Amer Al Ahbabi is a Serial Entrepreneur, Global Board Member, and Group Chairman at Vertix Holdings LLC., based in the UAE.
The most important work in a holding company rarely appears on a dashboard. It lives in how senior leaders weigh trade‑offs, how quickly they decide when information is incomplete and whether they keep promises when the quarter gets noisy.
Capital and technology help, and durable results come from governance that turns direction into disciplined execution. One clue to the stakes comes from a Gallup study, which found that managers account for a large share of the variance in team engagement—a reminder that leadership quality often decides whether strategy takes hold or stalls.
Focus on the following core practices to turn leadership and judgment into results that scale across your organization.
1. Align the portfolio and the plan.
Years ago, during a late‑night review, our numbers were respectable and the market was open, yet momentum had thinned. Two senior leaders were solving different problems: One chased expansion, the other guarded cash. We paused new spending for 10 days, wrote a one‑page brief that named three portfolio themes and asked each CEO to translate those themes into a one‑year operating mission with three priorities.
By the next board cycle, a consumer services subsidiary had shifted from diffuse growth to unit economics first, then expansion. Sales did not spike overnight, but quality improved, churn fell and the team could explain the plan in a sentence.
Ownership sits on the balance sheet; governance is the leadership system that compounds it.
2. Make authority and cadence visible.
Most misalignment starts with murky authority rather than poor intent. We approved a short decision‑rights matrix that stated who decides, who is consulted and what requires joint sign‑off. In a regional operator that had been missing targets, this single page made one call clear: The business‑unit CEO owned product prioritization, while the parent set capital thresholds. Decisions accelerated, rework dropped and the tone in meetings changed from advocacy to accountability.
Once authority is visible, cadence keeps it alive. We standardized a one‑page monthly pack across companies that covers momentum, roadblocks and talent. Long slides became written pre‑reads and forums focused on choices rather than updates. On Mondays, senior leaders spend 30 minutes reviewing the previous week, setting the week ahead and stopping work that no longer serves the plan. The ritual is simple, but its effect is cumulative: People leave with the same story and the same next step.
3. Hire for judgment and aim incentives.
Resumes tell you what happened; judgment tells you what will happen. For senior roles, we define three outcomes, three decision rights and three nonnegotiable behaviors, then run candidates through real scenarios, including a bad quarter they owned and what changed by week two.
I promoted a colleague I had observed for eight years because he made sound calls in both generous and tight markets, owned mistakes and gave credit away; he now runs one of our largest companies. The principle is not loyalty to tenure, but evidence of judgment under pressure.
Attention follows incentives, so we tune pay to point at the work that creates value. In one subsidiary, managers quietly spent more time on corporate projects than on their unit’s P&L; the compensation plan rewarded visibility, not results. We reset the mix so cash tracked controllable unit metrics and a smaller share followed group milestones. The first month brought grumbling, the second brought cleaner priorities and by the second quarter, the unit’s margin and delivery reliability had both improved. Incentives do not replace leadership, but they remove excuses.
4. Build endurance through retention, succession and risk.
Retention often turns on recognition and path rather than money alone. A respected manager once arrived to resign, frustrated by a scope that no longer matched his ambition. Instead of negotiating numbers, we mapped a 12‑month path with clearer authority and a sharper definition of success. After that, the resignation was withdrawn and the leader later took on P&L responsibility in a larger business. That pattern repeats across companies: People stay where they can do their best work and see a future.
Endurance also depends on successors. We treat succession as a system, not a calendar task, mapping two potential candidates for every key seat and giving them contained P&L ownership so they can learn with limited risk. When a senior executive left a logistics company with two weeks’ notice, the handoff took a day because one successor already ran the core operation and another owned customer renewals; momentum held and customers never noticed.
Finally, risk deserves a standing agenda, not an annual workshop. Although sectors differ, the questions are consistent: What could break cash conversion? Where are we over‑concentrated? Which single assumption would most change the plan if it proved wrong? Each quarter, we assign a rotating red‑team lead to challenge one critical assumption in writing; the point is not pessimism, but speed. When the environment shifts, teams that have rehearsed the hard questions move first.
Turn governance into results.
Entrepreneurship in a holding company is the discipline of making judgment scale. Write the themes that guide capital and translate them into operating missions; make authority visible and run a cadence that surfaces decisions; hire for judgment and aim incentives at value creation; and build endurance through attention, succession and explicit risk work. Do this consistently and the boardroom becomes a force multiplier. Capital and technology then accelerate a system that already works.
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