Nazim Farhan Choudhury

Managing Director of Adcomm Ltd.

Nazim Farhan Choudhury, Managing Director of Adcomm Ltd., joined Adcomm as a Management Trainee in 1994 and has come a long way since. Choudhury, who obtained a degree in Economics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, has played a pivotal role in Adcomm's forays into many diverse establishments and ventures. AktiVision (Direct Consumer Contact and Activation), Art of Noise (recording studio), Screaming Girl (production house), Northbrook Consultants (PR and Brand Consulting) and GraphicPeople (a joint -venture DTP Studio with WPP's Young & Rubicon) are some of the organisations he has helped found.

Over the last 18 years Choudhury has been involved with some of the most vibrant brands in the country. He has vast experience in working with clients like Nokia, Unilever, BAT Co., Standard Chartered Bank, Johnson & Johnson, Telenor, Telecom Malaysia, Coca-Cola and Pepsi to name only a handful. Of the top 20 brands according to the Bangladesh Brand Forum tally, Choudhury has worked on eight of them, and some of the advertising campaigns he has created have become legendary. Even some of the local brands that he helped nurture like Agora (Supermarket), Mojo (Carbonated Beverage), Citycell (Telecom) or GMG Airlines (Air transport) are market leaders. He has also recently ventured into the tourism sector with the opening of a luxury hotel and resort in Sylhet.

Choudhury is also a frequent writer in the Counterpoint section in The Daily Star and an advertising critique for the Bangladesh Brand Forum Magazine, the first magazine based on the latest happenings in brands and advertisements. Choudhury was instrumental in starting the Advertising Club Dhaka as joint convener. He still plays a dynamic role in ensuring the advancement of advertising and brand management professionals in Bangladesh. He is also an active member of BASIS [Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services] and a social youth organisation called 'Phiriye Ano Bangladesh' (Bring Back Bangladesh). While the former is the industry association of software companies, the latter is a youth mobilisation organisation aimed at bringing youth more into leadership positions in the country. Furthermore he is a senior adviser to Jaago Foundation, an organisation that gives provides free of cost English-medium education to underprivileged children.

Choudhury was chosen as one of the 'Faces for the Future' by the New Age newspaper's Heroes Edition in 2007 and in the same year received the “Brand Leadership Award” at the 17th Asian Brand Congress. In 2008 he was chosen as a representative for Bangladesh to the prestigious Asia Society's Asia 21 Youth Summit held in Tokyo, Japan. Choudhury is an active member of the Active Citizen's Program of the British Council and in 2010, helped the research and publication of the Next Generation Report, a detailed research into the minds Bangladesh's youth. Choudhury also hosted a weekly music program on Bangladesh's popular Radio Foorti FM station.

Compiled by Star Correspondent

Salman Amin Khan

Founder and Executive Director of Khan Academy

“The way people are learning is forever evolving and Salman Amin Khan, a Bangladeshi-American, has contributed to this evolution with one of the most talked about not-for-profit educational organisations, Khan Academy. With a mission to provide “a high quality of education to anyone, anywhere”, Khan Academy has created more than 2,800 free video tutorials on topics ranging from healthcare to art history.

“I see Khan Academy becoming the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything for free,” states Khan on his website.

It all started back in 2004 when Salman Khan, a 28-year-old hedge-fund manager, began tutoring his cousin in mathematics over the internet using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad. Nadia, who struggled with maths, agreed to sit in on remote tutoring sessions and found that it helped her tremendously. Eventually more of Khan's relatives became interested in his tutorial videos and he decided to move all his content onto YouTube. In 2009, Khan quit his day job to focus on making video tutorials full-time.

Then one day, Khan received a message from Ann Doerr, his first donor, saying Bill Gates had spoken about the Khan Academy at the prestigious Aspen Ideas Festival. Later that year, the Khan Academy received the Microsoft Tech Award for education and in 2010 Google provided $2 million for the Academy to translate its core materials into the world's most widely spoken languages. In March 2011, Salman Khan was invited by Bill Gates to speak at TED and after meeting Khan, Gates told him that he had used the Khan Academy Exercise Software to teach his own children.

Salman 'Sal' Khan's father is from Barisal in Bangladesh and mother from Kolkata. He was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and completed three degrees in mathematics, electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an MBA from Harvard. When asked how he had the time to make so many video tutorials, Khan said, “My wife was doing her residency in internal medicine, from 2005 to 2008, so there were many nights and weekends where she was working and I would have felt guilty doing anything less productive.”

The Khan Academy videos are currently being translated into the world's most widely spoken languages and Bangla is one of them. In 2011, with the supervision of the Agami Education Foundation, more than 880 mathematic video tutorials were translated by One Degree Initiative, a Bangladeshi youth-based non-profit organisation. Other subjects like Biology, Chemistry, and Physics have been translated by another organisation called Nascenia IT and all videos are available for free through YouTube.

When asked if he would ever be interested in turning Khan Academy into a business, he said, “I've been approached several times, but it just didn't feel right. When I'm 80, I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world.”

He added, “I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two Hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need?”

Five years on and many videos later, Khan's brain child has had more than 280,000 YouTube channel subscribers and almost 120 million views. He may not have reached the billions of students he hopes to yet, but Salman Khan is most certainly on the right track.

by Soraya Auer

Sheikh Bashiruddin

Managing Director of Akij Group

Akij Group needs no introduction and neither does Sk. Bashir Uddin, the brain behind its continued success. Sk. Bashir Uddin, the Managing Director of Akij Group, joined the company in 1988 right after he completed his S.S.C exams from Motijheel Central School. Although he was the son of Sk. Akij Uddin, founder of the Akij Group, he had to start from scratch and make his own mark. “I received my formal appointment from my father and started off by working in the Purchase Department of the company with a monthly salary of Tk. 300. I was basically buying stationeries for the company,” says Sk. Bashir Uddin.

Sk. Bashir Uddin completed his H.S.C from Ideal College and did B.Com. in the night session from Tejgaon College. He used to work all day and study at night and thrived in all the challenges placed in front of him. The year 1991 saw the beginning of his regular professional life.

"I got the best teacher in the world in the form of my father who was my mentor. He was a tough boss being a perfectionist by nature. He wanted me to learn a lot of things and I took them very seriously," says Sk. Bashir Uddin. "The knowledge I gained from my father outshines any I would have got if I pursued higher studies. I have no regrets and I treasure the things I learned from him."

His grooming included earning the things he desired with his own capability. "Although he could afford to give us whatever we wished for, my father used to create a sense of artificial poverty around us so that we were more practical and down-to-earth and attained what we wanted through our skills," says Sk. Bashir Uddin.

Sk. Bashir Uddin gave about twenty years of his life to the Akij Group and had to make a lot of compromises starting with having an almost non-existent social life. "One needs to have a trade-off between what one does and what one wishes to achieve," says Sk. Bashir Uddin. "I have enjoyed every single moment in this company from the day I joined. This is what I love to do and I enjoy being here with the big family I have in the form of the 40,000 people who work with me."

The heights achieved by Sk. Bashiruddin at such a young age is truly remarkable a matter of immense wonder. "Hard work, dedication and most importantly love for ones job is the key to success," says Sk. Bashir Uddin. "In our company, we work as a big team and I invest in the people with us for the last 30 years which also pays as dividend."

The various business interests of Sk. Bashir Uddin demands almost all of his attention, which leaves him with very little time for his family. "I have been blessed with a very understanding wife and family which make my life a lot easier. I try to compensate missing out on their lives by taking breaks from my work so that I can spend time with them," says Sk. Bashir Uddin.

Under his supervision, the Akij Group is always re-investing in a variety of projects starting from balancing and modernising their existing projects to investing in new areas of business. Such can be seen in the launching of their ceramic product which is the largest ceramic company of Bangladesh. They are also working on investing in the largest glass factory in Bangladesh.

"We take a lot of pride in being a local company. We pay 2% of the exchequer which makes us the largest company in the country. We are technologically very advanced and we believe in technologically enhancing all the business we are involved in. Our company has appropriate human capital to drive the business and is also financially disciplined," says Sk. Bashir Uddin. "Our company is a compliant one in many regulatory aspects and that certainly makes a platform for us to thrive in the future and be confident about exceling in every aspect. And this is the recipe which sees us growing in every field."

by Zaheen Zaema Khan