I watched my father run his business through the Lebanese Civil War. Here’s what it taught me about leading through disruption.

Alain Bejjani served as CEO of Majid Al Futtaim from 2015 to 2023, growing it into a $15 billion enterprise across 17 countries. He was named Gulf Business CEO of the Year in 2020 and ranked among Forbes Middle East's Top 100 CEOs in 2022. His book, Next: Leading Through the New Realities, is out now.

I spent most of the school holidays of my childhood at my father’s office in Beirut. While other children were at the beach or the mountains, I was watching a man run his businesses through one of the longest civil wars of the 20th century.

My father did not stop working when our city was being shelled. He did not stop paying his people when the banks were closed. He did not stop honoring his commitments when the contracts were technically unenforceable. He went to work and took me with him. I saw him every morning take stock of what was still standing: which suppliers were operating, which customers were reachable, which assumptions from the previous week still held. He would make each day’s decisions on the basis of that fresh assessment rather than on plans that had already been overtaken.

He had two imperatives: he did not pretend the system was working when it was not — yet hedid did not abandon the work because the system was not working. He held both these realities at once, and he chose direction within them every day of that fifteen-year war. I do not romanticize what this taught me — there is no lesson worth its cost — but I learned all the same, and it has shaped every business I have built or led since.

As a young lawyer, I worked closely with the late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri as Executive Vice Chairman of the Investment and Development Authority of Lebanon– — IDAL — and saw the power of his resilient leadership, which transformed and reinvented the country. I carried this to Majid Al Futtaim, where I spent the better part of two decades working at scale with those two imperatives. As CEO I helped build a single Dubai shopping mall into a $15 billion enterprise across real estate, retail and leisure and entertainment, operating in markets stretching from East Africa to Central Asia. The instinct........

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