Made in Casablanca, Shaped in New York City, Thriving in Dubai since 2005, this is my journey across 3 great cities I am privileged to call home.
With a US MBA, and DBA, I count 20+ years of multi-industry management experience, and a career history working within Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations across a multitude of industries from financial services and investments to retail and franchise development with international exposure within Europe, U.S. and the MENA region.
I shifted my career in 2014 to embark on my entrepreneurial journey full time, with the founding of Sustain Leadership Consultancy. a boutique strategy, leadership, transformation and innovation consulting firm. We engage and align stakeholders to create measurable and impactful business strategies that solve organizational problems, maximize profits, and enhance impact.
We work with organizations to achieve their true potential by identifying their business strengths and aligning their culture, procedures and processes with their deepest capabilities.
I founded Tawazoun, which means balance in Arabic, initially with the intention to shift the narrative of gender equality to gender balance, with the aim to be a think-do tank, that engages both men and women in the discussion of how we can together advance the gender balance agenda and tackle this issue in a fundamentally different way. Today Tawazoun has evolved based on its human centric approach that helped gather insights from the field on the main imbalances that need to be bridged. We aspire to work collectively, by engaging multiple stakeholders, from academia, the private sector, governments and civil society, to cultivate and accelerate balance on a broader level. Our main pillars are: Balanced people, balanced and inclusive workplaces, balanced societies and balanced planet.
As a native African I always believe in the concept of Ubuntu that is rooted in African culture, it means “I am because we are” and emphasizes the interconnectedness of people and the importance of staying connected to our community and showing kindness to one another. Adding the H of humanity, I created Hubuntu, where we could come together to learn from each other on how to cultivate more humanity in a world that is unpredictable.
I have always believed that “we don’t build businesses, we build people and then people build businesses.” This has influenced to a great extent my leadership style in my corporate experience, and was cultivated further when I had the privilege to work with the main team at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for knowledge, where I was in charge of innovation and entrepreneurship programs across the Arab World.
I am a published author, with 2 co-authored books, and my own recently published “ SEEDS of change” that earned number 1 best seller on Amazon.ae. As a thought leader, some of my articles were also published in Harvard business review Arabic and Forbes Middle East and Arabian Business among others.
I received many awards, including, the Game changer award in 2019 from the Middle East Institute of Excellence in Dubai, as well as the Saphira award from her native country’s government of Morocco in 2016, to name a few.
Do you feel lost in an increasingly complex and volatile business world?
Not sure how to deal with the ever-changing and shifting environment?
Enter SEEDS of Change! An easy-to-follow framework to enable you to accept change, thrive, and remain relevant in an increasingly uncertain world.
SEEDs of change provide guidelines to business leaders with a tool kit to help them shift mindsets and create new thinking that helps teams to cope with the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business environment, and develop agile strategies to continue to grow individuals and contribute to the business objectives.
