Nayana Mawilmada (MBA 2005) is seeing things. Standing at the edge of Beira Lake, an algae-choked body of water in the heart of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, he envisions people and restaurants—like New York’s South Street Seaport, he says, or Singapore’s Clarke Quay. “This waterfront is state-owned land that will be released for development, and the light rail will come in on the other side of those trees.” He turns and points in the heat of an April afternoon, taking in the city as it is now, orienting his vision from every direction. There’s the World Trade Center, where we’ve walked from Mawilmada’s office in Colombo Fort, the city’s central business district. A somewhat hazardous stroll along broken sidewalks, ducking in and out of traffic, took us past the presidential palace, majestic colonial-era buildings, and, further on, Pettah Market, a crammed warren of alleyways selling everything from mangoes to light bulbs to plastic flowers. Just across the road is Fort Railway Station, a major transportation hub used by over 200,000 people every day.

For now, this spot at the water’s edge is no more than an ad hoc parking lot, spotted with broken glass and weeds. “I come here and just kind of look at all this,” says Mawilmada. “I like to imagine what it might be when I’m an old man.” His tone is a bit dreamy, but there’s an underlying current of urgency as well. As head of investments for Sri Lanka’s Western Region Megapolis Planning Project, Mawilmada has a key role in planning and implementation for a 15-year, $40 billion initiative with the goal of creating sustainable development and economic revitalization for Colombo and its surrounding provinces, population 5.8 million. It’s why he has returned to a country he left over two decades ago in the midst of a crippling civil conflict: Sri Lanka is at a pivotal moment in its history, he says, a moment that represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do no less than help shape his country’s future.

He turns back to the lake, framing the view in his mind’s eye. Looming in the background, cranes for luxury hotels and apartment buildings split the city’s skyline. “You will see visible, visible change,” he says. “Fifteen years from now, this is where you take that one shot of Colombo.”

As a teenager growing up in Kandy, Sri Lanka’s second-largest city, Mawilmada was sometimes teased for being a dreamer. He remade his mother’s broken washing machine into a chair. He loved to work with wood, shaping a table out of raw planks. Transforming the things around him was an outlet, a way to make his vision a reality. Studying architecture was a natural next step to shape the world around him, even if it wasn’t a well-worn career path for his cohort at Trinity College, one of Sri Lanka’s most prestigious private high schools. It wasn’t a traditional high school experience, however; between the ages of 16 and 18, Mawilmada guesses he attended school for all of six months, studying at home for weeks at a time to avoid the unfolding civil conflict.

Clashes between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority ran from 1983 to 2009, closing down areas of the country for extended periods of time and costing an estimated 100,000 lives. By the time he finished high school in 1990, Mawilmada was ready to leave the fighting, and Sri Lanka, behind.

And he did, enrolling at Hampton University, a historically black school in Virginia that he picked for the rigor and selectiveness of its architecture program. “I’d be asked why I was there,” he says. “My counter to that was always, why shouldn’t I be? Yes, I was a bit of a curiosity, but I’ve always gone a bit off the beaten track, and having that be my first experience of the United States gave a very different perspective. You hear about and understand race issues very quickly.”

After putting his degree to work at Walt Disney Imagineering and Boston’s Sasaki Associates, however, Mawilmada was restless. It’s probably his grandfather’s fault.

A member of the municipal council in Kandy, Loku Banda Mawilmada was responsible for a number of local improvements, including a school, a local library, and new roads. He was also, later in his life, Mawilmada’s roommate. “As a kid, I’d get a steady dose of, ‘You need to start thinking beyond yourself. There’s so much you can do in terms of impacting society.’ As a result, I actually did grow up thinking that, and felt it was my responsibility to do something about it.

“After a while,” he continues, “I was frustrated by the scope of architecture’s influence; it was only about me, my client, and what they wanted to create.” In 1998 he shifted to a broader canvas and enrolled in MIT’s Master in City Planning program.

In the summer between his first and second years, as part of a joint initiative between MIT and the World Bank, he was sent to the Philippines to work with an informal settlement whose 12,000 residents were to be displaced for a resort.

“It was a huge aha moment for me,” Mawilmada recalls. “This time, I found myself on the other side of the table, representing the folks who lived there. I spent a couple of months immersed in that community, with our mandate being to figure out how to move them.

“We started investigating what their right was to be there in the first place,” he says. “Most had been paying taxes and utility bills for 30, 40, 50 years. Then we discovered that the mayor’s beach house was there on exactly the same basis.” At that point it was time to return to MIT, but Mawilmada believes the government eventually granted an upgrade to the settlement.

That experience was a turning point. Though a not completely logical progression, it’s the seemingly contrary forces of dreamer and doer in Mawilmada that would propel him through the various stages of his career. At that point, he was still the dreamer who had worked on designing a fantastical, entirely artificial baobab tree in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. But he was also making a decided shift into a more concrete (sometimes literally) world of doing that affected a great many more people in far more fundamental ways. For the next seven years, he served as an urban development specialist for the Asian Development Bank, working on housing and infrastructure projects in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives, Bhutan, and Thailand. “As I worked in development, I realized I didn’t understand enough about finance and commerce,” he says, explaining why he applied to HBS. “It was also a bit about taking a step back to understand what I wanted to do with myself, what kind of leader I could become.”

In early 2009, just before returning to Sri Lanka, Mawilmada had the opportunity to try something a little different, working for the United Nations Development Programme as an advisor to the newly formed government of East Timor. “You had yesterday’s freedom fighters now trying to figure out how to run a country,” he says. “Our job was to help them navigate the big policy and technical issues of various infrastructure projects.”

“What I found, and what continues to be true in the work I do in Sri Lanka, is that the technical solution is easy,” he reflects. “It’s navigating the human side that’s much harder—that’s what I found in my LEAD cases at HBS. There’s never an A, B, C sequence that you can put into a flow chart. You just have to keep your eye on where you’re trying to go and be fluid enough to push various buttons along the way to get there.”

As far afield and varied as those experiences were, each one brought Mawilmada a step closer to coming home. The war had just ended when he returned to Sri Lanka in late 2009 to continue his work as a consultant for the Asian Development Bank. And now, eight years later, Mawilmada says the country is ready to move on, for the most part. But lingering issues and resentments are the impetus for a current effort to rewrite the country’s constitution to avoid a repeat of the past.

That constitutional reform is an undertaking of President Maithripala Sirisena, who came to power in a shocking 2015 election when the 10-year incumbent, Mahinda Rajapaksa, called an early election at the urging of an astrologer who foretold the timing as auspicious. The contest was widely seen as a referendum on governing style. While the more autocratic Rajapaksa ended the war, he did so with intense and indiscriminate air, sea, and ground assaults, resulting in an international outcry over human rights violations; some estimates put the number of Tamil civilian casualties at 40,000 in the conflict’s final months. Defecting from his position as Rajapaksa’s minister of health, Sirisena’s unexpected win signaled a miraculously peaceful transition to a more democratic, just future. A coalition government formed, with Ranil Wickremesinghe, a pro-business advocate from the opposing party, as prime minister.

At the time of the election, Mawilmada had left the Asian Development Bank and was operating an independent development consultancy in Colombo. In addition, he and classmate Hiran Embuldeniya had started York Street Partners, the country’s first boutique investment firm. (Jayamin Pelpola (MBA 2010) would also join York Street, a winner in the 2014 alumni New Venture Competition.)

Years earlier, Embuldeniya and Mawilmada bonded at HBS over their Sri Lankan roots, a tie further strengthened by the December 2004 tsunami that struck the country and a fundraising effort they led at the School to aid relief efforts. After HBS, Embuldeniya spent six years working at McKinsey’s Dubai office; in 2010, he began to consider coming back to Sri Lanka.

Seeing his friend put down roots was a draw. “Who I was doing something with was always more important to me than what I was doing,” says Embuldeniya, who continues to serve as a director at York Street. “Also, I knew I wanted to come back and be part of what was happening in Sri Lanka.”

A six-month strategy consulting gig the pair pitched to Sri Lanka’s Urban Development Authority, the government entity charged with implementing projects such as the megapolis, would mark another key moment in Mawilmada’s career. At an offsite meeting of brainstorming and breakout sessions with 100 or so of the UDA’s top officials in 2014, Mawilmada got up to address the group at the end of the day. As Embuldeniya remembers it, the essence of what he said was this: The reason why what we’re doing here is so important is because I really want my kids to live in a Sri Lanka that’s better than the Sri Lanka that I live in today or the one I grew up in. “Nayana said it with such intensity and authenticity that you had no other way but to believe him,” Embuldeniya says. “Soon after that, the head of the UDA asked him to become its director general.”

The megapolis is a creature as ambitious as its name. The 257-page master plan encompasses housing, water, transportation, and environmental priorities. Aside from downtown Colombo, the plan proposes a business park adjacent to the airport as well as a ring of clustered mini cities around the capital, each with a different focus: agriculture, industry, tourism, science and technology, and logistics.

Of all the project’s phases, however, transportation is the issue that really gets Mawilmada going, the one that, in his mind, will be a complete game changer. It’s something he’s spent countless hours on, sitting in meetings, speaking in public forums, and slowly—ever so slowly—moving the ball down the field. A central pillar of the megapolis plan, it is likely to be among the first to see completion.

For starters, the first 25 kilometers of a new light rail line will shrink a painfully slow commute from suburban Colombo to its business district from 90 to 20 minutes. Mawilmada helped secure a $1.25 billion investment for the line from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, with two other 25-kilometer corridors prepped for public-private partnership funding.

Buses are another piece of the puzzle, with the current system made up of thousands of private operators, in addition to government-run vehicles. The result: an unregulated, competitive chaos on roads already choked with cars, motorcycles, and three-wheeled tuk tuks. If all goes to plan, bus service will be consolidated on clean, air-conditioned, GPS-equipped vehicles, all feeding into the existing railway and new light rail network. Finally, the Asian Development Bank has agreed to a $650 million loan to cover capital costs for electrification of an initial 110-kilometer railway line running through Colombo from the northeast to the city’s south, with additional line and equipment upgrades to come.

A “complete system reset” is how Mawilmada describes this ambitious plan, and he recognizes what it will take to get it done. Time and money, yes, but that’s not all. There’s also the question of how you get a guy who makes his living running one or two buses to buy into this new system when it could mean the end of his business as he knows it. “One of the biggest challenges is these institutional changes,” he says. “It’s going to take time.”

Some days, the time required to create real change wears on Mawilmada. Yet there’s no surprise in the fact that government work comes with the built-in frustrations of politics and, all too often, inefficiency and bureaucracy. It’s a fact Mawilmada will reference obliquely but not dwell on, as doing so does no good.

“You need to give Nayana full marks for coping with this,” says Madhura Prematilleke, principal at Team Architrave. As one of a handful of architect-consultants to review the megapolis plan, Prematilleke was dismayed not only by the project’s name (“strange and archaic”) but also by the lack of an overall framework. “It was extremely broad brush, almost slogans,” he recalls. “After we made some noise about not being able to work in isolation without understanding the whole, they brought in the UDA, then headed by Nayana. Fortunately he took the whole thing by the scruff of its neck, prioritized, identified goals, and made a clear plan.”

Given the project’s scope and complexity, as well as the relatively recent change in government, it probably isn’t surprising that some missteps had already been taken in terms of zoning and development. “Nayana is pragmatic,” Prematilleke says. “His temperament was, ‘OK, that’s gone. Let’s see how we can work with what’s left and review the impact of what has already happened.’ So, for example, creating incentives for industries to move into designated areas rather than, as he would say, ‘spreading like a rash.’ He brought meaning to the process.”

“You find that people with two different viewpoints begin to trust Nayana to be professional and fair,” says Nishan de Mel, executive director of the Verité Research think tank, describing how Mawilmada initiated a public forum, hosted by Verité, to respond to an opposing viewpoint on the megapolis plan. “These two factions weren’t talking to each other, but they were coming from the same place in some ways,” de Mel says. “Those interactions catalyzed a whole conversation and movement. If you can create a public conversation about something, that itself has enormous power. Today, transport is front and center of the megapolis, which hadn’t been the case.”

Mawilmada is the first to point out that he is not the decision maker. It’s not possible to simply rubber stamp his vision for the city. But he has found the flexibility to insert himself in multiple committees focused on his chief concerns. Yes, as head of investments, he does speak to investors and tries to steer them in the right direction. But he also sits on a committee in the midst of crafting a national housing policy. And he’s part of a planning group for the city of Kandy, which, in addition to being Mawilmada’s hometown, is a sacred and heavily visited UNESCO World Heritage site plagued by pollution and outdated urban planning.

“I don’t have much positional power, but I can present a solution and rally people around it,” he says. “By being in government, I basically get to sit at the table and make a case.”

It’s not glamorous. And it’s not fast. By most estimates, groundbreaking for the light rail won’t take place until late 2019 or even early 2020. But it will happen.

“I tell my kids, one day you guys are going to ride a metro,” Mawilmada says. “Just know that I was a part of it in some small way.”

Mawilmada and others of his generation who have begun returning to Sri Lanka still have distinct and often disturbing memories of the country’s civil conflict. Dumith Fernando (MBA 2000) was 10 years old when some of the first riots took place in Colombo in 1984. He remembers mobs on his street, some with water registration lists they were using to target homes with Tamil names. An uncle involved in politics was shot dead. “The country sort of came to a standstill,” he says.

Fernando returned to Sri Lanka several years ago, leaving a secure position as managing director and group COO at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong to purchase Asia Securities, an independent securities brokerage and advisory firm that he hopes to build into, in his words, “the Goldman Sachs of Sri Lanka.” Taking a broad view of the country’s assets, Fernando highlights areas that keep popping up in discussions of Sri Lanka’s economic prospects.

Its location just off a major shipping lane between Dubai and Singapore, he notes, makes its deep water ports extremely attractive—and the fact that it maintains good diplomatic relations across the Indian Ocean region doesn’t hurt either. Analysts have noted Sri Lanka’s potential as a highly strategic link for China in what many see as a maritime Silk Road for the 21st century; it also has easy access to both coasts of India, with transshipment to India accounting for about two-thirds of its volume. Just over 2 million tourists visited in 2016, a 300 percent increase since the end of the conflict in 2009; by 2020, the government expects that number to double, adding $10 billion to the economy. And foreign investment—particularly from China—is evident everywhere, the most striking and immediate example being a swarm of earthmoving equipment filling in land off the coast of downtown Colombo. Over the next 15 years, an independent, Chinese-funded “port city” will rise here, featuring office space, housing, and retail—essentially, an independent, international financial center with a direct link to Colombo’s central business district.

Fernando mentions additional investments in the country’s south as a sign of promising future growth, although a nearly vacant airport (built in the former president’s home province with high-interest Chinese loans) stands as a reminder of the care needed in negotiating such deals. But he and others are philosophical. Due to Sri Lanka’s smaller size and lagging tax receipts, much of the development that happens in the coming years will be driven by private-sector foreign investment. “To the extent that government can create enough transparency in these transactions, I think we should be able to manage this activity to our benefit,” Fernando comments. For that reason the work being done by Mawilmada is all the more important: “Nayana is best in class in infrastructure and real estate development,” he says simply. “Our country needs people with private-sector experience to take up these public-sector positions and help drive the agenda.”

Managing the balance between development and identity is something that Mawilmada brings up frequently. A Colombo that ends up looking like Singapore would be a failure, he says, despite the city-state’s incredible success. Back at the edge of Beira Lake, he points out the juxtaposition of a dramatic luxury apartment building under construction with one tower seeming to lean into the other, designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie. “You want to create a modern face without losing what makes us special—because you can’t re-create that,” he says. The city’s historic buildings and the local color of areas like Pettah Market also need to be kept intact as living, functioning entities. Environmental issues are another ongoing concern. “In Battaramulla [a future stop along the light rail] we have endangered fishing cats living in the wetlands,” says Mawilmada. “There are otters, iguanas, pelicans. We are one of the world’s top hot spots for biodiversity.”

It’s a seemingly impossible medley of challenges to juggle, Mawilmada admits, in a free-association stream of thought that captures the alternating states of optimism and despair that can come from trying to help steer your country in the right direction. (Helping his teenage son with math homework and baking apple pies are two ways to find perspective.) “It’s frustrating at times, but really invigorating at others when you actually manage to get something done. Every time I get a soapbox I talk about what we can do there,” he says, motioning again to Beira as shorthand for everything Colombo can become. “Now the prime minister and others are talking about it, and after a while it takes on a life of its own. They own it, and you don’t need to be there anymore.”

He is, he confesses, considering a move now that Beira and some of his other priorities—transport, Kandy, housing—have been moved far enough along to be considered relative certainties. “You plant the seeds,” Mawilmada continues. “Once they start growing,” he trails off. “I’m not very good at sitting for 10 years and waiting.”

In July, after much soul-searching, Mawilmada does make a move, becoming sector head of property development at John Keells Holdings, Sri Lanka’s largest conglomerate with 70 companies across the real estate, food and beverage, financial services, transportation, and leisure sectors. With the infrastructure pieces he’s worked on under way, Mawilmada is turning back to the private sector to execute on his vision from a different angle.

He’s frank about the financial aspect of the decision—with three children, a government salary wasn’t sustainable over the long term—but he doesn’t rule out a return to government, and is equally upfront when discussing how his new job fits into the Sri Lankan future he speaks of with such passion. “John Keells is probably the only company based in Sri Lanka that has the scale and commitment to create systemic change,” he says, noting that housing will be one area of focus. In October and November, he’ll be exploring that topic further as a participant in the Eisenhower Fellowships’ prestigious Middle East/South Asia leadership development program.

It’s all to the same end, to the vision he’s been framing in his mind’s eye of a city—and a country—with the right balance of modernity, inclusion, character, and economic success. As always, he has to remain focused on the ultimate objective, even when the outcome can feel uncertain or very far off. “It’s like raising a child. You won’t know you did it right until they grow up,” Mawilmada says. “You coax, inspire...it has to be what it’s going to be. But hopefully you’ve influenced it in enough of the right ways.”

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