The CEO who took a demotion to join Unilever

A Karachi upbringing built on discipline

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Amir Paracha where he grew up and what early life looked like. Paracha’s answer is straightforward: born and raised in Karachi, schooled at a Parsi institution where the rules were strict enough that no child was permitted to have a parent or driver carry their school bag. He recalls the eighties as the era of Michael Jackson, Amitabh Bachchan, centre partings, and Parker-Sheaffer pens — all of which were banned at school. The point, he says, was to instil ethics and discipline before anything else.

Muzamil presses him on how schools have changed. Paracha’s answer is pointed: schools have become status symbols. The quality of a child’s education is now almost entirely a function of the family’s socioeconomic class, and the social mobility that once came from pure merit has been quietly closed off. “Pehle wala khatam ho gaya — merit ke upar hota tha” (“That earlier thing is gone — it used to be based on merit”), he says. Teachers’ dedication has also declined. The old system, imperfect as it was, gave a child from any background a genuine shot at moving up.

Three attempts to find the right door

Paracha’s route to IBA is one of the more unusual in the conversation. He started pre-engineering at DJ Science College in the early nineties — a period when Karachi was frequently shut down by unrest and students spent as much time running away from trouble as attending class. His real ambition was the Pakistan Air Force. He made it to the final medical stage, was incorrectly flagged for a goitre, filed an appeal, was cleared — but by then the selection round had already closed. The air force told him to wait for the next cycle. He had moved on.

He enrolled in NED University for mechanical engineering, but his heart was not in it. IBA was the real target. He failed the entry test twice. Rather than give up, he completed a private bachelor’s degree in two years — while still attending NED — specifically to meet IBA’s entry requirement. On the third attempt, he got in. He then dropped NED entirely after about eighteen months.

“Main smart nahi hoon. Main persistent hoon” (“I am not smart. I am persistent”), Paracha tells Muzamil. He is emphatic that he was never a topper, never the nerdy student, never someone with a high IQ. What he had was a refusal to stop trying once he had decided on a direction.

What a GPA cannot teach you

Muzamil raises the experience many young professionals describe when they enter large organisations: the gap between academic preparation and the reality of the workplace. Paracha’s answer is one of the sharpest passages in the conversation.

“GPA can only get you an admission in an organisation — that’s it. Uske baad ek nayi duniya shuru ho gayi hai.” (“After that, a new world has begun.”) The skills that actually determine survival — how you carry yourself, how you communicate, how you navigate organisational politics, how you handle failure, how you manage people — are not taught in business school. Behavioural science, he says, is either absent from the curriculum or so bookish that it bears no resemblance to real human interaction.

He adds a second ingredient alongside social skills: resilience. Bad patches will come regardless of how socially adept you are. The people who leave during those patches, he argues, are making a mistake. His rule of thumb is that you cannot choose your boss any more than you can choose your parents. If the organisation is right, ride it out. “Log join company ke karte hain, chhorte boss ke liye hain” (“People join companies but leave because of bosses”) — a pattern he says he has never been able to understand.

A deliberate step down in title

After four years at Shell — two in analytics, two in sales — Paracha applied to Lever Brothers (later Unilever Pakistan) in 2000. He and a group of colleagues submitted what he calls a wholesale application. The company offered him a position one level below where he was at Shell. He accepted.

The first six months were miserable. He felt unowned, invisible, and seriously considered leaving every single day. What changed was a brand assignment: Surf Excel. “All of a sudden itna bada brand, itna purana brand — aur ek jisko barah mahine hue hain company mein — usko de diya.” (“All of a sudden, such a big brand, such an old brand — and they gave it to someone who had been in the company twelve months.”) He felt valued for the first time. The challenge was real, and he stayed.

Muzamil notes that most corporate professionals would be devastated by a title reduction. Paracha’s reasoning was simple: Unilever was a marketing company with genuine marketing work to do. Shell, being a fully regulated industry where the government set prices, offered almost no room to practise the craft. The title was a price worth paying for the substance.

From marketing to sales: the education he did not expect

After roughly three years on Surf Excel and subsequent stints on hair care, deodorants, and Close-Up, Paracha was posted to Dubai in 2006 as Marketing Director for the North Africa Middle East cluster. His team spanned nine nationalities — Lebanese, Iranians, Australians, English, and multiple varieties of Arab, each with a distinct identity and a distinct claim to cultural primacy. He describes the challenge of producing a single advertisement that would work across the entire cluster: the model was Lebanese, the dialect was Saudi, the soundtrack was Egyptian.

He returned to Pakistan in 2009, joining the board as Vice President for Marketing, Home and Personal Care. A few years later, the company told him that general management would require sales experience. He had sold fuel at Shell for a year and a half. He had never sold soap, shampoo, or toothpaste.

He was given the Vice President for Sales role, leading a field force of roughly five to six thousand people. “Main bilkul andar se khokha tha” (“I felt completely hollow inside”), he says, because the sales teams knew he had no sales background and he could see no reason why they should follow him. What he found instead was humility. Sales people, he says, are simpler and better than marketers. They work in conditions and locations that most head-office employees never see, they are away from their families, and they carry no grievances. “I really learnt a lot of humility from there.” He stayed in sales for six years and travelled every part of the country.

Leading through COVID in the first thirty days

Paracha became CEO on 1 February 2020. On 2 March, Pakistan recorded its first COVID case. On 15 March, global direction came to shut down the following day. He had been in the role for less than six weeks.

Later in the discussion, he describes the particular difficulty of leading an institution — not a startup — through a moment with no manual. Factories could not be visited. People could not be met in person. MS Teams and Zoom were still unfamiliar tools. And yet Unilever Pakistan’s factories ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without a single day’s closure. Its 21,000-person end-to-end team was in the field every day. “Unhon ne apne aap ko peeche rakha, unhon ne apni family ko peeche rakha, unhon ne nation ko aage rakha.” (“They put themselves behind, they put their families behind, they put the nation first.”)

The company made a pledge of approximately 1.2 million dollars for rations, PPE, and ventilators. Lifebuoy ran what Paracha describes as the first brand-agnostic campaign in Unilever’s history — telling people to wash their hands with any soap, naming Dettol and Safeguard alongside its own product. Out of that period came a new internal theme: Unilever for Pakistan. “Is mulk se bahut kuch liya hai. Yeh dene ka waqt hai.” (“We have taken a great deal from this country. This is the time to give back.”)

Purpose as the reason a company survives 125 years

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Paracha have moved into the broader question of whether companies need a social purpose to survive. Paracha’s answer is historical. Sunlight, Unilever’s first brand, was launched in 1884 to reduce the physical labour of household work for women. Lifebuoy was launched in 1889 in response to plague in England. “These two brands were born out of a purpose — not born out of a lust for profit. Profit will follow.”

He connects this directly to the modern workforce. A millennial or Gen Z employee, he argues, has choices that his own generation never had — freelancing, startups, remote work. A good salary, a good office, and a good title are no longer sufficient. “You can’t. That’s not the only thing that entices them.” What they want is to feel that their work has an eventual benefit beyond the transaction. Brands that can articulate that — Dove’s campaign against beauty stereotypes, Lifebuoy’s domestic violence campaign with the Ministry of Human Rights — are the ones that attract and retain that generation.

On plastic and climate, Paracha is specific rather than aspirational. Unilever Pakistan has collected roughly 20 percent of its plastic output, recycled it, and used it to build outdoor furniture and play areas in parks across Karachi. The ambition is 100 percent collection by 2025 and a fully circular plastic economy in Rahim Yar Khan by 2028. Ninety-eight percent of the company’s energy already comes from renewable sources — solar and steam — with only two percent drawn from the national grid.

Pakistan in 2050: fixable, but only if character recovers

Muzamil closes by asking Paracha how he sees Pakistan in 2050. Paracha is an optimist and says so plainly. Law and order has improved dramatically. The electricity crisis is nearly resolved. Road networks are strong. CPEC, he believes, will begin bearing real fruit after 2025 when the projects complete. The startup investment rounds of the past few years are, in his view, just the beginning of foreign direct investment that will follow as mature markets elsewhere run out of growth.

But he is equally direct about what worries him. Pakistan’s savings rate is among the lowest in the world. The country is a consumption-driven economy that needs to become an export-driven one. The cost of doing business — energy, taxes, machinery efficiency — makes Pakistani manufacturing uncompetitive in international markets even when the product itself is world class.

And then there is the issue he returns to at the very end, the one he says is the hardest to fix. “I think so you lost character as a nation. Our value systems, our ethics, our integrity, that honesty — that continues to basically deteriorate year on year.” Infrastructure problems, he says, are a matter of time and investment. The moral and ethical deterioration is a different kind of problem — one that no policy instrument can easily address, and the one that, if left unresolved, makes everything else irrelevant.