The Poet and the Caliph
A poet praises the caliph as a dog and a goat, and is given a house by the river instead of the sword. Before punishing a failing employee, ask how to teach him.
Leadership & People
Leadership is not a rare gift but the courage to accept responsibility and carry the consequences of your choices. Leaders go astray when they believe success was theirs alone and keep only the bearers of good news around them; companies run by a body of capable people write epics, and companies built on one-man heroics write tragedies. The good ones teach before they punish, because nobody wakes up deciding to do bad work.
Marketing, Brands & Media Saudi Society & Public Life AI & the Future of Work
Writing
A Boss You Wish You Could Leave
Two bosses he wished to leave, one with no sense of the future and one never satisfied, and what each taught him. A healthy workplace, he concludes, is closer to a gym than a garden.
Thrown Out of the Kitchen
Every Ramadan his wife throws him out of the kitchen, and she is right: change for its own sake, like McDonald's two-box burger, is a management mistake he sees everywhere.
The Mistake Smart People Make with Their Bosses
A Roman engineer who was right and was flogged, and a Michelangelo who changed nothing and was thanked. Managers are human, and when and how you tell them matters more than what you tell them.
From Rescue to Ruin
English version of «مراحل انحراف المدير»: King Arthur, Qarun and Hitler as the three stages of a CEO's fall, and why orchestras outlast soloists.
مراحل انحراف المدير · Maaal · 2018
How a Manager Goes Astray
Carlos Ghosn's arrest prompts a theory: chief executives pass through three stages, Arthur, Qarun and Hitler, from listening, to believing their own legend, to handcuffs.
Let's Stop Spoiling Each Other
Two tough bosses, one Saudi and one Egyptian, made him. A Twitter storm over a fired saleswoman prompts a plea: Saudi nationality is a responsibility, not a shield for poor work.
Forget Our Lobby, Try Our Room
A dropped coffee is cleaned up in seconds. Then he imagines the same hotel run by committees, forms and blame, until six months and fifty injuries later it launches an ad campaign.
Narcissus in Business
A sequel to "Forget Our Lobby": organizations, like Narcissus, can fall in love with their own procedures and forget what they were built for, until every department swears the failure is someone else's.
Say "LEADERSHIP" One More Time and I Will Punch You
A rant against the leadership industry and its superheroes: success is a team sport. Stripped of the seminars, leadership is the courage to take responsibility and live with the consequences.
Khalid's Kabsah and Professor Mischel
Nine hungry colleagues hold out, barely, for the man who bought their lunch. Mischel's marshmallow studies make the case for self-discipline over "listen to your heart".
