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

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.

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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 when one writes about that journey is to project a clean narrative onto what was, on the ground, a long sequence of decisions made under partial information.

There was no master plan. There were principles, applied with discipline. We said no repeatedly to opportunities that did not fit. We stayed committed not only to talent and merit but also to the Arab world at moments when the prevailing wisdom said the region was too volatile, too small, or too complicated to justify the patience. We understood that we were not in the business of retail square meters but in the business of trust with all our stakeholders and that trust is a balance sheet item, even if no accountant will quantify it. We knew that capital follows talent, not the other way around and that successful companies are those with the people capable of deploying capital intelligently in changing conditions. And we distinguished resilience from efficiency, each with its own logic: efficient companies minimize cost per output — resilient companies minimize the probability of catastrophic failure. Better leaders know which one they are optimizing for, and why.

I write this now because the Gulf business leaders I speak with weekly are facing a version of the questions I learned to recognize early, though in a profoundly different register. The parallel is not war. The parallel is the obligation to lead inside conditions where several of the assumptions you built on are in motion at the same time.

Consider what is actually shifting. The post-1990 global order that kept trade routes open and capital flows predictable is fragmenting. Almost anything can now be weaponized to serve geopolitical objectives — energy, payment rails, semiconductors, supply chains, data, and human capital flows themselves. Artificial intelligence — and its physical extension into robotics and autonomous systems — is decoupling growth from headcount in ways that will reshape every economy whose models assumed the opposite. The cost of capital has reset. The reliability of long-standing security guarantees is being openly questioned. None of these shifts is regional. All of them are landing in the Gulf with particular force, because the region’s growth model was built, successfully, on the assumption that each of these systems would continue to behave as it had.

Four Imperatives

Against that backdrop, four imperatives stand out.

First: refuse both denial and paralysis. Denial says the systems are working as they used to and the strategic playbook of the last 20 years still applies. Paralysis says the systems are broken and there is nothing to do but wait for clarity. Neither is leadership. The work is to take stock of what is still standing, which dependencies are intact, which are exposed, which assumptions have expired, and to make decisions on the basis of that judgment. It is a daily discipline — it starts with the honesty to admit when yesterday’s assessment no longer serves this morning’s reality.

Second: trust will do more strategic work in this decade than it has done in living memory. The Gulf is making bets on AI, tourism,