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Alumni Story: I always had my eyes set on where I wanted to be..


Like the Subway Surfer boy of the video game, Saif Salim Khan is zipping through the corporate world ‒ dodging obstacles, climbing, tumbling, leaving the competition behind… and never looking back.

After completing his MBA in Finance from FORE School of Management in 2012, Saif joined AC Nielsen as an Executive in Retail and Shopper Practice. Within 6 months, Saif stunned the competition by bagging the Simply Excellent Gold Award in October 2012. In this short span, Saif had handled projects and generated market insights for clients like HUL, Mondelez, L&T;, InOrbit Malls, and Aditya Birla Retail, among others major players in the FMCG and retail industry. He was the core member of an initiative to develop a pricing tool to assist business development teams across Nielsen CR in accurately pricing research projects. Saif developed algorithms based on over 200 proposals to predict the project costs and cycle times and to reduce operational costs. He drew personal praise from Adrion Terron, the ED & CR Bases Head at Nielsen, for this effective innovation. “Saif appears to have a penchant for problem solving and an affinity for using technology to do so,” wrote Adrion in his commendation.

Not surprisingly, barely 13 months into the job, Saif was promoted to Associate, and assigned to Retail Measurement Services (RMS). In RMS, Saif worked with a team in designing and executing the RMS on-boarding/training initiative by integrating various global teams across continents. He was with RMS for barely 4 months, and yet was able to create a month-long program that recruits at RMS would go through to understand the product and to develop a working knowledge of the business. This would, at the same time, considerably reduce the cycle time for training and increase the learning curve. This training platform is currently being beta tested in India for future global implementation by AC Nielsen. But, by this time, Saif had already hit the fast lane… and the next rung beckoned him.

So in September 2013, barely 17-months after passing out of FORE School of Management, Saif Salim Khan made the big shift to the post of Research Manager with IMRB International. He currently handles niche clients like PEPSI & Michelin at IMRB. Saif shares his thoughts on his success: “Success pretty much boils down to one’s attitude. With the right attitude, you can dazzle leaders and win the applause of one and all. Wherever you work, you’ve got to make it ‘your’ business. Teamwork isn’t the immediate 3 people next to you; it’s the whole organization across the world. You think big, you do big.”

Saif is always looking for ways to make business processes lean and improve the bottom lines of the company. He believes in working with the system and not against it; this is something he learned at FORE School of Management. Speaking of the value of an MBA, Saif says, “I often meet people who say, ‘MBA is of no use‘. I believe that’s why they will never go beyond a certain level.”

Saif attributes a lot of his workplace acumen to the Marketing, Sales & Distribution, HR & Training & Finance classes he attended at FORE School of Management. Looking back at this experience, Saif fondly remembers the help of his teachers: “Whenever faced with a challenge, I always recall what one of my teachers at FORE, would say – ‘If the sun is shining, you really can’t do anything about it. It’s just there! It is not a problem!’ Innovation & strategy are mostly a combination of best practices across the globe, and it’s a privilege to be mentored on these aspects by the illustrious professors of FORE School of Management. All learning at FORE School of Management was centred on ‘going beyond text books’. Creativity was a given.”

Saif’s offers this last piece of advice to his juniors at FORE School of Management: “Push yourself; you are going to have late nights. Rise above the mediocre. That’s why you are at FORE.”

Note: This is a sponsored article and has NOT been written by the PaGaLGuY Editorial Team. It is intended from an informational perspective only and it isup to the readers to research and verify the claims and judgements in the article before reaching a conclusion.

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