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Life, Faris Ali believes, would be considerably less interesting if it moved in a straight line. To explain this\u2014and his own career\u2014he reaches not for a business-school metaphor but for seashells, Romanesco broccoli, branching trees, lightning and galaxies. All of them, he says, grow and move in patterns that are expansive rather than linear. Why should a career be any different?<\/p><\/p>\n
\u201cI view career trajectories in the same light as I view the cosmos,\u201d Faris says. His own CV makes the argument rather convincingly. After earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in International Business from Gulf University for Science and Technology in 2012, he worked at the Kuwait Fund for Development, where his responsibilities included facilitating payments for infrastructure projects and supporting humanitarian financing involving international organizations. During roughly the same period, he co-founded Experimental Eatery, which he describes as Kuwait\u2019s first pop-up restaurant concept. He later worked as Operations Manager at the non-profit Nuqat, became Business Development Manager at Kuwait Dana Lubes Company and eventually joined Tamdeen Group in 2023. Today, his CV lists him as Business Developer, under the real estate arm of Tamdeen Group.<\/p><\/p>\n
To Faris, however, the apparent jumps between industries make considerably more sense from inside the career than they might on paper. Moving among different kinds of organizations has taught him how to communicate with specialists who do not necessarily speak the same professional language. An engineer may approach a problem one way, a finance executive another, while marketing, information technology (IT) and design bring their own terminology and priorities. Faris sees part of his job as understanding enough of each world to connect them. \u201cI would say a critical part of my responsibilities that most people don\u2019t see is being the \u2018connector\u2019 behind the scenes,\u201d he says. His current work at Tamdeen Group can involve coordinating across companies, departments and sectors as ideas move toward actual projects.<\/p><\/p>\n
That breadth is deliberate. Faris describes himself as an \u201cactive lifetime learner\u201d and says he has worked his way through more than 800 books, in addition to lectures and other educational material. His interests listed on his CV range from behavioral psychology and neuroscience to artificial intelligence, futurism, ecology and cryptocurrencies. He even listens to books at the gym, \u201cbetween sets and EDM (electronic dance music) tracks.\u201d The point, for him, isn\u2019t collecting disconnected facts. It is being able to enter a room containing architects, marketers, engineers or other specialists, understand what each is trying to accomplish and see where their interests intersect.<\/p><\/p>\n
His appetite for learning has also taken him repeatedly to programs supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). Since 2023, Faris says he has participated in six: the Harvard Kennedy School custom program on navigating change, decision-making, negotiation and leadership strategies; UC Berkeley\u2019s Equity Fluent Leadership in Kuwait; Artificial Intelligence & Leadership for Executives through HEC Paris in Kuwait; AI-Driven Marketing Strategy at Columbia Business School in New York; the Digital Leadership Program at HKUST Business School in Hong Kong; and, most recently, Leadership in a Technology Driven World at Imperial College Business School in London. He regularly checks the executive education opportunities offered through KFAS, looking for programs that can broaden his perspective or strengthen an area he wants to develop.<\/p><\/p>\n
What stayed with him most was not a particular certificate or lecture. It was what happened when people from different backgrounds were put around the same table. Faris particularly valued the group exercises that followed the academic material, when participants had to draw on their different experiences to solve a problem together. He describes the result, characteristically, as gaining access to a \u201ccollective hive mind.\u201d For someone whose daily work already involves connecting different professional languages, the attraction is obvious. He worries that people who become deeply specialized can retreat into departmental silos; the KFAS programs repeatedly pulled him in the opposite direction, putting him in contact with professionals he might otherwise never have encountered.<\/p><\/p>\n
The network has occasionally resurfaced in unexpected places. This summer, while vacationing in Marbella, Faris happened to encounter a Saudi participant he had met through the Imperial College program in London. For him, the chance meeting illustrated something larger about the relationships KFAS can create. \u201cKFAS as an institution is like an iceberg,\u201d he says. \u201cIts academic and business network spans deeper than what is visible on the surface.\u201d He has met peers through both its international and Kuwait-based programs and would like to see more professional development programs connecting participants across the Gulf.<\/p><\/p>\n
Technology is another reason Faris believes that kind of cross-disciplinary thinking is becoming increasingly necessary. He had already been following automation during the fintech boom more than a decade ago, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) led him to apply for the Imperial College program. But despite his fascination with AI tools, he is wary of vague claims about what it can accomplish. In conversation, he gives the example of someone walking into a company promising to \u201capply AI.\u201d His response would be to start asking questions: What kind of AI? What exactly is being sold? What problem does it solve? Is the technology genuinely sophisticated, or is expensive language being wrapped around something readily available elsewhere? Specificity, he says, matters.<\/p><\/p>\n
He is equally wary of becoming so dependent on technology that people lose skills of their own. Faris believes excessive reliance on AI can weaken communication and cognitive habits, and argues for a hybrid future in which human judgment develops alongside increasingly capable machines. His metaphor this time comes from Greek mythology: the centaur, except the creature he imagines is \u201chalf human, half artificial intelligence.\u201d In real estate, he expects that combination to become increasingly tangible as AI and Internet of Things technologies\u2014networks of connected sensors and devices that collect and exchange data\u2014allow properties to generate live data about how they are functioning. He compares the possibility to viewing the vital signs, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) of a building simultaneously on a tablet.<\/p><\/p>\n
The same instinct\u2014to connect things that initially appear unrelated\u2014also shapes the way Faris thinks about Kuwait. He sees particular potential in food and beverage, fitness and wellness, and health care, sectors he believes can reinforce one another as parts of a wider leisure economy. His own work already places him inside one version of that convergence. To Faris, a modern Gulf mall is no longer simply a collection of stores. Climate and changing consumer habits have helped turn such developments into mixed-use environments where people can eat, exercise, work, meet and access other services. At Tamdeen\u2019s Al Khiran Mall, he points out, someone can arrive by speedboat at the marina and then walk inside to access government services.<\/p><\/p>\n
There is, perhaps, something fitting about a man with such an eclectic career spending his working life connecting different pieces of large, mixed-use destinations. Faris does not pretend to know exactly where his own path will lead next. He is still, as he puts it, in the middle of the journey, with the way forward unfolding \u201cchoice by choice and project by project.\u201d <\/p><\/p>\n
His advice to young Kuwaitis is considerably shorter than his explanation of fractals, galaxies or artificial intelligence.<\/p><\/p>\n
\u201cBe nimble, be humble, be aware, be ready.\u201d<\/p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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