What a Croatian chief people officer learned about Pakistani talent

A Croatian people officer in a fifty-five-year-old Pakistani company

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as one he had been waiting to have. He had moved to Dubai, noticed National Foods on the shelves of every store he walked into, and become genuinely curious about what a Pakistani consumer-goods company looks like once it stops being a Pakistani diaspora story and starts being an export business. The person running the people side of that transition is not Pakistani. She is Ivana Bajamic, originally from Croatia, currently the chief people officer at National Foods, and based in Dubai. She has been in the role two and a half years.

Ivana does not lead with her title. “I don’t lead through the title,” she tells Muzamil early on. “I believe I lead much better without one.” Her remit is two functions — people, which is what National Foods calls HR, and corporate reputation. The first is about belonging, retention, and the moments that matter inside the organisation. The second is about communicating with the right intent, internally and externally. She frames both as the human and reputational core of the company.

The personal anecdote that lands the role for her six-year-old daughter lands it for the audience too. The daughter had been invited to bring her parents in to talk about their jobs at school, found her mother’s description incomprehensible compared with the other parents’ beauty salons and personal training studios, and announced at the dinner table that her mother had “such a weird job.” Muzamil lets the line sit. It is a clean way into a function that most Pakistani SMEs still do not have a proper name for.

Fifty-five years, forty countries, and a strategy that is not about diaspora

National Foods was set up in 1970 by two unrelated families — Majid and Hasan — and is now led by the second generation of both. It is publicly listed. Ivana does not labour the financials, but she does share that the business grew about seventeen percent in net sales in the first nine months of the year, across both the local and international books, and exports to more than forty countries. The familiar geographies are there — GCC, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom — because that is where the diaspora is. But the strategically interesting part of her job, the part that explains why someone like her is in the role at all, is the rest of it.

“In our international arena, we are not talking only about diaspora,” she says. “The demand and the love in the markets for the ethnic food is incredible.” That is the wedge. National Foods is no longer just supplying Pakistanis abroad. It is selling to “open-minded foodies” and well-travelled consumers through mainstream channels — Morrisons in the United Kingdom, Costco in Canada, a Taste of Dubai pilot in Media City. To do that, the company runs a separate product range for international markets. Muzamil points at the sample masala packs she has brought to the studio. There are dedicated steak, burger and chilli masalas, plum chilli sauce, sweet chilli chutney, a crushed pickle that Muzamil says is a house favourite. None of these are the same SKUs as the Pakistani range. The chilli garlic, he notes, is the thing he takes with him whenever he travels — because the flavour is genuinely difficult to find outside Pakistan.

The point Muzamil draws out of this is a generalisable one for Pakistani exporters. Most Pakistani companies that go abroad sell to other Pakistanis. The Iranian and Indian restaurants in his American suburbs adapted; Pakistani ones tended not to. National Foods is one of the few trying to take Pakistan to the world rather than to a corner of the world that already knows Pakistan. That is what made him want to record this conversation in the first place.

Why she joined — and how she joined

Ivana spent close to twenty years in HR before this role, but she did not start there. She began in marketing at a Croatian fashion brand, asked her boss in the second year to spend two or three months on the shop floor during peak season, and discovered through the conversations with sales reps and customers that what she actually wanted to do was bridge the gap between the admin function and the business. From there the career went international — Boston, Barcelona, a German organisation in Adidas Group, a Brazilian poultry producer.

When the National Foods opportunity came, she was at a stage where the name of the organisation mattered less than the vision and the invitation. “I was making this decision,” she says, “the name of the organisation didn’t matter as much as when I was a young intern. It wasn’t about numbers of employees, it wasn’t about the revenue, it was about the vision and the passion of driving the business.” What sold her was meeting Abrar Hassan, the CEO, who she says had been pushing HR onto the decision-making table at National Foods since the 1970s. She was joining an organisation that, in her words, had already invited the function in. Keeping the seat at the table was on her.

There is a small revealing detail that Muzamil does not let slip past. National Foods had been working with an HR consultancy on the global expansion structure. The consultancy’s first recommendation to the board was not to design the structure. It was to hire the global head of HR first and let her help shape it. That is how Ivana got the call. The order matters. Most Pakistani companies try to globalise sales first and discover the people problem at the end. National Foods reversed the sequence.

Trust in HR was the first transformation — and the hardest

Asked what she walked into, Ivana is direct. The biggest initial gap was trust in the HR function itself. “Historically HR was having a head of a police,” she says, “which for me doesn’t make any sense, right? I mean, ultimately, the core of this function is to be a co-driver of the strategy.” She rejects the framing that HR is a support function. “HR is not a thing we do,” she tells Muzamil. “It’s a thing that runs our business.”

She does not approach culture work as transformation, she says. She approaches it as evolution. The DNA of the company is fifty-five years old, the founders’ philosophy is something she describes as beautiful and inspiring, and her job is not to overwrite it. Her job is to challenge specific boundaries in a respectful and constructive way and to be given the room to do that. The freedom to do that, she says, is something she will never take lightly. “It’s something you don’t even get the opportunity very often in multinational organisations.”

She is also explicit about the method. She does not believe in copy-paste from global best practice. The two things that bridge global frameworks and local traditions, she says, are deep listening and adaptive integration. She arrived without claiming to understand Pakistani culture. She paused. She listened. She brought her team into the conversation rather than handing them a finished policy from a closed office. The proof point she offers is the evolution of trust in HR over two years, and the way the leadership team — what they call the Mancom — now owns the people agenda alongside her.

What Pakistani talent has, and what it is missing

This is the section of the conversation Muzamil pushes hardest on, and Ivana’s answer is the most quotable thing in the episode.

What Pakistani talent has, she says, is the thing she cannot teach. “I cannot teach a hungerness, right, for the results. I cannot teach a value alignment. I cannot teach genuine care. That’s what I want to see.” The energy and the integrity people bring on board is what she appreciates most. Skills can be taught. Mindset cannot.

What it is missing is more interesting. “One thing that for me is missing more and more is that ability to pause from time to time,” she says. “Sometimes we are like hamsters, right? In that little wheel, and we are doing things that historically we are used to do.” The downstream consequence of that, she argues, is that people struggle to connect the dots — to see how what they personally do reflects on the outcome the business needs. They talk fluently about innovation and digital transformation but get uncomfortable when asked to tell the tangible story in their own function. She does not read this as resistance. She reads it as something that has not been taught.

She also names the structural backdrop. The economic situation in Pakistan is hard, the tax burden is real, hyperinflation has worn people down, and the biggest single risk to her people function is retention. “There is not one single visit that I have without someone approaching me saying, Hey, Ivana, my immigration papers came through.” Canada, the United States, Australia — whatever comes through first. She calls it a bittersweet feeling. She is happy for the individual; she does not want to lose the talent her team invested in. The response, she says, cannot be to take the back seat. It has to be career mapping, succession planning, and what she calls small wins — one of National Foods’ best sales talents now running a market in Canada for the company, the best finance person promoted to finance controller for the international division in Dubai.

Muzamil pushes on the cliché Pakistani-talent critiques — discipline, time, work ethic. Ivana does not take the bait. She reframes the question as generational rather than national. National Foods has roughly twenty-two percent Generation Z on staff and around fifteen percent Generation X, and she says the conflict between what each cohort wants is louder than any of the national-stereotype critiques. Generation Z wants purpose, inclusivity, visibility, exposure to leadership. The right answer, she says, is not to dismiss that as unreasonable. The world that produced the company-loyalty-for-fifteen-years model is gone, and she does not particularly want it back.

The day the CEO killed working from home

The single best story in the conversation is from her first day. It was 2 January 2023. She was sitting in the Dubai office and a company-wide announcement landed on her screen: no more working from home. “My heart skipped a beat for a second,” she says. She had had explicit conversations during the recruitment process about her stance. She nearly went in with a prepared speech. Instead she paused, took her boss to lunch, listened to him for an hour, and only then explained her side.

His concern was control — people abusing the system, no way to police it. Her counter was that COVID did not just change where work happens; it changed how work happens, and the leadership response has to change with it. The exchange ended with him telling her to bring back a hybrid proposal. That proposal is the policy National Foods runs today.

The principle she draws out of the anecdote is the one that scales. “When you don’t start with this narrative of I need to control you, I need to owe you, but it’s much more of the empathetic way of leading the organisation, I think people react better.” A few people will abuse the system. There need to be consequences for those people. But penalising the whole organisation to manage a minority is a leadership failure, not a workforce failure.

Performance culture, calibration, and calling a spade a spade

Muzamil pushes Ivana on the harder operational question — how, in a legacy Pakistani company with eight hundred and fifty full-time employees and thousands more seasonal operators across factories in Karachi, Faisalabad, Port Qasim and Nooriabad, does she actually measure whether anyone is performing.

The answer is process, but the process is in service of a cultural shift. Every back-office employee has KPIs set at the start of the year. Mid-year there is a talent review where line managers evaluate against skill set, potential and next career step. The leadership team then runs a calibration cycle — Ivana sat through every conversation in her first one. What she found was that people were genuinely uncomfortable calling a spade a spade. They took underperformance personally. They struggled to point at someone who was not delivering and say so. Four weeks of conversations went into raising the bar — agreeing as a leadership team that what used to be “meets expectations” five years ago was not enough today.

She is careful, though, to keep the framing human. “Talent is not process-driven,” she says. “It has to be human-driven.” If the international division promised ten percent market share growth in sauces and supply chain disrupted the plan, she is not going to hold an individual seller responsible for the macro. Flexibility is invited into the process. The process is just the scaffolding.

The mechanism she is proudest of is a monthly people meeting where the leadership team talks only about people topics. One of her team members told her early on that she was being over-transparent — sharing too much of the bad news. She disagreed. “I do show, you know, bad facts. I do expose problems because I need us to attack those problems together.” She is not interested in being the leader who solves people problems in isolation. She is interested in the leadership team owning the culture together.

Diversity is a behavioural practice, not a slogan

Muzamil raises the obvious question — gender and the Pakistani workforce — and Ivana opens with a warning. “Diversity became a buzzword. I wouldn’t be surprised if people start rolling their eyes and stop listening to your podcast.” Her answer is to talk about what National Foods actually does, not the framing.

The example she chooses is the company’s first female apprentices programme in STEM. Twenty-plus young female scientists were brought into the Faisalabad factories this year. Before they arrived, every line manager went through gender-sensitisation training. The code of conduct and anti-discrimination policy are non-negotiable. There is an Integrity at Work hotline for anyone to use. The CEO flew to Faisalabad to welcome the cohort in person. She had expected the new joiners to be quiet and a little intimidated. They were the opposite. “They were outspoken. They were hungry. They wanted to be seen. They wanted to stand up.”

There are two adjacent points she makes that are easy to miss. The first is that National Foods runs family-friendly policies, not female-friendly policies — because the load on dual-career families is a partnership question, not a women’s question. The second is that she is allergic to the perception of positive discrimination. “It’s a very sensitive point,” she says. “We need at all costs to avoid the perception of positive discrimination. For National Foods particularly, it’s about the right candidate. If we have the right candidate or two right candidates, only then the gender is going to play its role.”

The advice she ends this section with is the one she would give to any young Pakistani woman in the workforce. “Don’t try to blend in. Stand up.” And then, more pointedly: “I want your work to speak louder than your passport.”

AI, S/4HANA, and a deliberately patient digital roadmap

Asked about AI and digital transformation, Ivana does not oversell what National Foods is doing. The company is at the start of that journey, she says. The foundation work — implementing SAP S/4HANA — is ongoing. A new IT leader joins in June with digital transformation as one of the main mandates. The board supports it. They are nowhere close to ready.

What they have started is small and within her own function. She wanted the people team to be the first to adopt — partly competitive, partly because it is safer to learn by doing inside HR than to push it onto operations first. They are piloting talent acquisition solutions, outsourcing repetitive administrative work, and looking at a chatbot for factory floor populations.

Where she lands philosophically is closer to the Muzamil framing than to the standard corporate one. She does not think AI replaces people. She thinks it should free the organisation up to use that human capacity for things that matter more — culture, leadership, judgement. “That cannot be outsourced to AI,” she says. “Whatever, presentation making, data analytics — that’s incredible. How about we modernise our entire operations and manufacturing facilities with new tools, new systems, and we use a skillset of those people into something else a bit more meaningful?” The work National Foods is starting now is on educating the organisation about ethical AI use — including young people in schools and universities — rather than fighting the change.

What Ivana would tell Pakistani companies trying to globalise

Muzamil asks the question that frames the whole conversation. If a Pakistani company — MNC or SME — is hungry to globalise itself, especially in services and exports, where should it start? Ivana laughs at the inevitability of her answer. “I would be putting myself in the foot if I don’t say a people function.”

But she does not stop there. The starting point, she says, is an honest conversation at the board level about how willing the ownership actually is to invite a different opinion into the room. She had that conversation in her second and third rounds with the chairman and CEO. She told them she would speak up. She told them she would voice opinions, talk about problems, push on things they might find uncomfortable. She told them it was fine if they did not feel ready for that, but they needed to sleep on it before saying yes. The chairman jokes with her now that sometimes he has to leave the office and sleep on what she has just told him before he can respond. She loves it.

The way forward, she says, is a blend. Diversity in ethnicity makes the organisation more resilient, more innovative, more human. She is also explicit that her preference is to grow local talent first and only tap the global market when there is a genuine skill-set gap that does not exist in Pakistan. National Foods’ new head of international sales is a foreigner who moved from the UK with mainstream-channel experience the team did not have. That is the right reason to hire a foreigner. Wherever the skill exists in Pakistan, the role goes to a Pakistani.

Pakistan in twenty-five years — and the one variable that decides it

By the end of the conversation Muzamil asks Ivana the question he asks most guests. Where does she see Pakistan in 2050. She calls it a billion-dollar question and is honest that she is still in the early stages of forming a view. But she gives a clean answer anyway.

“I really think it’s going to come down to the level of openness,” she says, “of inviting people who know, right? People who understand.” She uses her CEO as a small example — someone who knows agriculture deeply, who could contribute to broader country-level conversations on the sector if invited in. The intellectual capacity exists. National Foods recently sponsored the first Pakistani conference at Harvard, and Ivana says the conversation, the quality of debate and the level of care from young Pakistanis who want to come back and contribute was the most hopeful signal she has had in years. The question is whether the country gives them the space to do it, and whether they are invited back earlier in their careers rather than after retirement.

The book recommendation she leaves Muzamil with is consistent with the leadership stance she has held all conversation. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek and Dare to Lead by Brené Brown. Authenticity, courage, intent over appearance, vulnerability, empathy. None of it is novel. All of it is rarely practised at the top of Pakistani companies. The episode closes with Muzamil thanking her — and saying he hopes National Foods outshines its global ambitions, because what helps National Foods helps Pakistan.