Farah Tamer, Senior Director of Strategy, Esports World Cup Foundation: Every week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. We spoke to Senior Director of Strategy and PMO at the Esports World Cup Foundation, Farah Tamer (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I am Farah Tamer, a Lebanese industrial and systems engineer by training who grew up between Los Angeles and the UAE. I spent my first eight years working in metals and mining for a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. I wanted a change, so I completed my MBA at INSEAD in 2017 and went right into consulting at BCG for almost five years. There, I discovered my passion for gaming and esports. I became a key part of the team there for gaming and esports platforms, working on very interesting projects with local stakeholders in Saudi, before I left BCG in 2022.

I moved into SRMG for about two years. I got exposed to a lot of different things within the media sector from the industry’s perspective, whereas I come from professional services. I made the jump and joined the Esports World Cup Foundation in November of last year as Senior Director of Strategy and PMO.

I joke and tell everyone now that my mom was wrong. She used to complain about all those hours I spent sitting in front of video games. It wasn’t all for nothing: I understand the industry as a consumer in a very deep way. It was easy to make that transition to apply my business acumen to something which I considered a passion since forever.

My job as director of strategy and PMO at the EWCF is really about being the glue in the foundation between the different streams. We are an entertainment entity at our core. We do the tournaments, the events, and the many moving parts around that, from distribution to game licensing to marketing. My main objective is to break down the silos and create bridges between them.

The foundation is quite young as an organization. We’re building out the new processes, building out the governance structure, reporting lines, and so forth. My consulting hat comes back then and I take a little bit more of a coordinating role on how we structure things and how we operate on a day-to-day basis.

Esports feels like it’s going through an inflection point. It has been nurtured and incubated by the core community for decades, and now it’s at a point where it’s going to go mainstream. What I’m really excited about is that, in the near future, people will be speaking about esports in the same breath as they do mixed martial arts or even basketball. It has always been a tightly-knit community, but now it’s a community that has relevance to the wider world.

My strategy for keeping up with the market had to change. I used to just play all the video games out there, but now I simply don’t have the time. Instead, I rely on the nature of the tightly-knit esports community. Because everyone knows one another, information flows easily through excellent resources like newsletters and industry platforms. I also learn a great deal through the relationships I’ve built over the years.

My mornings are consistently for a workout. It gives me a good base for each day before I start going. My day changes dramatically depending on the time of year. Normally I get up, read emails, finish calls, then switch into content mode to review everything that comes across my desk. It’s coordination meetings, long-term planning, and operational deep dives. As we get closer to July and August — when the Esports World Cup takes place — my typical day is probably three times more intense. It’s an unusual experience coming from my background to be in this business now because it’s truly cyclical.

There is this really toxic saying in consulting: work comes first, life comes second, and balance comes third. The risk there is that if you have a very ambitious, motivated personality, you can become a workaholic. Now, almost two decades into my career, I listen to people close to me when they say, “Maybe this weekend we take off and we go somewhere else and you’re away from that laptop.” They’ve all been very patient with me, and they tend to be my safety net when it comes to work-life balance.

To wind down at the end of the day, I turn to gaming and play a quick round of whatever is the game of the day. It’s about going back and reconnecting with why I’m so obsessed with this whole sector, to remind myself of why it matters. I’m playing the Hades 2 early release and just wrapped up the latest Prince of Persia from Ubisoft. I regularly play every Assassin’s Creed title whenever it comes out, and have been on the Call of Duty train since the early 2000s. Street Fighter is my origin story, as a child in the 80s and early 90s, and I still enjoy it.

I also try to inform myself about the future, so I read quite a bit on AI ethics. I finished a great book called Robot Ethics 2.0. As for cinema, I think we’re past the golden age, but I like what A24 is producing, and I rewatch a lot of old stuff from the late 90s and early 2000s. My music mood board is also a little bit all over the place: hip-hop, rap, heavy metal, electronic. I’ll be 40 this year, and I still have my music collection from when I was 14 — including CDs, MP3s, cassette tapes.

The best piece of advice I received is to not take anything personally. I grew up near Hollywood, so the idea of storytelling and captivating narratives has directly influenced how I conduct myself on a day-to-day basis. I can become emotionally attached to things sometimes. But when things doesn’t go your way, it’s usually not a big deal outside of the context. That has helped me maintain a good amount of balance in the thick of it by detangling emotions facts.

ALSO- You can never be 100% sure. Mark Twain has a great quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” I’ve learned this lesson over and over through my professional career. You can seek precision and certainty if you work as an engineer, but in the business world, you will have to accept that 95% is as good as you’re going to get.

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