Ten years ago, Devin Bad­hal left T&T to set­tle in Mi­a­mi, Flori­da in the Unit­ed States.

To­day, he has char­tered a sig­nif­i­cant course, as he has as­cend­ed to the po­si­tion of vice pres­i­dent of op­er­a­tions at glob­al sports­wear leader Nike.

The jour­ney to this point, he ex­plained, had come from a place of cul­ture shock as he moved from work­ing in var­i­ous arms of the gov­ern­ment, in­clud­ing the po­lice ser­vice and the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter.

“I grew up in Trinidad, in Princes Town, and I start­ed go­ing to UWI (the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies). Af­ter I did my bach­e­lor’s de­gree, I start­ed my mas­ter’s de­gree right af­ter. At the same time while I was do­ing my mas­ter’s de­gree I used to work for the T&T Po­lice as a crime an­a­lyst, look­ing at da­ta analy­sis.

“Da­ta was brand new back then. The po­lice ser­vice was now be­ing in­tro­duced to da­ta, so iden­ti­fy­ing crime pat­terns, trends, and things like that. Af­ter the T&T Po­lice I went to work for the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion, in­ves­ti­gat­ing se­nior gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials,” said Bad­hal about his ini­tial work af­ter leav­ing uni­ver­si­ty.

But af­ter get­ting mar­ried, he mi­grat­ed and en­coun­tered a ma­jor shift.

“I moved to Mi­a­mi. When I moved to Mi­a­mi, I got a job at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mi­a­mi health sys­tems which is fo­cus­ing on sys­tems as a project man­ag­er. I was analysing the per­for­mance of the com­pa­ny and, you know, just start­ing off in the US. It was like a first job all over again, work­ing with dif­fer­ent peo­ple, dif­fer­ent cul­ture, and this was one of the most chal­leng­ing times be­cause leav­ing the work en­vi­ron­ment in Trinidad and mov­ing to the US, it’s very dif­fer­ent,” he said.

“Every­thing is per­for­mance mea­sure­ment met­rics. How many re­ports per day, it’s a very, very dif­fer­ent work cul­ture in the US. So I spent some time there. And then I moved over to John­son Con­trols, which is a com­pa­ny deal­ing with fire sup­pres­sion se­cu­ri­ty de­vices, and I did analy­sis there as well,” he said.

Bad­hal, who is 35, said from there he no­ticed there was a greater em­pha­sis on ef­fi­cien­cy and the bot­tom line.

“My role would have been to im­prove process­es across a com­pa­ny. They would tell me okay for the year, find a way to save US$5 mil­lion. I would go to look for bro­ken process­es and how we could sell more. How we could save mon­ey? How to just find ways to im­prove how we do busi­ness to save $4 mil­lion or $5 mil­lion?”

Bad­hal op­er­at­ed as a Six Sig­ma Black Belt, who is es­sen­tial­ly a team leader re­spon­si­ble for mea­sur­ing, analysing, im­prov­ing, and con­trol­ling key process­es that in­flu­ence cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and/or pro­duc­tiv­i­ty growth.

Af­ter mak­ing his pres­ence felt, Bad­hal moved on to a glob­al­ly recog­nised name, Mi­crosoft.

“Mi­crosoft was one of my great­est ca­reer shifts. They had me fo­cus­ing on lead­ing a team across three re­gions of the world: US, Ire­land, and Sin­ga­pore. So, I’ve man­aged a team of project man­agers who would de­ploy projects across the globe.

“Ba­si­cal­ly any­where Mi­crosoft im­ple­ments a new project. It would be my team, cer­tain­ly Win­dows, Xbox, Out­look, OneDrive, and any Mi­crosoft projects. So, I spent some time do­ing that,” said Bad­hal.

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, how­ev­er, changed his tra­jec­to­ry again, and af­ter some down­time, he opt­ed to ap­ply for a job at Nike.

“So I moved from Mi­a­mi all the way across the US to the Nike world head­quar­ters which is in Ore­gon, which is the com­plete op­po­site side of the coun­try, so an­oth­er huge shift for me. Mi­a­mi is so nice. The night-life, ver­sus com­ing in­to a for­est area here in Ore­gon,” he told the Busi­ness Guardian.

Once again Bad­hal was tasked with do­ing se­ri­ous analy­sis for the com­pa­ny, as it sought to find new ways to ap­peal to cus­tomers.

“I start­ed as a di­rec­tor and tem­porar­i­ly as­signed, based on our needs to the vice pres­i­dent. So here I lead a team of 121 peo­ple. And this team com­pris­es an­a­lysts, da­ta sci­en­tists, man­agers, and di­rec­tors, all fo­cus­ing on da­ta, and analysing how well peo­ple use the app. If a prod­uct is out of stock what’s the next prod­uct that cus­tomers go to and rec­om­mend that prod­ucts. So build­ing da­ta mod­els,” said Bad­hal, who al­so took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to start and fin­ish his PhD dur­ing that time, fur­ther in­creas­ing his stock.

His work saw him be­ing of­fered the job as vice pres­i­dent of op­er­a­tions late last year.

“I was al­most sec­ond in line, but they still of­fered it to me be­cause I took the ini­tia­tive. They need­ed some­one and I was there to step up and take it,” he said.

Bad­hal said while he ex­pe­ri­enced a ma­jor shift in work eth­ic when first ar­riv­ing in the US, there were sev­er­al times his Caribbean up­bring­ing helped him to pitch new ideas in the cor­po­rate world as the wide ex­po­sure to var­i­ous groups al­lowed him to craft mes­sages dif­fer­ent­ly.

“In the Caribbean, when you go to present, there are al­ways sev­er­al dif­fer­ent view­points,” he said.

“There are so many peo­ple to con­vince based on my work ex­pe­ri­ence in Trinidad, I’ve used that. And in my job to­day, when I present or when I give a talk or have any pub­lic dis­cus­sion, I try to re­mem­ber that when you’re speak­ing, you need to speak for every­one and their per­spec­tive.

“You need to look at how the mes­sages are in­ter­pret­ed ver­sus what you want to say. I could just go and say what I want to say but might not be in­ter­pret­ed well, so I need to keep that in mind,” said Bad­hal, who said this ap­proach has al­lowed him to win over nu­mer­ous teams through­out his ca­reer.

He added that he has al­so used his up­bring­ing as a mo­ti­va­tion to keep push­ing for im­prove­ment.

“My dri­ve is to make the best op­por­tu­ni­ty that we have, to make the best of the sit­u­a­tion that we have. Any­thing that I ap­proach, any job, any cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, I try to say how can I make the best use of it. Be­cause the way that I grew up, it was a very hum­ble home. It wasn’t very rich or any­thing but just try­ing to say how could I get there? How can I get to the next point? To me, the jour­ney wasn’t achiev­ing that next goal, but get­ting there, try­ing, and the ef­fort be­hind it.

“That’s what mo­ti­vat­ed me to say: how can I be the best at this?” said Bad­hal.