#13Jamal Bahlawan

Jamal Bahlawan joined CCC in 1982, which means his career at the company now runs longer than most people's entire working lives. That kind of tenure is unusual almost anywhere, but it's particularly notable at a company like CCC, which has stayed under the control of its founding families for more than seven decades and tends to promote from within rather than bring in outside executives at the top.

Much of Bahlawan's early career was spent on the commercial side of the business, in estimation and proposals, the part of a contracting company responsible for pricing and winning work before construction ever starts. Over the years he was involved in pursuing and securing a large volume of awarded projects worldwide, work that gave him a detailed view of how CCC prices risk and competes for contracts across very different markets, from oil and gas infrastructure to buildings and transportation. That commercial grounding is a somewhat different route to the top job than the more construction-operations path many contracting CEOs take.

Before becoming CEO, Bahlawan served as Chief Operating Officer for CCC's projects and operations globally, a role that put him across the delivery side of the business as well as the commercial side he had spent decades in. That combination, understanding both how work gets won and how it gets built, has carried into how he now runs the company as a whole.

CCC itself was founded in Beirut in 1952 by three Palestinian entrepreneurs, growing out of early pipeline and refinery work in the Middle East into what is now one of the region's largest contracting groups, with projects and offices across more than forty countries and a workforce in the tens of thousands. The company has remained privately held by the founding families through generations of leadership, including the current chairman, and has weathered the kind of regional instability, currency shifts, and market disruption that has ended plenty of other contractors over the same period.

Bahlawan took over as CEO during a period that included the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the construction sector's supply chains, labor markets, and project financing all at once. Steering a company with CCC's scale and geographic spread through that kind of disruption required close attention to cash flow and project risk across dozens of countries simultaneously, an extension of the same commercial instincts he built up over decades in estimation and proposals before ever reaching the top job.