What sets Faisal apart is the unique position and perspective he has always maintained, which is grounded in a hardcore technology with deep roots in leading-edge management science and mindful entrepreneurship. His intense curiosity has always led him to explore disruptive approaches to solving complex business problems.
Over the last two decades he has played a variety of roles including CEO, Chairman of the Board, and an advisor to F500 boards and management. He has architected customer/partner/joint-venture/business transformational relationships with cross industry, private and public sector global brands such as GE, MasterCard, American Express, Northrop Grumman, PepsiCo, IBM, Home Depot, Netscape, Infosys, French Social Security Services, Gartner, Cambridge Technology Partners, JP Morgan Chase, CSC, and others. In 2014 he became one of the fouders of Shadoka, Shadoka’s portfolio of offerings enables entrepreneurship, growth, and social impact.
At the age of only 14, he began what would be the first of many businesses: cobbling together stereo components to sell from his father’s home in Dhaka, Bangladesh in order to save the money he would need to support his plan to study in the United States.
He built his first commercial software product at the age of 19 while studying at the University of Minnesota, and went on to hold management positions in Pitney Bowes and then Dun and Bradstreet. In 1991, Pitney Bowes recruited him to join one of their R&D groups before he finished his undergraduate degree. At Pitney and Dun and Bradstreet, he worked on cutting-edge analytics and decision support methods and systems for customer intelligence, sales effectiveness, and revenue optimization before CRM/ERP, Sales Automation, and Business Intelligence were hardly concepts.
As a serial entrepreneur, he has raised venture capital from angels, strategic partners, and institutional investors to fund his innovative business-to-business startups. Over the decades, his companies innovated products and solutions that: provided middleware software for complex, secure transaction processing; created industry’s first set of re-usable software components for integrated B-to-B e-commerce; and pioneered comprehensive business value management frameworks and platforms.
In 1994, GE recruited him, then one of its youngest technology executives, to launch one of the industry’s first comprehensive B2B electronic commerce spin-offs, leveraging his innovation from one of his startups.
As a thought leader, he has written seven books on management, innovation, leadership, creativity, and entrepreneurship; established a research think tank in collaboration with leading academics from around the globe. He has become an authority on entrepreneurship, mindful leadership, innovation, creativity, transformation, and sustainable growth. His research leadership created several financial indices and methods such as the Convergence Index, Business Agility Index, Sustained Innovation Index, and Operational Excellence Index that measure the correlation between management maturity improvement and organizational financial performance. For his commitment to business-technology convergence, CIO Quarterly magazine designated him “Mr. Convergence”.
His previous book, The Power of Convergence (published by the American Management Association [AMA]), was released in April 2011 and almost immediately was named “One of the Best Business Books of 2011” by 800CEOREAD and CIO Insight. Two of his previous books, Sustained Innovation and Winning the 3-Legged Race, were also included in the “Top 5 Transformation Books” of the last few years, while Sustained Innovation also ranked in CIO Insight magazine’s “Editor’s Picks: The 10 Best Business Books of 2007”.
Faisal regularly chairs and speaks at CEO summits, B-Schools, and leadership forums globally. Notably, the CEO Summits at the NY Stock Exchange, Global China Summits, Forbes Business Leadership Forum, Sino-American CIO Summit in Beijing, European CIO Summit in Monte Carlo, MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership, Thunderbird Sustainable Innovation Summit, BOOTH School of Business – Entrepreneurial Ventures, CFO Magazine Technology Summit, Chief Executive Magazine CEO Roundtables, and Yale School of Management CEO Summits, among others.
An avid blogger, Faisal has a large following on Twitter and maintains numerous ongoing lines of communication with students and young entrepreneurs to offer guidance and advice to the next generation of business leaders. A lifetime student of Eastern philosophies, he holds a strong belief that it is through knowledge sharing of our experiences that we may provide the greatest clarity on how to improve our collective future.
