This General Manager once had to sell his NOKIA phone to buy Milk

During his early days in Saudi Arabia, Abdurrahman Farooq had to sell his Nokia phone to buy milk. Thirteen years later, he is working as a Quality General Manager for one of the largest property developers in the Kingdom.

During the Building Leaders podcast, Abdurrahman shared his remarkable journey, his positive outlook on life, as well as his deep sense of purpose in what he does.

“Some people are so absolutely poor, all they have is money”

Abdurrahman experienced both sides of life. He used to struggle to provide for his family, now he is financially set. He went through junior and senior roles, from small unknown companies to huge corporations like BESIX and Al Futtaim. He speaks about his adventures in a centered manner and stresses that the one thing that ultimately matters for him is faith, and that is something he will never lose.

The company you work for can define you as much as you can define it

AbdurRahman doesn’t fall shy of a great number of academic degrees and certifications, in fact, he bases his plans for success on that. He fell in love with the Quality profession during his stint in Saudi Aramco’s state of the art project, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre (KAPSARC). Aramco’s stringent quality procedures inspired him to go deeper into quality management and Abdurrahman has since then been on a mission to transform the way quality is defined and accomplished.

How to get people to like you as a quality engineer

As Abdurrahman explains, if you wait to fix what’s wrong, if you act like you are the police and if you sit in your office expecting people to follow the quality procedures you’ve sent them, then it’s highly likely you’ll create some enemies.

As he often liked to say, quality is a culture that you need to practice, not a set of instructions to give out. Your job as a quality engineer is to engage all departments towards a common goal, provide all necessary guidelines, ensure the top management is committed, and ultimately promote the quality culture successfully.

Reading on the internet is information, reading from a book is knowledge

As the son of a teacher, Abdurrahman is “built to learn”, but he also has five daughters and a very demanding job. In the era of high-rate online media consumption, he emphasizes the importance of making time to establish a reading habit. When asked about how he achieves this, he says that “if you are interested in something, your 24 hours become 72”. It also helps if you get rid of your TV and make your kids read with you.

If you don’t share your knowledge, you will smell

Abdurrahman says that if you are just piling up knowledge without sharing it with others, “just like a pond whose water has stopped, you will start smelling”. He finds LinkedIn not just a highly useful medium to find a job (his last 3 jobs came through LinkedIn) but also a great platform to engage with wonderful professionals around the world and share your knowledge. For Abdurrahman, the more lives you enrich, the richer you will be.

Listen to Abdurrahman’s full story below: