Being a CEO is like being the goat at a family wedding: pampered, praised, and then served at dinner. One wrong question or bruised ego, and the corner office starts to feel like a trapdoor. The same board that once called you “family” suddenly avoids eye contact. It’s a shiny job title wrapped in politics, where survival depends more on diplomacy than performance.
“My grandfather was a Chowdhury, how can I be a carpenter?”—a classic Bangladeshi mindset, where jobs involving tools, wheels, or grease are treated like social demotion.
Two shoe salesmen were sent to a remote village to assess the market. The first returned, visibly deflated. “Hopeless! No one wears shoes there,” he said. The second came back beaming, saying, “Amazing! No one wears shoes there!” Same village, same people, same situation, different perspectives. One saw zero demand, the other saw untapped potential.
In Bangladesh, numerous negative stories exist aimed at discrediting AI and discouraging its adoption. One school introduced AI to grade Bangla essays.
A classic and familiar office tale: Meet VP (Vice President) Mojnu. Mojnu bhai, known for his “strict leadership,” has one peculiar habit: never making eye contact.
Let’s begin this serious discussion with two extremely serious incidents, both tragic in their own way. A Sardarjee, celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary, took his highly educated and poetic wife to a posh candlelight dinner.
Eid-ul-Azha was meant to be a lesson in sacrifice, empathy, generosity, and humility. But in our version, it often turns into a festival of flexing, where the size of your cow somehow reflects your spirituality, and the price tag gets more attention than the prayer.
One reason we remain stuck in the slow lane of progress is painfully simple: in Bangladesh, the individual trumps the institution, and the institution trumps the nation.
Being a CEO is like being the goat at a family wedding: pampered, praised, and then served at dinner. One wrong question or bruised ego, and the corner office starts to feel like a trapdoor. The same board that once called you “family” suddenly avoids eye contact. It’s a shiny job title wrapped in politics, where survival depends more on diplomacy than performance.
“My grandfather was a Chowdhury, how can I be a carpenter?”—a classic Bangladeshi mindset, where jobs involving tools, wheels, or grease are treated like social demotion.
Two shoe salesmen were sent to a remote village to assess the market. The first returned, visibly deflated. “Hopeless! No one wears shoes there,” he said. The second came back beaming, saying, “Amazing! No one wears shoes there!” Same village, same people, same situation, different perspectives. One saw zero demand, the other saw untapped potential.
In Bangladesh, numerous negative stories exist aimed at discrediting AI and discouraging its adoption. One school introduced AI to grade Bangla essays.
A classic and familiar office tale: Meet VP (Vice President) Mojnu. Mojnu bhai, known for his “strict leadership,” has one peculiar habit: never making eye contact.
Let’s begin this serious discussion with two extremely serious incidents, both tragic in their own way. A Sardarjee, celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary, took his highly educated and poetic wife to a posh candlelight dinner.
Eid-ul-Azha was meant to be a lesson in sacrifice, empathy, generosity, and humility. But in our version, it often turns into a festival of flexing, where the size of your cow somehow reflects your spirituality, and the price tag gets more attention than the prayer.
One reason we remain stuck in the slow lane of progress is painfully simple: in Bangladesh, the individual trumps the institution, and the institution trumps the nation.
Meet Imran Bhai. His last vacation was during the 2018 hartal. He thinks “OOO” means “Only On Outlook,” not “Out of Office.” His hobbies include forwarding work emails to himself at 2:00 AM and replying to “Happy Birthday” messages with a Gantt chart. Imran Bhai isn’t alone; he is the unofficial president of Bangladesh’s ever-growing workaholic club.
There is a special breed of professionals in every Bangladeshi office, those who seem to know everything from quantum physics to kebab recipes. They speak with such confidence that even Google starts to doubt itself. But here is the twist: a new study by Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig, and David Dunning reveals that the more of an expert you are, the more likely you are to claim knowledge of things that don’t actually exist. Welcome to the glamorous world of overclaiming with “I know it all syndrome” or as we like to call it in Dhaka boardrooms, “Bhai, I already have the idea!”
