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I have spent thirty years in an industry that does not like change, working for companies…
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisWhat I'd tell a CEO walking into their first international turnaround Someone asked me recently what advice I would give to a senior operator stepping into their first international turnaround. I thought about it longer than they probably expected. Not because the answer is complicated. Because it took me a long time and a lot of markets to learn it, and I wanted to get it right. Here is what I wish someone had told me. The technical part is the smallest part. You were hired because of your operational track record. Your ability to read a P&L, restructure a supply chain, rebuild a leadership team. That credibility is real and it matters. But in an international turnaround, the technical work is maybe thirty percent of the job. The other seventy percent is trust. Building it, maintaining it, repairing it when it breaks. If you walk in leading with your expertise before you have earned the right to be heard, you will find very capable people working around you rather than with you. Context is not an obstacle. It is the job. Every market has a history that predates your arrival and will outlast your tenure. Regulatory relationships that took years to build. Supplier dynamics rooted in personal loyalty. Customer expectations shaped by culture, not just product. The operator who treats local context as friction to be overcome always struggles. The one who treats it as intelligence to be understood always finds leverage others miss. Loneliness is part of the assignment. International turnarounds are isolating in ways that domestic ones are not. You are far from your network. You are operating in a culture that is not entirely yours. The people around you are watching to see who you really are under pressure, and you are doing the same with them. Build one or two genuine relationships early, people who will tell you the truth. They are worth more than any consultant or any report. Your standards travel. Your methods must adapt. This is the hardest balance to hold. You cannot lower your standards to fit the context. But you must be willing to find different paths to the same outcomes. The operator who insists on doing things the way they worked somewhere else will always underperform the one who holds the standard firmly and holds the method loosely. Thirty years across two continents, seventeen US states, and seven MENA markets taught me that the best international operators are not the most technically brilliant. They are the most genuinely curious, the most culturally humble, and the most stubbornly committed to outcomes over methods. That combination is rarer than it should be. And it is exactly what the best turnarounds require. If you have led or lived through an international turnaround, what is the one thing you would add to this list? #FoodIndustry #Leadership #Operations
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisThe hardest person to lead is the one who built it Nobody prepares you for this conversation. You have been brought in to modernize the business, institutionalize the processes, build the infrastructure for the next chapter. You have the mandate. You have the board's support. You have a clear plan. And then you sit across from the person who built it with their bare hands over thirty years, and you realize that none of that matters as much as what happens in this room. Founders are not difficult because they are stubborn. They are difficult because they are right about things you cannot yet see, and wrong about things they cannot yet accept, often in the same conversation. I have navigated this dynamic more than once. Across family businesses in MENA, across patriarchal organizations where the founder's presence was felt in every room whether they were physically there or not. It is the most delicate leadership challenge I have encountered in thirty years of operations. Here is what I learned. Their instincts deserve more respect than they get. A founder who built a business from nothing to significant scale did not do it by accident. They have pattern recognition that is real, even when it is not articulated in ways that survive a board presentation. Before you challenge their instinct, understand it. You will be right more often and resented far less. They are not resisting change. They are protecting identity. When a founder pushes back on a new system or a new structure, they are rarely arguing about the system. They are arguing about what the business means, what they built, and whether the new version will still carry the thing they care most about. Address the identity and the system conversation becomes easier. You are not replacing them. And they need to hear that repeatedly. Not once in the onboarding meeting. Repeatedly. Through your decisions, your language, your willingness to credit what came before. The operators who treat the founder as a complication to be managed always lose. The ones who treat them as a senior partner with a different role almost always win. The goal is not to take over what they built. The goal is to make sure it outlasts both of you. Have you ever had to lead someone who built what you were brought in to change? What did that teach you? #FoodIndustry #Leadership #Operations
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisInstitutionalizing a family business: what works, what breaks relationships Family businesses are not broken businesses. I want to say that clearly before anything else, because the institutionalization conversation too often starts from a place of arrogance. Outside operators arriving with clipboards and frameworks, treating decades of built relationships and hard won market knowledge as obstacles to be overcome. That attitude will get you nowhere. And it deserves to. When I came into AlNabil, I was not walking into a failing business. I was walking into a business that had been built by people who cared deeply about it, that had real market presence, real customer loyalty, and real institutional knowledge embedded in people rather than systems. My job was not to replace what was there. My job was to make it last. Here is what I learned about doing that without destroying what made the business worth saving in the first place. Systems are not a criticism. When you introduce process, documentation, and governance into a family business, the founding generation often hears one thing: you have been doing this wrong. That is not what you mean, but it is what lands. The framing matters enormously. Every system I introduced was positioned as protection, protecting the business, protecting the family's legacy, protecting the people who had built it. Never as correction. The informal power structure is real. Every family business has one. The cousin who has no title but whose opinion shapes every decision. The long tenured manager who knows where everything is buried. The founder who has stepped back in name only. Ignore these people and you will find your initiatives dying in ways you cannot trace. Engage them early and honestly and they become your most powerful allies. Speed is the enemy. PE timelines create pressure to move fast. But institutionalizing a family business requires trust, and trust requires time. The operators who try to compress that timeline by forcing change rather than earning it consistently create resistance that costs more time than they saved. Patience in year one pays dividends in year two and beyond. The goal was never to turn AlNabil into a different company. The goal was to give a great company the infrastructure to become a bigger, more resilient version of itself. That distinction is everything. Have you navigated the tension between institutional discipline and preserving what makes a business unique? What did you learn?
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisThe cultural gap that kills cross-border food operations I once watched a highly capable American executive destroy a year of relationship building in a single meeting. He was not rude. He was not arrogant. He was efficient. He had an agenda, worked through it, called for decisions, and wrapped up in forty five minutes. The other side of the table smiled, nodded, and never called back. That is the cultural gap nobody puts in the integration plan. Seventeen years across the US and a significant chapter across MENA taught me one thing: the most expensive mistake companies make when crossing borders is assuming professionalism is universal. It is not. The expression of it is deeply cultural. Time means different things. In the US, a late meeting is disrespectful. In MENA, a meeting that skips relationship preamble is cold and transactional. The operator who does not know which room they are in will offend someone before agenda item one. Hierarchy is not optional. Decisions flow through seniority in ways that feel slow to Western operators. Going around it does not speed things up. It erodes trust. Silence is not agreement. A room that does not push back has not agreed. It has decided to handle the disagreement elsewhere. Politeness is not a plan. Cross-border operations do not fail because of strategy. They fail because of assumptions that were never examined. What is the most important cultural lesson your career has taught you? #FoodIndustry #Operations #Leadership
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisWhy most food company turnarounds fail in year two, not year one Year one of a turnaround is actually the easy part. I know that sounds wrong. Year one is brutal. The hours are relentless. The problems are everywhere. The pressure is constant. But year one has something that makes it survivable, even energizing. It has a burning platform. Everyone knows something is wrong. The board knows it. The leadership team knows it. The floor knows it. That shared urgency is rocket fuel. People move. Decisions get made. Things that were stuck for years suddenly become unstuck because the alternative is visible and nobody wants it. Then year two arrives. The bleeding has stopped. The early wins are in. The business looks better. And that is precisely when most turnarounds quietly begin to die. I have seen this pattern across multiple operations, in the United States and across MENA. The geography changes. The dynamic does not. Here is what kills year two. Premature declaration of victory. The moment leadership starts talking about the turnaround in the past tense, the organization exhales. And an organization that has exhaled stops doing the hard disciplined work that got it to safety. Recovery is not transformation. Confusing the two is fatal. The return of old habits. Turnarounds require people to work differently. New rhythms, new accountabilities, new standards. But habits are stubborn. The moment the pressure lifts, the organization gravitates back toward what was familiar. You do not notice it happening until you look up and realize the discipline you built is quietly eroding. Loss of the change coalition. Every turnaround runs on a small group of people who genuinely believed in what you were building. By year two, some have burned out. Some have been poached. Some have simply moved on. If you have not replenished that coalition and embedded the change more broadly, you are one resignation away from losing momentum you cannot recover. The hardest part of a turnaround is not the crisis. It is convincing a recovering organization that the work is not done. Urgency is easy when the house is on fire. The real discipline is maintaining it after the flames are out. Have you lived through a year two? What did you do to keep the momentum alive? #FoodIndustry #Operations #Leadership #Manufacturing
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisThe moment I knew a plant was going to fail before the numbers showed it The report looked fine. Yield was acceptable. Throughput was on target. The variance report had nothing alarming. On paper, the plant was performing. But I had walked it that morning. And I knew. There is a sound a healthy plant makes. Not literally, though that is part of it. It is more of a rhythm. The way people move. The way handoffs happen. The way a supervisor addresses a problem versus walks past it. The way workers interact with each other at the line versus stare straight ahead. That plant had lost its rhythm. And once a plant loses its rhythm, the numbers are about three to six months behind the reality. I have seen this across facilities in the United States and across the Gulf. The geography changes the specifics but never the pattern. Here is what I have learned to watch for before the data catches up. * Supervisors who report up but never look down. When your middle layer is managing their boss's perception instead of their team's performance, the floor is already drifting. You see it in how they present in meetings. Everything is under control. Everything is being handled. Meanwhile the line tells a different story. * Maintenance that gets deferred without escalation. In a healthy operation, a deferred repair is a flagged risk. In a failing one, it is just how things work. When the team stops escalating because they have stopped believing anyone will act, you are looking at a culture that has given up on standards. * Pride of ownership disappearing. This one is hardest to quantify and easiest to feel. When workers stop caring how the place looks, how the product is handled, how the shift ends, something has broken in the relationship between the people and the place. That is not an HR issue. That is a leadership failure with an operational price tag. The numbers eventually told the same story I already knew. They always do. The question is whether you wait for them or whether you learn to read what comes before them. Have you ever known something was wrong before you could prove it? What did you do with that instinct? #FoodIndustry #Operations #Leadership #Manufacturing
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisMENA food markets are not 'emerging.' They're just different. I used to hear the word "emerging" applied to MENA markets by Western executives who had never spent a week there. It always bothered me. And the older I get, the more I understand why. "Emerging" is a polite way of saying underdeveloped. It implies that the destination is to become more like us. More like the West. More like what we already understand. That framing is not just condescending. It is operationally dangerous. Seventeen years across the United States, New York, Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and beyond. Then Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and Turkey. I have had the rare privilege of operating seriously on both sides of that divide. And what I found in MENA were not markets waiting to grow up. I found markets with distinct consumer psychology, deeply embedded food culture, supply chain realities that have no Western equivalent, and regulatory environments that reward patience and relationships over speed and contracts. The companies that fail in MENA fail for one of three reasons. They export their playbook. What worked in Chicago does not work in Riyadh. Not because the people are different, but because the context is. Purchasing behavior, seasonal demand driven by Ramadan and Hajj, the role of family in buying decisions, cold chain infrastructure, all of it requires a rebuilt approach, not a translated one. They underestimate relationship capital. In MENA, the deal is rarely made at the negotiating table. It is made in the meetings before the meeting. Trust is the currency. It accumulates slowly and disappears fast. Operators who skip this step because it feels inefficient pay for it later in ways that never show up cleanly on a balance sheet. They send the wrong people. MENA postings are not entry-level assignments. They require senior operators with enough confidence to adapt without losing their standards, and enough humility to know what they do not know. I have seen all three mistakes made by companies that should have known better. MENA is not emerging. It is different. And different requires respect, not a roadmap borrowed from somewhere else. What has surprised you most about operating in or entering a market outside your home base?
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisWhen Carlyle came into AlNabil, I watched something that changed how I think about business permanently. They were not buying a food company. They were buying a narrative. A market position. A set of assumptions about what the business could become. The financials were the proof points, not the point. Most operators never understand this. They think PE is about cost cutting and EBITDA expansion. And yes, that matters. But the firms that create real value, the ones that generate 3x and 4x returns, are the ones who walk in with a thesis and spend every operational decision either confirming it or refining it. Here is what that taught me about running a PE-backed business. Your job is to make the story true. The investment thesis is written before you fully understand the operation. Your job as the operator is to close the gap between what was promised to the investment committee and what reality actually is. That requires brutal honesty internally and relentless execution externally. At the same time. Data without narrative is noise. I have sat in board meetings where operators presented flawless reporting and left the room with zero confidence from their investors. Why? Because they reported what happened without explaining what it means and where it is going. Investors do not need a historian. They need a navigator. The exit starts on day one. Every system you build, every process you institutionalize, every management layer you develop is either adding to or subtracting from the value of the business at exit. I learned to make decisions with that lens on permanently. Not because the exit is the only thing that matters, but because it forces the kind of discipline that makes the business genuinely better. PE is not about the money. It is about the clarity the money demands. Have you worked in a PE-backed environment? What surprised you most about how they think?
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Ashraf Barghuthi posted thisI've hired people with pristine MBAs who couldn't run a shift. And I've worked alongside plant managers who never finished college who could optimize a 500,000 square foot operation in their sleep. Tyson Foods & Pilgrim’s Pride taught me why. Scale at that level isn't academic. It's physical. It's relentless. You're moving millions of pounds of product every single day, across dozens of facilities, with workforces that turn over faster than most companies onboard. There is no pause button. There is no "let's revisit this next quarter." You learn three things fast, or you don't last. Discipline is the strategy. At the scale of Tyson & Pilgrim’s, a 0.5% yield improvement across a network isn't an operational tweak. It's tens of millions of dollars. But you don't get there with a new initiative or a consultant's framework. You get there by doing the same right things, correctly, every single shift, without exception. Consistency at scale is the competitive advantage. Full stop. The middle layer makes or breaks you. CEOs set direction. Floor workers execute. But it's the shift supervisors and plant managers in between, the people nobody writes case studies about, who determine whether anything actually happens. At Tyson & Pilgrim’s, I learned to invest obsessively in that layer. They are the transmission. Without them, the engine just revs. Speed of decision is a cost center. Every hour of ambiguity in a live operation costs money. Real money. I became a faster, cleaner decision-maker at Tyson & Pilgrim’s not because I got smarter, but because hesitation had a price tag I could see in real time. No classroom replicates that. You can study operations. But you only learn to operate by operating. Where did you learn the thing that no course could have taught you? #FoodIndustry #Operations #Leadership #Manufacturing
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4mo
#FoodIndustry #Operations #Leadership
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4mo
Rana Amer Reading the room before leading it. That is exactly it. The operators who skip that step consistently pay for it in ways that never show up on a single line item but accumulate across every stakeholder relationship they need to execute.
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4mo
Bassam AL-ZOUBI,,CSCE, PMI-PMP Bassam you have distilled it well. The right message to the right stakeholder in the right way sounds simple until you are operating across cultures where all three variables shift simultaneously. That is where experience becomes the only reliable guide.
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Ashraf Barghuthi liked thisAshraf Barghuthi liked thisطريقة حفظ القرآن الكريم خلال عام .. رزقنا الله وإياكم حِفظُه🔥🤲 الجدول موجود قدامك في الصور سهل وواضح كل اللي عليك تبدأ +تلتزم وخليك فاكر ان التكرار هو سرّ الحفظ👌🏻 اكتب "مهتم" واستلم حاجات اضافية هتساعدك جدا علي الحفظ✅👇🏻👇🏻 📌 خرائط ذهنية لحفظ القرآن الكريم في ملف Pdf يمكنك تحميله بسهوله https://lnkd.in/dxuduP3J 📌هذي كل متشابهات القرآن الكريم للناس اللي هتحفظ واللي حفظوا القرآن كنز فعلا لمن يحفظ القرآن❤️ https://lnkd.in/dNpiC8Y4 📌 تطبيق المصحف الجامع – جميع المصاحف والتلاوات مجانًا في هاتفك https://lnkd.in/eFnkKCWM 📌 كتاب "القرآن تدبر وعمل"من اشهر الكتب في التدبر هيساعدك علي فهم الايات بطريقة سهلة https://lnkd.in/d2kbzTve
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Ashraf Barghuthi liked thisAshraf Barghuthi liked thisWould you still want your leadership role if your title and recognition completely disappeared tomorrow? A couple of weeks back, I attended a workshop hosted by MAX - Muslims Achieving Excellence Network Community called "𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐋𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟" by Coach Chihab Kaab. He forced the room to look in the mirror and ask a brutal question: What is really driving you? Is it validation, security, or contribution? When validation drives us, people become our audience rather than our team. When security drives us, we spend all our energy protecting our position instead of developing our people. True contribution means using your influence purely to improve things around you. It means managing downward to grow your team, rather than just managing upward to secure your next promotion. If your title vanished today, the impact you have on your people should remain exactly the same. Take a look at your calendar for this week. Does it show that you are focusing on your own visibility, or are you actively opening doors for others? Let us check our egos at the door before we start our Monday morning☕ #MAXCommunity #LeadershipDevelopment #ServantLeadership #ManagementReflections #InternalGrowth
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Ashraf Barghuthi liked thisAshraf Barghuthi liked thisNo one picks up the phone anymore. Everything is automated. Interview invitations are automated. Rejection emails are automated. Follow-ups are automated. Scheduling is automated. Outreach is automated. Some days it feels like we’re one step away from automating actual conversations. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. AI and automation have a place. They help us work faster, scale processes, and eliminate repetitive tasks. But not everything should be automated. This week, I found myself thinking about how much business still comes down to human connection. A phone call. A conversation. A genuine check-in. A thank you. A moment where someone feels seen instead of processed. As recruiters and HR professionals, we spend so much time talking about candidate experience, employee engagement, and relationship building. Yet sometimes we’ve automated so much of the journey that we’ve removed the very thing people remember most: the human being on the other side. The best recruiting experiences I’ve had weren’t because the technology was great. They were because someone picked up the phone. The best networking opportunities weren’t because of an automated sequence. They were because someone took five minutes to have a real conversation. Technology should support relationships, not replace them. Because at the end of the day, people don’t build relationships with workflows. They build relationships with people.
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Ashraf Barghuthi liked thisAshraf Barghuthi liked thisكم بتكلف مشاويرك بالاردن ؟ المصدر من صفحة compareinjordan
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