Jordan

Fairmont Amman, 5 August 2026. The first chapter of the Arab Leadership Intelligence Council.

The room

Chief executives, bankers, family office principals, public sector reformers, association leaders, advisers, ex-ministers and one voice from the next generation of family business leadership. They were not asked to agree. They largely did.

The finding

The chapter did not identify a shortage of talent, strategy or ideas. It identified a shortage of institutions capable of holding any of them.

Strategy documents do not build economies. Execution does. Every country in the region has an answer on paper. Few have one in implementation.

The paper is built on that distinction.

What the chapter covered

• The institution gap. Why capable individuals and sound plans keep failing to produce institutional results, and what has to exist between the two.
• Governance as an investment condition. Governance as the thing that makes a company investable, rather than a compliance exercise.
• Board infrastructure. What most family enterprises in the market do not have at board level, and what it costs them when external capital arrives.
• The Jordan and Gulf corridor. The movement of senior leadership between Jordan and the Gulf, and what happens to executives who go and to those who come back.
• The next generation. What the incoming generation of family business leadership is being prepared for, and what it is not.

The output

The chapter produced ten conclusions, published as the Council’s first paper.

The format

Invitation only. Complimentary rather than free. Nothing sold from the stage, and every commercial conversation held one to one in the weeks that followed.

The same format carries into Riyadh.