Biography|Sabir Sami — The University Road Campus Where He Talked Marketing Back to IBA

People treat an alumni talk as a courtesy visit.

On this University Road campus it was a dated public session with a syllabus attached.

On 26 March 2019, IBA Karachi's Career Development Centre and Alumni Affairs office hosted Sabir Sami in the Corporate Connect Series.

The session sat inside the Personal Effectiveness course and was run with visiting faculty member Nadia Sayeed.

IBA's own alumni magazine recorded the date, the hosts, and the place: the Main Campus.

Sami was then managing director for Yum! Brands across the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey, and Asia.

The talk title on the record is Global trends in marketing strategy and consumer preference.

He spoke about social media and technology changing how people buy.

He named speed, ease, and convenience as the preferences he watched in both the market and the company.

He closed by telling students to work on mindset, people, and time.

Those lines are the magazine's paraphrase of a living speaker, not a transcript.

After the classroom piece he walked the boys' hostel.

The magazine says he went there to refill hostel memories from the late 1980s.

That is the same institute that issued his marketing MBA in 1988, when IBA was still a constituent of the University of Karachi.

The ground had changed.

Most of the Main Campus a visitor sees now went up after 2008: auditoriums, the library block, new academic buildings on the old plots.

The 2019 session used that rebuilt fabric.

It was not a degree ceremony and not a press tour of Louisville.

It was a working executive standing in the school that still prints his class year on every alumni note.

Two years later Yum! would name him KFC Division chief executive from Gardiner Lane.

The Karachi date is earlier and quieter.

Stand on University Road and the lawns look like a new campus.

The talk that brought him back was held on this one.

Photo: Umesh kumar Gianchandani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Aerial view of the rebuilt IBA Main Campus used for the 2019 session.