Kamal Quadir is an entrepreneur and artist, renowned for his leadership at bKash and earlier at CellBazaar. Pioneering e-commerce in Bangladesh and leading one of the largest mobile financial services companies in the world take extraordinary vision and excellence in execution. Both of these rely on a nuanced level of understanding of strategy and intuition. In conversation with Insights Series team, Kamal Quadir discusses how intuition and a design mindset blend together in guiding his decisions and forming his strategies.
Insights Series: What does intuition mean to you?
Kamal Quadir: You experience many different things at different phases of your life. You learn certain things, out of which you develop a way to reflect on day-to-day matters or to tackle complex problems. When a football is coming at you, for instance, your mind and body have developed certain ways to respond to it. To me, that is a kind of an intuition; I find it useful to fall back on it, especially at times of overwhelming complexity which also require critical decisions.
Insights Series: How did you develop this kind of intuition?
Kamal Quadir: I come from a relatively well-educated, large family. I lost my father at a very young age, which pushed us to focus on achieving excellence in education. With my siblings abroad for higher education, I grew up with the hard reality of everyday life that forced me to deal with the world outside my home at a very young age. I believe when you give somebody responsibilities, they can deliver regardless of their age, if you create a supportive environment. This leads to a maturity that continuously builds up, and eventually develops into good intuition, allowing you to reflect constructively. Academic learning supplements this, honing your intuition and equipping it with formal analytical skills.
Insights Series: Have you ever been misled by your intuition into making a bad decision?
Kamal Quadir: I came back from the US in 1997 for an art exhibition at Alliance Francaise. After this and after having sold some of my art pieces, I worked in a large energy business. However, I remained closely connected with the vibrant art community in Bangladesh, consisting of people from key institutions such as Charukola. Right around the dot-com bubble, I started an animation company with my brother Khalid Quadir, who was then based in the US. The idea was to produce animation work professionally with the help of Bangladeshi artists and meet orders from major studios in America; we could submit the deliverables digitally through the internet. We worked for over 3 years behind this endeavor, but in the end, my intuition that an artist would naturally be a good animator was not correct.
Insights Series: What do you think went wrong?
Kamal Quadir: According to the business model, the designs would be developed in North America, from companies such as Disney, and the artists in Bangladesh would be guided by those designs to produce animations. But the people I worked with were artists, not craftsmen. They were creative, revolutionary souls who wanted to make people see the world through their artwork. While I respect them for that, my idea of making an animator out of a fine arts student was an intuitive thinking that did not work. There is a difference between an artist and an illustrator. Perhaps, an illustrator would be a good animator, but not an artist.
Insights Series: Can you tell us of an instance when you achieved breakthrough in a situation using intuition?
Kamal Quadir: When I was establishing CellBazaar, we had decided to promote our brand using stickers on vehicles to capitalize on the time people spent sitting in traffic. Returning from a short business trip to the US, I was disappointed at how my colleagues had implemented the idea. The stickers were all placed in front of the vehicles. To me this was the wrong thing to do, because you do not expect to stare at a car’s windshield. I did two things to amend the situation. First, I decided that the sticker would be placed at the back of the vehicle, on the bottom right corner, directly in line of sight of the driver behind. Stuck in traffic and bored – that is the circumstance when someone is most likely to read the sticker. I also changed the sticker to a unique shape and color that made a bigger impact on the eye. This made a relatively permanent impression, especially with repeated exposure; every time they saw the shape, they thought of CellBazaar.
Insights Series: Speaking of logo design, we have noticed very little use of colors and minimal clutter in your communication materials. Is that related to a similar thinking?
Kamal Quadir: A conscious decision I took for both CellBazaar and bKash was to keep as much white space as possible in graphics. It’s almost like framing a painting. Border yourself, put a mat, stop the clutter. And within that border, don’t go overboard. Some people contend that it’s a waste of space, but I believe it is better to utilize the empty space and have something in the middle that is clean and impactful than to clutter the visual real estate with things that are bound to be missed. The focus should be on making the most impact; clutter dilutes impact. Perhaps, this is an example of connecting intuition developed through exposure to art and a fact-based evaluation skill.
Insights Series: How do you encourage innovation among broader teams, considering the risks of failure and the general stigma associated with the term?
Kamal Quadir: We make our people feel included. At bKash’s launching, the billboards featured the faces of actual bKash employees. This made people genuinely feel that they were not just a cog in the machine but a core part of the enterprise. Sometimes, people are bombarded with the word “innovation” and put under too much pressure to deliver without an adequate arrangement to innovate something. In order to innovate, I believe maintaining a work environment where one can express his ideas without any fear of criticism is important. Letting people participate in designing a process or an object creates the right environment for innovation.
Insights Series: You have also previously referred to design. How is design linked with innovation?
Kamal Quadir: Innovation, I find, is heavily linked to design. When I say design, I am not referring just to aesthetics but also to your approach to solving problems. It involves answering questions about how you intervene to make something more convenient, efficient and effective. For example, at this very instance we are sitting at this table, which doubles as our writing board. We don’t have walls or spaces to hang boards because they take away aesthetic beauty from the workplace and create clutter. Rather every table in this office is a tool for writing and collaborating, yet another example of combining convenience, efficiency and effectiveness.
This article was written in 2018.
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