying is that they should come out of the bookish knowledge and they should be groomed to be better citizens, better human beings and better leaders. And that does not come from any institution that comes from you yourself. So you have to be a good human being, you have to know how to deal with people. You have to know how to respect other people. So, these skills should also be developed. I don’t know if these are skills or values, but these are something we actually look at. And as for skills, they should see what marketers are doing and they should follow that; what finance managers are doing, and how to blend these two. If somebody really wants to move fast in their career, they need to look at why a CEO enjoys his life: it’s not the money, not the big cars and the big houses. I’m talking about his job. Why is he enjoying his job? If they try to explore that, they will learn. This is how I started. I still remember my days in Bata, where I saw a managing director and I was inspired by him. His name was Garcia, he came from Columbia. I saw that he was using a lot of economic indicators in business and he was developing business plans. That simulated me. A lot of macroeconomic factors can be incorporated into the business plan. To me that was very interesting and I saw a lot of spreadsheets across his table. And I thought, yes, this job is very interesting.
Q: We might say you are already in the pinnacle of your life or career. But still we would love to know how you want to finish it. What is your vision?
SHN: Yes, Alhamdulillah I have done really well in my career. But if you talk about what I want to do later, then I would say, I would like to involve myself in a career developing institute or organization. At the same time, I want to work on women’s rights too. You know, in our country there are so many social taboos centering women and which are not authentic or expect- ed. In sha Allah, I have a strong desire to do something on this issue.
