Feroz Khan And DigiFlynt Towards Innovation and Transformation
- 28 Feb 2022
- FerozTech
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Feroz Khan is the founder and CEO of DigiFlynt. He is also the former Partner of BCG and KPMG.
Feroz Khan is the founder and CEO of DigiFlynt. He is also the former Partner of BCG and KPMG. Feroz aims to master new skills and keep moving forward. He even takes failure positively. He says, “I try not to be bothered by things that do not yield the desired results.”
Furthermore, he says that he learns from his mistake and moves forward. Feroz Khan’s career highly focuses on technology and the digital field of work. He loves working on digital transformation projects for several leading industries and works mostly with digital and emerging technologies.
Feroz Khan’s company, DigiFlynt, is in Dubai, UAE. The company has a team of visionaries fueling innovation. Furthermore, the DigiFlynt team has an entrepreneurial spirit and mindset that thinks from their customer’s point of view to get fruitful solutions. The company also has an online presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
As a result-driven person, Feroz Khan strongly focuses on innovation and creativity. He is always keen to learn something new and expand the horizons of his knowledge to keep doing something fresh and innovative. Let’s see how all this turned out to be for Mr. Feroz Khan through our interview with him.
I was born and brought up in a small town in India and was lucky to be a part of one of the best schools in the region. Apart from teaching academic lessons, the school also taught me how to live life in a challenging situation and the art of self-dependence. Although there have been several memorable moments in my career span of over 24 years, I have been quite lucky to have led various roles across different industry verticals.
My entire career has been heavily influenced by technology, which started with enterprise technology and took me towards digital and emerging technology. I had the good fortune to work on a variety of technologies, including enterprise, application, infrastructure, network, and, most importantly, digital. However, when I see the split of my career, I observe that I have led almost 50% of my career, i.e., 12 years in the domain working with Oil & Gas, Consumer Goods, and Retail technology. I spent the remaining 50% of my career in consulting, which provided me with a platform to work across various industry verticals.
I also had the opportunity to work with Strategy and Management Consulting Firms like BCG and KPMG. There I worked mostly on digital and emerging technologies and led digital transformation projects for various banks and financial services. Consulting has been a turning point in my career and has been the best years of my career where I advised multiple clients, transformed many organizations, and mentored many young consultants to sharpen their skills.
My life goals are a little different, which eventually shapes my career. I concentrate on giving my all in whatever I do, and I try not to be bothered by things that do not yield the desired results. To focus on the task at hand, and if it fails to produce results, to use this as a chance to learn from my mistakes so that I can do things correctly the next time. Keep a positive attitude and don’t let fear threaten my success.
Instead of getting carried away with what people will say and how they will reach, I should be prepared to roll up my sleeve, get my hands dirty, and set an example. I will make every effort to master new skills such as artificial intelligence, which will be critical for a new era of working and thinking. It can communicate with robots and machines and become increasingly prevalent in the future.
My biggest strength is to live life with positive emotions, which generally motivates me. I genuinely believe that the moral ground I set for myself should be the same as what I expect from others. For my strength, I look towards my role models who are excellent technocrats and hence get motivated with their actions and innovation. My strength is my hands-on knowledge. It motivates me to roll up my sleeves and do my hands dirty.
Furthermore, I step into the shoes of my employees to view things from their angle, which guides and motivates me a lot. I do not believe in sympathy. Instead, I believe in empathy.
The path that I took was my keenness to learn new topics and master the art of perfection. I sharpened my knowledge in the field of digital and emerging technologies as a thought leader who would be known for bringing change through a digital transformation at the country/global level. At the same time, I learned the art of possibility, which has the potential to transform the nation digitally. Beyond my work, I am a person of grace and compassion. Therefore, I took the path to be known for my kindness and generosity. I hope I will be forgiven for all of my mistakes.
This is quite an interesting question. I asked myself the same question when I was planning to launch my company. Then I thought, my specialization is digital, and I have a strong backing of strategy and am rock solid in operationalizing any big project and initiative. Thus, I learned that Flynt is the name of hard rock, which corroborates my strength and ways of working. Therefore, I formed a company named as DigiFlynt in Dubai.
Once the company was established, I started looking towards geographies that are not so developed and have the growth potential, and thus I shortlisted West African countries. We could set ourselves up with a full-blown team, development center, tools, processes, and technologies across the UAE, India, Togo, and Gabon in a short span of time. I am a CEO, Shareholder, and Board Member of DigiFlynt, and it gives me great pride to say that we are not only working for enterprises. Instead, we are also working for the entire country and nation transformation.
It is a known fact that when an individual or company grows fast, problems and challenges are bound to be faced. Thus, we should be firm and solid to solve all those problems and challenges and shouldn’t be affected by the issue’s intensity. Instead, we take that as an opportunity to learn and strengthen ourselves. When I talk about the professional challenge, starting a new company and raising capital towards the same was the biggest challenge.
To add to the complexity comes the language barrier to operate in Francophonie countries. Hiring relevant skills was another challenge that I had to overcome. The biggest of the lot was the client not paying you on time after taking the services, which eventually led to operational issues. Having said that, I learned how to overcome those challenges successfully and learned the tricks of mitigating control over those.
Result-oriented
I get thrilled with new ideas and thoughts emerging on Monday, which get accumulated during the weekend when you are free from your workload. I love my work, and I get thrilled with the thought process of meeting my team members with fresh ideas and thinking to make the week productive and bring a positive impact to work.
I give equal weightage to my culture and vision because a real vision emerges from the foundation of your culture. It is pretty essential to have solid cultural backing in order to realize your vision. I value my culture, which has taught me to respect others and be affectionate and respectful. Being educated and knowledgeable is being valued in my culture. I value my culture, which helped me learn the importance of happiness.
The most valuable thing towards my vision is to be result-oriented in a time-bound manner because vision needs a set of missions to be realized, and a mission has few sets of objectives that need to be accomplished. Once I am clear with my purpose, I create plans to realize the same, which has to be time-bound and result-oriented (my one-word description of life).
After completing my Engineering and Business studies, my passion and interest eventually landed me to become a software developer and a digital evangelist. My life as an engineer was full of learning, and I was a person who was more interested in practicals as compared to theory. Today, at this juncture of my career, I give full credit to my engineering studies and experience for making me a better business leader.
The eagerness to be more innovative and creative with my engineering design has helped me make better business decisions. The modules like project planning and machine drawing have helped me take precise and micro-level detailing of business work, which eventually helps me in better operational planning.
In my professional life, I spearheaded multiple projects. It provided me the platform to think differently and consider the art of possibility through innovative and creative ideas, especially when I worked in consulting.
The key value which helped me overcome various roadblocks was one anecdote from my childhood that became a mantra for my life, and I still follow that philosophy in whatever I do. The mantra was – don’t study for the heck of scoring high marks, instead study because you want to gain knowledge that can never be taken away from you.
The study helps in enhancing your knowledge of the topic that eventually helps you build your character and personality. I still try to incorporate this philosophy in my work sphere, especially when new projects require business process study.
There have been multiple memorable incidents in my leadership, but to highlight, one of the important ones was setting up my current company in record time and making it operational in multiple countries by virtue of the values of making ourselves different in terms of analyzing the problem statement and solution-finding capabilities.
I would like to be remembered for my talent in the field of technology as a thought leader who would be known for bringing change through a digital transformation at the country / global level.
At the same time, I would like to be remembered by the name who has the potential to transform the nation digitally. As I said, I’m a person with compassion and grace. I would like people to remember my kindness and generosity. I hope I will be forgiven for all of my mistakes.
The future is fully digital, and with the influx of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the future will be totally digital. It will be based upon personalization sitting on the foundation of customer experience.
Change management will be a daunting task for business, society, and people, and no matter how much digital we bring in our life, success will only be counted when we start using it, and it becomes a part of today’s life. How we operate and transact daily will be based on digital foundations, and everyone has to adapt to this change.