Sketches Of My Life

By Author: Malintha Rodrigo
Total Articles: 3
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Mohamed Vazir Muhsin is a Sri Lankan Strategic Management Consultant and the pioneer of MVM & Associates, a Management Consultancy firm in Washington DC. He is also the Vice Chairman of World Links, a global organization, which promotes computer literacy in schools in the developing countries. He also holds a degree in Chartered Accountancy from Colombo.


Professional Career
Mohamed Muhsin joined the Hayley’s Group of Companies, Sri Lanka in 1971. Here he worked under the guidance of the late Chairman of the Hayley’s Group of Companies, Lal Jayasundera. Lal, who was widely acknowledged as one of the finest business managers in Sri Lankan history, taught Mohamed Muhsin the dynamics of the Art of Management. Mohamed Muhsin learnt that stable Management would attract capital and capital attracted labor and the combination enriched the economy and society.


In 1977, M.V.Muhsin moved to Zambia and worked for the Zambia Industrial and Mining Corporation, called ZIMCO. Having worked at ZIMCO for some time, he got selected to work in a Presidential Commission to reform the public ...
... enterprises. He served as adviser to the president of Zambia, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, on State Enterprise Reform. In this capacity, he led major programs involving the restructuring of public enterprises and the creation of joint ventures.


His career at the World Bank began in 1988, where he joined as Senior Country Officer in the Eastern Africa Department. In 1997, Mohamed Muhsin became the Vice President of the World Bank and its CIO. M.V.Muhsin worked closely with former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn and was held in high regard, for the work he accomplished at the World Bank. At the bank Mohamed Muhsin’s challenges included putting collaborative tools in the hands of everybody who then worked at the bank. Access to up-to-date data and information was critical for providing real-time advice and decision support, both internally to the staff and to their clients in the field. So Mohamed Muhsin and his team had to bring together a suite of enterprise resource planning tools, consolidating 65 fragmented systems and 125 disparate databases. M.V.Muhsin worked selflessly to complete this mammoth task in record time. The result was that World Bank now provides their global staff with online, real-time information on transactions so that questions can be answered far more expeditiously for their clients. A second major challenge that M.V.Muhsin took up during his tenure was to set up on average about 40 videoconferencing and distance-learning sessions per day, reaching 80 to 100 locations at a given time, and this whole suite of knowledge sharing has become a front-line business for the bank. The sessions deal with a wide range of issues such as decentralization, anticorruption programs, financial-sector programs, municipal reform and agricultural research. After 17 years of dedicated service at the World Bank, he retired in November 2005.


From 2005 to March 1, 2009, M.V.Muhsin served as Director of John Keells Holdings, considered Sri Lanka’s largest “Blue Chip” company. In 2006, he also joined Dialog Axiata Plc (formerly Dialog Telekom Ltd.), the largest mobile operator in Sri Lanka as Independent Non-Executive Director.


Awards and Recognition
M.V.Muhsin attended the elite Trinity College, Kandy in Sri Lanka and was awarded the Rydes Gold Medal in 1962. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka.
M.V.Muhsin became the Vice President of the World Bank and was named its very first CIO.