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 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, industrial diversification, and on becoming a node in a multipolar order. These bets will depend on the trust that leaders in the Gulf have built with their local and global stakeholders. Trust accumulates slowly and evaporates quickly. The leaders who understand that every interaction either augments or diminishes trust will compound an advantage their competitors cannot match by spending more.

Third: resilience is now a distinct strategic objective rather than a tax on growth. The Gulf’s position is particular: sovereign capital at scale, an industrial base that needs deepening, geographic exposure to chokepoints that cannot be wished away, and a strategic logic that makes reducing external dependency a sovereign priority. All of this means that resilience investment is not a crutch — it is, structurally, the next growth cycle. Defense, logistics and infrastructure, and food security are sovereign capabilities. The capacity to execute these investments on compressed timelines is itself a strategic and ultimately exportable one. Leaders who recognize resilience as the actual growth thesis of the decade will fund it like a generational opportunity.

Fourth: maintain strategic discipline under conditions prone to erode it. Opportunities will multiply and the capital available to chase them will be unprecedented. Pressure from boards, media, peer institutions, and the simple human instinct not to be left behind will intensify with every cycle. Yet the leaders who win this decade will be those who maintain conviction about what they are building and why — saying no to almost everything else, and who refuse to confuse motion with progress. This is the hardest discipline of the four, because the cost of holding it is quarterly and the reward is paid only in the long run.

Disruption Is Not the Opposite of Direction

Disruption is not the opposite of direction — it is the condition under which direction becomes the only thing that matters. Vision is what you announce in good times. Direction is what you choose when several of your assumptions have failed in the same week, when the numbers do not yet make sense, when your team looks to you to name what is actually going on. That is the discipline I learned over a lifetime.

The leadership requirement that this implies is significant and I will be honest the supply does not yet match the demand. Leaders who can integrate across geopolitics, capital allocation, technology adoption, human capital strategy, and sovereign-resilience planning and who can hold all of these in a single decision frame are not today available in the numbers that will be needed. That does not make them less needed. Leadership is circumstantial — the realities produce the leaders, not the other way around. The world will reward the institutions that develop leaders fastest. Those leaders will not simply transform their organizations — they will reinvent them around realities that did not exist five years ago. That is the work of the Gulf’s next decade. It is harder than the work of the last one.

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.

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