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Most banking leaders talk about transformation. I've delivered it - twice.
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisFedEx's CEO said something this week that most leaders never say out loud. We are in the middle of the biggest supply chain shift he has seen in 35 years. And FedEx, he said, is the referendum on it. Not a bad quarter. Not a soft cycle. A referendum. The company's results are now a public vote on whether it can cross from one era of its industry to another. That distinction is the one most leadership teams get wrong, and it is worth being precise about. A cycle is weather. Demand dips, costs rise, a market cools. You manage through it: tighten spending, protect the core, wait for conditions to normalize. The playbook works because the old world comes back. A structural shift is climate. The old world is not coming back. Trade routes reorganize. Customers change how they buy. Technology resets the cost of the entire operating model. Waiting is not a strategy. Waiting is decline with better optics. Here is the failure pattern. Structural shifts arrive disguised as cycles. The first year looks like a downturn. The second year looks like a slow recovery. By the third year, the companies that treated it as weather have cut their way to a smaller version of a business the market no longer wants, while the companies that named it early have already rebuilt for what comes next. The most consequential judgment a leadership team makes is not how to respond to a downturn. It is diagnosing which kind of downturn it is in. And the tell is exactly what FedEx's CEO just did. Naming the shift out loud, at full scale, in public. You cannot mobilize an organization to cross an era while telling it this is a rough patch. The first act of leading through a structural shift is refusing to call it a cycle. #Leadership #CorporateTurnaround #PrivateEquity #Strategy #Transformation
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisVolkswagen signaled up to 100,000 job cuts this week. Microsoft cut 4,664 this month. KPMG Australia over 1,000. In July alone, 25 companies have announced more than 13,500 redundancies. Every one of those companies has a detailed plan for who leaves. Almost none of them has a plan for who stays. Here is the pattern I have watched play out in every restructuring. The moment a reduction is announced, two lists start forming. The official one, built by HR and reviewed by legal, deciding who exits. And the unofficial one, forming silently in the heads of your strongest people, deciding whether to wait around for the answer. The second list moves faster than the first. Your best people are the first to leave during a restructuring. Not because they are targeted. Because they are the only ones with options. The market knows who they are, recruiters know the company is in turbulence, and every headhunter call lands differently when the person answering has just watched a town hall about cost reduction. So the restructuring achieves its cost target and quietly destroys its quality base. The headcount number lands. The capability walks out the door on its own, unbudgeted, and lands at a competitor. Restructuring plans model headcount cost with precision. Almost none model headcount quality at all. The fix costs almost nothing. Before any announcement, identify the fifty people the recovery actually depends on. Talk to each one personally, before the town hall, not after. Tell them they have a future and what it looks like. Retention conversations are free. Replacing the people you failed to have them with is not. The redundancy plan protects the P&L. The retention plan protects the turnaround. Most companies only build the first one. #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #Leadership #BoardGovernance #TalentManagement
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisUber's board is being sued by its own shareholders. Not for a bad decision. For the warnings they allegedly ignored. Over 3,500 lawsuits consolidated by June. A complaint calling the company a "serial compliance offender." Shareholders seeking to hold directors personally liable. Set aside how the case ends. The pattern is the thing. Nobody decided to fail. Something stopped being watched. Every organization has an unglamorous oversight routine somewhere. The compliance review. The capacity meeting. The risk committee. Banks call theirs ALCO. Manufacturers call it S&OP. The forum where someone is forced to look at the structural math of the business and say it out loud: what we owe versus what we have. Where the gaps are opening. These routines share a dangerous property: skipping them has no immediate cost. Cancel the review this quarter and nothing happens. Revenue still comes in. The numbers still print. So it slips again. And somewhere in the organization, a gap starts compounding quietly. Warnings arriving with nobody assigned to act on them, because the discipline that would have converted warning into action no longer operates. By the time the gap reaches the results, it is not a governance issue anymore. It is a crisis. And the organization spends ten times the effort fixing what a standing meeting would have caught for free. It’s very clear what the absence of this discipline does to an institution. The decline does not announce itself. It accumulates. The most important question in any operational review is not what is being managed. It is what stopped being managed, and when. Institutional failure rarely starts with a bad decision. It starts with a warning that had no meeting waiting for it. #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #Leadership #BoardGovernance #OperationalExcellence
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisEvery turnaround playbook says the same thing. Stabilize first. Then grow. Cut the costs, fix the balance sheet, stop the bleeding. Once the patient is stable, start rebuilding the revenue line. Sequential. Logical. Safe. Right? I'm not sure I can continue to believe it. The sequential model has a flaw nobody prices in: time. Stabilization takes 18 months. By the time you pivot to growth, the organization is exhausted, your best commercial people have left for companies that are building rather than cutting, and the board has spent its patience watching a P&L that shrank by design. You arrive at the growth phase with no energy, no talent, and no runway. The turnarounds that actually work run both at once. Cost discipline and income recovery in the same twelve months. Not because it is easier. Because the alternative quietly kills the recovery before it starts. Running both simultaneously does something the sequential model cannot: it gives the organization a reason to endure the cuts. People will accept a smaller cost base if they can see the revenue line responding. What they will not accept is two years of subtraction with a promise that addition comes later. Promises do not retain talent. Momentum does. It also changes what the board sees. A cost line falling while operating income rises is a turnaround. A cost line falling while revenue drifts is a managed decline, and every board member knows the difference even when the deck says otherwise. The objection is always the same: the organization cannot handle both at once. My experience is the opposite. The organization cannot handle sequential. Simultaneous is the only version fast enough to finish before the patience runs out. Stabilize first, then grow, is not the safe option. It is the slow way to fail. #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #Leadership #BoardGovernance #Transformation
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisThe hard part is what your customers do while you are doing it. Restructuring is loud. Headcount reductions make the news. Leadership changes make the news. Strategy reversals make the news. Your customers hear all of it, and every one of them quietly asks the same question: should I still be here? The deposit base. The renewal rate. The repeat purchase. Whatever form it takes in your industry, franchise stability is the real turnaround scorecard. Because it measures the only thing that matters: whether there will be anything left to grow when the restructuring is done. I have watched organizations celebrate hitting their cost targets while their customer base walked out the back door. The P&L looked better every quarter. The franchise was dying underneath it. Here is the test I use. If customers are staying through the turbulence, the restructuring is surgery. If they are leaving, it is an autopsy in progress, and the cost savings are just making the body lighter. The uncomfortable truth: most turnaround plans do not have customer retention anywhere in the first ten pages. The board reviews the cost trajectory monthly and the franchise health quarterly, if at all. That ordering is backwards. And it is why so many turnarounds hit every cost milestone and still fail. A restructuring plan without customer retention on page one is not a turnaround plan. It is a liquidation plan with better branding. #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #Leadership #BoardGovernance #ValueCreation
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisOn January 1, 2026, Greg Abel became CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The next day, the stock fell. Not because of anything Abel did. Not because of bad news. Simply because Warren Buffett was no longer in charge. The market was not selling the company. It was pricing the uncertainty of following a legend. Think about what Abel inherited. A $1 trillion conglomerate. A 60-year track record. A chairman who is still in the building. And a global investor base that spent six decades trusting one person's judgment above all others. No strategy fixes that. No restructuring plan addresses it. No earnings beat resolves it. This is the leadership challenge nobody talks about. Everyone prepares new CEOs for the hard scenarios. The turnaround. The crisis. The underperforming business. There are frameworks, playbooks, advisors, and case studies for all of it. Nobody prepares you for walking into a room where the last person who sat in your chair is considered irreplaceable. Abel said he would not change Berkshire's approach. He said he learned everything from Buffett. He said maintaining the fortress balance sheet would always be a priority. All of that is the right answer. And none of it is enough. Because the real test is not whether you follow the playbook. It is whether the organization starts to believe in you rather than just tolerating you. That transition does not happen through strategy. It happens through decisions. Each one small. Each one watched. Each one either building or eroding the thing that cannot be inherited: trust. The most underrated challenge in leadership is not the broken organization. It is the healthy one that was built around someone else. #Leadership #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #MergersAndAcquisitions #ValueCreation
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisEveryone tells a new turnaround CEO that the first 90 days define everything. They are wrong. The first 90 days are the easy part. The mandate is clear. The urgency is shared. The board is aligned. The organization expects change. The changes you make are the obvious ones, and every decision generates visible momentum. Turnarounds do not die in the first 90 days. They die between day 91 and day 270. That is the valley nobody prepares you for. The easy decisions are done. The operating improvements are underway but not yet visible in the numbers. The organization is exhausted. The team starts asking why the P&L does not reflect the effort yet. And the people who quietly opposed the changes begin testing whether the new direction will actually hold. This is where most turnaround leaders lose the room. Not because their plan was wrong, but because they spent all their credibility in the first 90 days and kept nothing in reserve for the valley. The leaders who make it through do three things differently. They set expectations for the valley before it arrives, not during it. They protect two or three visible wins for the middle period rather than front-loading everything. And they keep communicating with the organization at the same intensity in month six as in week one, when every instinct says the explaining is done. The first 90 days determine whether you start well. Day 91 to 270 determines whether you were right. #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #Leadership #BoardGovernance #Transformation
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted thisPorsche bet everything on electric. The market did not follow. Porsche's stock fell more than 31% as margins collapsed, China sales slumped, and the company was forced into a messy reversal of its EV strategy. A new CEO was brought in on January 1, 2026, and the direction was reversed: combustion engines were back on the roadmap, and the all-electric timeline was abandoned. One of the world's most iconic brands had to admit it got its strategy wrong. Here is what makes this worth paying attention to. Porsche did not fail because it stopped making great cars. It failed because it confused a trend with a customer truth. The trend was electrification. The customer truth was something else entirely: people buy a Porsche because of what it feels like to drive one. When those two things came apart, no amount of technology could close the gap. This is the strategic mistake that shows up in almost every corporate turnaround I have seen. The organization falls in love with where the market is going and forgets to ask whether its customers are going there too. By the time the answer becomes clear, the cost of course-correcting is enormous. The new CEO, Michael Leiters, came with a specific credential: he turned McLaren around during the COVID crisis, stabilized the business, and returned it to profitability. The board did not hire a visionary. They hired someone who has previously rebuilt a distressed performance car company. That decision tells you everything about what Porsche actually needs right now. In a turnaround, the question is never what the market wants next. It is what your customer has never stopped wanting. Find that. Rebuild from it. Everything else is noise. #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #MergersAndAcquisitions #Leadership #ValueCreation
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Jamal Al Awadhi posted this41% of companies trimmed management layers last year, according to a Korn Ferry survey of 15,000 professionals worldwide. Researchers are calling it the Great Flattening. Here is what nobody is saying clearly. Every turnaround CEO does this manually. AI is now doing it automatically to healthy companies. When you walk into any organization, one of the first things to look for is where decisions are getting stuck. It is almost always in the middle. Too many layers. Too many people whose job is to pass information up and down rather than act on it. Removing those layers is not cruelty. It is surgery. The organization moves faster, costs fall, and the people who remain feel more trusted. That is the upside. But there is a consequence nobody talks about in the restructuring playbook. 40% of employees report a lack of direction after their company removed managers. 72% of senior executives say they feel stretched beyond their abilities as they absorb the work their managers used to handle. As Korn Ferry's consulting CEO Lesley Uren put it: "When management disappears, so does direction." This is the part AI cannot fix. And it is the part most leaders get wrong when they flatten organizations too fast. Removing layers removes cost. It does not automatically install clarity. Someone still has to tell people where they are going, why it matters, and what winning looks like for them personally. That is not a management task. It is a leadership task. And it falls directly on the CEO when the layers come out. The companies that flatten well are not the ones that cut the most. They are the ones that replace coordination with clarity before they remove the people who were providing it. That sequence matters more than the number of layers removed. AI can eliminate the coordination. Only the leader at the top can eliminate the confusion. #Leadership #PrivateEquity #CorporateTurnaround #MergersAndAcquisitions #ValueCreation
Jamal Al Awadhi replied to a comment
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Nadeem Shaikh Appreciate that. And you've named the uglier version of it. Sometimes it isn't about cost at all, it's about someone protecting their own position. When decisions get made for the individual instead of the organization, the whole thing pays for it later.
Jamal Al Awadhi replied to a comment
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Asadullah Beg أسعد الله بـيـگ Great example. Those two people were probably written off on paper and turned out to be exactly who you needed. Institutional knowledge and relationships don't show up in a cost line, but you feel their absence fast. Thanks for sharing this.
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Sandra Ernst This is the part that gets underestimated. The numbers can be moving in the right direction and you can still lose the room if the two audiences aren't hearing a consistent story. Shareholders want proof of trend, people want proof the pain has an endpoint. Keeping both aligned is a communication job as much as an operating one. Really sharp addition.
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Jamal Al Awadhi liked thisJamal Al Awadhi liked thisI'm truly honored and grateful to receive the Star Award for June 2026. This recognition means a lot to me and reinforces my belief that dedication, planning, and a commitment to quality can make a real impact.
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Al Hilal Bank
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Flat6Labs
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Flat6Labs is a regional startup accelerator program that fosters and invests in bright and passionate entrepreneurs with cutting-edge ideas. Flat6Labs provide seed funding, strategic mentorship, a creative workspace, a multitude of perks, entrepreneurship-focused business training, and directly support startups through an expansive network of partners. Flat6Labs is a Global Accelerator Network member.
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UAE incumbent goes OTT – IP&TV World Forum MENA report
Benjamin Schwarz - CTOi Consulting
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