The playbook expired: what leaders who have lived through real crises do
VEON's founder, Majid Al Futtaim's chief legal officer, Maersk's head of supply chain resilience, an INSEAD associate dean and a former special operations operator all write in the Reset & Pivot edition of Capital Club Dubai's Capital Insights. Their conclusions are strikingly similar, and none of them involves waiting for things to return to normal.
This is the second of three articles on the Reset & Pivot edition of Capital Insights. Part one, on the UAE economy, is here: https://thefintechtimes.com/from-scale-to-value-how-the-uae-turns-every-shock-into-infrastructure/
Mohamed Karmaoui, General Manager of Capital Club Dubai, is candid in his introduction to the edition. This has been a hard year for many of the Club's members, with energy markets shifting overnight and some businesses forced to cut costs, close lines or walk away from markets they had spent a decade building, and the Club has felt it too. He frames Reset & Pivot not as a post-mortem but as a working session on what comes after, written by people who have reset and pivoted before at a scale most will never see.
The edition's special feature and leadership section deliver on that promise. Six contributors, from very different worlds, arrive at much the same place.
Preparation, not luck
Augie K Fabela II founded VEON in the Soviet Union in 1991 with thirteen employees, took it to the New York Stock Exchange in 1996 as the first mobile operator ever listed there, and became the youngest chairman of any NYSE-listed company at 30. Since returning to the board in 2021 he has helped lead the share price from USD 7 to USD 55. His article draws on his new book, Tenacity: The UAE's Finest Hour, written as an eyewitness to the UAE's response to this year's attacks. Read Augie K Fabela II's full article in Capital Insights
Fabela was at the Meydan races five hours after the missiles started falling on Dubai, and so was the Ruler of Dubai. Over 31 days the country faced more than two thousand missiles and drones. Within days the government brought together around three hundred business leaders with one question, what do you need, and half of what was asked for was being implemented within 12 to 48 hours. His verdict is that this was preparation rather than improvisation, built on years of private-sector roundtables and lessons learned from the 2022 attack on Abu Dhabi.
He is equally blunt about business. Leading with traditional risk management, he argues, is a defensive posture, and companies do not grow on defence. He distinguishes a pivot, a change you choose, from a reset, a change forced on you, and is open about VEON's own: an early push into digital services that relied on scale over customer need led to a USD 300 million write-off, a new team and a new CEO. Digital services now make up thirty per cent of revenue. What links the two moves, in his view, is what he calls enduring speed: prepare thoroughly so that you can decide at the speed of need.
A disruption of the order, not to it
Hassan Basil Hassan, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel at Majid Al Futtaim, with previous senior roles at GE, Mars and Dubai Holding, offers the edition's most quotable diagnosis. Previous crises, from 2008 to the pandemic, disrupted the environment while leaving the underlying order intact. This one, he argues, is renegotiating the order itself, and stability can no longer be treated as the default state to which organisations return. Read Hassan Basil Hassan's full article in Capital Insights
His warning is aimed at the reflex to cut. Cost optimisation, he says, stabilises the present without defining the future, and the people best able to navigate uncertainty are the first to read the signals and leave. He points to McKinsey analysis showing that companies which came through 2008 with speed and discipline had built a total shareholder return advantage of more than 150 percentage points by 2017, and to McKinsey and World Economic Forum research finding that only one company in four considers itself ready for major disruption. The organisations repositioning most decisively, he concludes, did not build their advantage during the crisis; the crisis revealed it.
Resilience as the operating model
Zera Zheng, Global Head of Supply Chain Resilience and Consulting at Maersk, picks up the same thread from the logistics floor. Disruption is now frequent and overlapping; a 2024 Maersk survey found more than 76 per cent of European shippers had experienced it in the previous year. Her answer is to move from efficiency alone to conscious trade-offs between cost, lead time, reliability, risk and optionality, and to turn visibility into decisions by translating each external signal into exposure, options and a named owner. Read Zera Zheng's full article in Capital Insights
Her most practical point is cultural. Organisations, she writes, should not depend on a few experienced heroes who know who to call; that creates fragility. The goal is decision readiness, with expertise captured in repeatable logic and technology used to make trade-offs transparent rather than to automate judgement away.
The Crisis Stack
Ayman Gomaa spent 21 years in US special operations, including 14 combat deployments, before founding Acacia Innovations Technology and creating the War Room to Board Room leadership workshop. His observation from boardrooms across Dubai is that struggling leaders lack a stress-tested way of deciding, not intelligence or resources. Read Ayman Gomaa's full article in Capital Insights
His Crisis Stack is four questions: what do I know for certain, what am I assuming, what matters right now, and what is my next single action. He illustrates it with a contract in Afghanistan in August 2021, when the government fell, the banking system was cut off and his letter of credit was cancelled. By challenging the assumption that the deal was dead, securing authorisation from the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, taking payment by cheque and converting the cash into exportable commodities, he recovered the full value and came out ahead. Reset and pivot, he argues, are skills that must be trained before they are needed.
Leading after the crisis
Professor Mark Mortensen, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and Associate Dean of its Middle East campus, turns to what leaders get wrong once the pressure lifts. Read Professor Mark Mortensen's full article in Capital Insights
Performing confidence you do not feel erodes trust, he writes, and research shows leaders are judged more competent when they describe uncertainty as a property of the situation rather than a personal admission. Psychological safety, the subject of his collaborator Amy Edmondson's work and the strongest predictor of team performance in Google's Project Aristotle, looks different in a diverse and hierarchical region but matters just as much. And the relational work that gets shelved in a crisis, the check-ins and team rituals, is the strategic work of the reset. He cites Abu Dhabi's decision to extend stays and cover hotel costs for more than 20,000 stranded passengers in March as an example of relational investment made exactly when it would have been easiest to skip.
From the Club's own Strategic Council
Erik Almqvist, Baron of Keith Marischal, founder and CEO of Sense Strategy and a member of Capital Club Dubai's Strategic Council, gives the edition's theme its simplest definition: resilience keeps you standing, a reset changes your assumptions and a pivot moves you towards advantage. Read Erik Almqvist's full article in Capital Insights
He sets out four steps, re-anchoring safety, re-evaluating alliances, repositioning for opportunity and redesigning systems, and applies them to governments, corporations and families alike. He draws on first-hand experience, including helping restore lender confidence in Mobily during e&'s difficult period in the mid-2010s, before the group transformed from telecoms operator into technology group, and building Africa's first supra-national cybersecurity authority. His great-grandfather built the world's first oil tanker with Ludvig Nobel in 1878. The advice he leaves readers with is to treat a crisis as a rare opportunity to reset and pivot, led by head, heart and hand.
What the six agree on
Different industries, different crises, one conclusion. Stop waiting for clarity that is not coming. Prepare before you need to, so that you can move fast when you must. Keep the mission fixed and change the machinery. And invest in people precisely when the pressure tells you to cut.
The full articles are in the Reset & Pivot edition of Capital Insights. Read the full Reset & Pivot edition of Capital Insights
Next week, the final part of this series looks at transformation, with the former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock on why healthcare's next pivot is about adoption rather than invention.
About Capital Club Dubai and Capital Insights
Capital Insights is the members' magazine of Capital Club Dubai, the private business club at Gate Village in the Dubai International Financial Centre. For nearly two decades the Club has brought together senior leaders, investors, family businesses and policymakers through closed-door forums, roundtables and structured introductions, and its members have access to more than 300 reciprocal clubs worldwide. Disrupts Media is proud to support the distribution of Capital Insights. capitalclubdubai.com