While other kids were at the beach, Alain Bejjani was in his father's shop. Beirut was at war. Bombs were falling. And his father went to work anyway.
The stores had walls of sandbags out front, high enough to stop a bullet, so customers would feel safe enough to come in. His father moved between shops working out which roads were passable, how to move goods through a war, how to pay suppliers when the banks were shut.
That's where Alain learned the lesson that shaped his career. War doesn't stop life. And the most resilient form of life is business.
He carried it into one of the biggest jobs in the region. Eight years as CEO of Majid Al Futtaim, 50,000 people, 17 markets, billions in revenue. And when I sat down with him this week, he said the line I haven't stopped thinking about.
Resilience is not something you build in hard times. You build it in good times, and it reveals itself in hard times.
When COVID hit and businesses shut overnight, his company chose not to fire anyone because of the pandemic. They could only make that choice because they'd spent years holding cash in reserve when nobody could see why it mattered. The values showed up under pressure because the discipline was already there.
Now, you might be thinking: that's a $15 billion company. I don't have years of cash to sit on.
Neither do most of the CEOs I coach. But resilience at your scale isn't about a war chest. It's about three things you can actually build, starting now.
The first is a team that works without you. Most mid-market CEOs are the single point of failure in their own company. If you were unreachable for two weeks, would decisions get made, or would everything wait? A resilient company has a leadership team that can carry weight when you can't. You build that in the calm, by letting them make real calls now, not by hoping they'll rise to it in a crisis.
The second is a culture honest enough to surface bad news early. In a fragile company, problems stay hidden until they explode, because people are afraid to be the messenger. In a resilient one, bad news travels fast because people trust that raising it brings support, not blame. You build that trust in good times. You can't manufacture it the week the crisis hits.
The third is the discipline to say no to one tempting thing. Every buffer Alain held cost him a growth opportunity he chose not to chase. Resilience at any scale means deliberately leaving some room - financial, emotional, operational - instead of optimising every last point of capacity. The leaders who run at 100% in the good times have nothing left when the year turns.
None of these are dramatic. That's the point.
Resilience never looks like resilience while you're building it. It looks like slower decisions, harder conversations, and passing on things you could have grabbed. It only reveals itself as wisdom later, when the disruption comes and you're the one still standing.
So here's the honest question. If your worst year arrived tomorrow, which of those three would let you down first? Your team, your culture, or your discipline?
That's the one to start working on this week. Not because a crisis is coming on any particular date, but because the only time you can build resilience is before you need it.
This is much of what I do with the CEOs I coach. We find the single point of failure before the market does. If you want a clear-eyed look at where your company is fragile, reply COACHING and we'll talk.
🎧 Full conversation with Alain on The World Class Leaders Show: link below.
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.