About Me
I grew up across three countries: Britain, Pakistan and the UAE. Same child, three different sets of rules about what was possible.
That is an early education in how differently a system behaves depending on who it was built for, and who it was built without.
I have spent the twenty years since working as an enterprise transformation leader, which is a formal way of saying I redesign how organisations decide, fund and execute, so that the change they have already agreed on can actually happen.
By 23 I had graduated and sold my first business, an online outdoor sports portal. Then I founded Ikonami. Over eleven years we built eight digital health products serving 1.3 million NHS users under Agenda for Change, and sold the company to Electric Word PLC in April 2011.
By 2010 the commercial success had stopped being enough. A close and personal experience with the consequences of extremism forced harder questions about what I was building and who it was for.
So I sold up. And with my wife Sahar, co-founded Peace Through Prosperity.
What the community work taught me
Peace Through Prosperity is a self-funded social innovation lab. We help micro-entrepreneurs in marginalised and conflict-affected communities build viable businesses and write their own narrative of change. Over 4,000 people so far, across eight countries. Everything we validate, we open source.
The method was built on a pavement in Karachi, with fruit vendors and cobblers and barbers working fourteen-hour days who had no patience for a framework that did not survive contact with the next morning.
One of our earliest participants was Akram, a street barber. When we met him in July 2014, he was earning €2.88 a day. Within nine months he had a barber shop and employed four people.
People do not resist change. They respond rationally to the system they are standing in.
The years I do not usually talk about
I did not stop building when Ikonami sold in 2011.
I had already started Ikonami Technologies the year before, keeping the name but not the business, chasing emerging technology: open source, augmented reality, NFC. It did not reach viability and I wound it down in 2013. Alongside it, I advised the Department of Health and the Ministry of Defence.
It matters to the work. I have spent the decade since being brought into other people’s stalled programmes, and having had something of my own fail is a large part of why I read those rooms accurately.
Enterprise transformation leader in practice
In 2014 I went back inside large organisations, with a different lens. I stopped asking what the operating model should look like, and started asking what this system currently makes rational.
The work an enterprise transformation leader actually does is redesign the decision system: the governance structures, accountability lines and collaboration patterns that determine how an organisation functions, regardless of what the org chart says. Not the strategy. The machinery underneath it that decides whether the strategy ever moves.
Since then: Novartis, Bayer, Sandoz, JTI, Westminster City Council, Croydon Council, and LUSH Cosmetics through Acquia. Operating model design, decision rights, portfolio governance, funding mechanisms, leadership cadence.
At JTI, 27 months across 11 MENEAT markets. 405 people activated, cross-functional collaboration at 82% against a 59% global benchmark, and a 5× validated return on the investment, acknowledged by the Regional President.
At Croydon Council, 114 AI and digital use cases with nothing shipping. First products live with service teams inside six weeks, and a £1.6m investment portfolio in front of the steering group within four months.
The numbers matter. What matters more is that they hold after I leave.
Beyond the boardroom
Since 2023 I have run youth programmes across Jordan, Türkiye, Ethiopia and Pakistan. Low-power laboratories, where I watch how decision-making and accountability form once hierarchy and titles are out of the room. The patterns travel straight back into how I design decision systems inside large organisations.
Through Better Government, a think tank I co-founded, I apply the same thinking to civic engagement and adaptive policy.
The question does not change with the setting. What does this system make risky, and what would make the right behaviour the rational choice?
I speak at international conferences, including Global Scrum Gathering Lisbon, Lean Agile London and Agile Estonia, and have been published in Cutter Consortium and Startups Magazine, and quoted in Management Today.
And the rest
I coach my son’s football team on weekends and drink far too much tea.
If any of this resonated, book twenty minutes over a virtual tea. Not a pitch, a conversation.
