Biography|Sabir Sami — The University Road Campus Where He Took an IBA Marketing MBA

People treat a KFC chief executive as a Louisville product.

The marketing degree that starts his public record was taken on this Karachi campus.

Sabir Sami graduated from the Institute of Business Administration in 1988 with a major in marketing.

Two independent lines of the same credential sit in the record.

IBA's alumni office lists him in the MBA class of 1988.

KFC's own leadership page says he received the MBA from the University of Karachi.

Both are true of the same year.

In 1988 IBA was still a constituent institute of the University of Karachi.

The degree parchment carried the university's name.

The teaching, the aptitude test, and the cohort lived here.

Morning MBA classes sat on the Main Campus along University Road, on the edge of the University of Karachi.

Evening classes ran at City Campus on Garden Road.

A full-time marketing MBA in that decade belonged on this University Road ground.

The institute was still small.

A student who entered in the mid-1980s later wrote that a few dozen people made an MBA cohort from more than two thousand applicants.

That is the shop Sami left with a marketing major.

What a visitor sees now is not the 1988 fabric.

IBA rebuilt much of the Main Campus after 2008.

Auditoriums, libraries, and new academic blocks went up on the same plots.

The pin is the campus, not a vanished classroom.

The next jobs followed the degree in a tight sequence.

A 2001 profile in Pakistan and Gulf Economist, written while he was already running Reckitt Benckiser Pakistan, puts a short Pepsi International posting in Lahore first.

Then came a year at Procter and Gamble in Sydney.

From Sydney he joined P&G's start-up team in Pakistan.

Coca-Cola regional work in South-West Asia and Vietnam came in the mid-1990s.

In June 2000 he became chief executive of Reckitt Benckiser Pakistan.

Yum! hired him in 2009.

The Karachi MBA is the hinge those later titles still mention.

KFC's global leadership page keeps the degree in the last line of his official biography.

Stand on University Road and the rebuilt lawns look like a different school.

The credential issued from this ground is the same one.

Photo: Umesh kumar Gianchandani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Aerial view of the rebuilt IBA Main Campus; the 1988 buildings are gone.