Houman (Sasha) Sanandaji

FacultyFaculty

Biography:

Houman Sanandaji (Sasha) holds a Master of Business Administration from SPROTT School of Business at Carleton University, Ottawa, 2005.

He has been adjunct faculty at University Canada West since the beginning of 2019 and teaches marketing management, business environment, ethics and strategy as well as visual communications in mass media.

Sasha has worked with different industries in Asia, Eastern Europe and North America and has taught different managerial courses at college and university level in three different continents.
Working with different students from different backgrounds including international and exchange students from Eastern European and Central Asian post-soviet countries as well as Asia has helped Sasha to quickly learn about cultural differences, to become flexible, and to adopt new skills. His pedagogical focus has become informed by these experiences and has become much more student and learner centered.

Expertise and Experience

In 2008 Sasha studied TAA, Hunter TAFE, (TAA) Training and Assessment, UNSW, Australia.

Soon after he co-founded his managerial consultancy business and started providing managerial solutions to small and medium-sized businesses. Sasha’s expertise is in strategic management and marketing management.

Over the last 15 years, developing and implementing three-level strategic planning for businesses in different industries has become the hallmark of his career, making him a well-verse specialist in the field. Developing, implementing and running market planning campaigns, advertising, branding and sales management in the manufacturing and retail industry, finance and insurance sector, and the education system is where he shines the most.

Sasha moved to Central Asia to follow his career running startup businesses, providing consultancy services and connecting education to industry. Over the ensuing seven years he worked with students and industry players in Central Asia, learned new languages, and dealt with the retail, hospitality and recreation, food and beverage industries, consumer products, international exchange programs, event organization and product promotion. Sasha ran the office of international relations at his university, contacting experts from all around the world and creating opportunities for those who were motivated to try new things in life.

In 2017, Sasha decided to return to Canada to continue his career in British Columbia. Since then, he has been working with universities and colleges in BC including University Canada West, Capilano University, Langara College, Vancouver Premier College and Sprott Shaw College. Teaching Strategic Management, Marketing Management, Communication and Supply Chain Management, Sasha has always had the eye for something new. He challenged himself to learn more and went through not only academic courses but practical and vocational courses as well. Attending conferences and seminars he opened new doors toward sustainability and green businesses. Teaching courses such as sustainability and ethics are the result of his personal attraction towards learning and implementing academic knowledge into practice.

Sasha Speaks English, Russian and Persian. He goes for a run every day, is not afraid of getting his hands dirty with cars and has a passion for authentic timepieces. His favorite book is “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama, he is an enthusiastic fan of Christopher Nolan and studies topics related to ethics and green innovations.

Scholarly Activity

Sasha’s research interests are in:

  • Business ethics: Issues related to applying ethical principles into businesses, cross-cultural ethical dilemmas and how to deal with them, where to draw the line, grounds for discriminations and how to handle related issues.
  • Strategic planning: Vision and mission statement development, goal setting, action planning, developing strategies considering external and internal environmental factors affecting decision making systems, conflict management and crisis management techniques implementation.
  • Social studies: Conducting social studies leading to recognition of specific behaviors in organizations’ stakeholders.
  • Consumer behavior: Studying consumer behavior, factors affecting consumer decision making process, trends and megatrends with influential power, and how to implement consumer behavior knowledge into practice.

Contact him through LinkedIn.