About — Saif Rehman

My Story

One question, five different ways of asking it.

I have spent thirty years on a single problem, in four different settings, and it took me most of that time to notice it was the same problem: why organisations that know what to do so often fail to do it.

I started at Andersen Consulting — now Accenture — on federal systems integration in 1995. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, later IBM, I led the Year 2000 infrastructure assessment for the International Air Transport Association across more than fifteen countries: a hard deadline nobody could argue with, critical infrastructure in four regions, no possibility of a partial answer. At BearingPoint I ran global resource operations for the high-technology practice — ten thousand consultants and subcontractors, thirty million dollars a month in subcontractor spend. That job cured me of believing in individual brilliance. What holds at that scale is the system underneath.

I founded NextGen Consulting in 2006, after four years running an offshore delivery firm before most American consultancies accepted that global delivery would work at all. Twenty years on, the firm builds governed AI for government and enterprise — systems where a machine can draft anything and a named person owns every consequential decision.

— Saif Rehman

The rest of it

What the private sector could not teach me

Over the last six years the Governor of Maryland appointed me to three state commissions — consumer protection, economic development, and service and volunteerism — two of them confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. I have also served since 2020 on the board of a national disaster recovery organisation.

I took them for a selfish reason: it is very difficult to understand why public programmes stall unless you have sat inside one while it was stalling. What I learned there ran against the grain of everything I had built. A company optimises for execution. A public institution is optimising for something harder — being answerable to people who did not choose to be involved — and a good deal of the friction I would once have removed on sight turns out to be load-bearing.

That discomfort became a novel. The Continuity System asks what happens when a democracy is offered competence in exchange for uncertainty, and takes the trade. It is published by Rehman House Press, and it is the only one of these pursuits that lets me leave the question open instead of answering it.

I have run for local office in Howard County three times, and I am currently running as an independent candidate. What that has taught me is on the politics page: it is an argument about parties and process, not a platform.

Home

Four countries, and then one street

I have called four countries home — Pakistan, Kuwait and Canada, before the United States. Today home is Ellicott City, Maryland, where my wife and I are raising our three children, and where I have built a business, coached, volunteered and run for office in the same few square miles for twenty years.

The travelling is not separate from the rest. Sixty-seven countries so far, and every one of them is solving the same human problems — how to keep people safe, how to school the young, how to give ordinary families a fair shot — in a different language and with different tools. Singapore taught me that competent institutions are the foundation of trust, not a luxury. Norway taught me to plant trees whose shade I will never sit in. Poland taught me what rebuilding actually costs.

I hold a Ph.D. from Northcentral University. The rest is on the business, public service, politics, travel and books pages.