#11Mahmoud Samara

His time at GM took him through several distinct jobs rather than one steady climb up a single ladder. He worked on the manufacturing side at an assembly plant in Ontario, ran Cadillac's Canadian operations at a point when the brand was trying to reposition itself, later oversaw sales, service, and marketing for Cadillac across North America, and eventually became President and Managing Director of GM Europe, based in Zurich, where he was responsible for setting up a new mobility business from scratch. That mix of manufacturing, brand management, and startup-style operations is fairly unusual for one executive to have touched personally.

Alghanim Industries itself is one of the larger privately held businesses in the Gulf, built up over roughly a century from a single trading operation into a group active in more than a dozen countries. It holds a wide spread of businesses under one roof: automotive brands including Ford, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and Honda, electronics and home retail through Xcite and Safat Home, food and beverage operations including Costa Coffee and Wendy's in the region, along with industrial, insurance, and logistics businesses. Running something with that many moving parts is a different challenge from running a single automaker's regional arm, even a large one.

Samara's academic background is in international business, with an MBA from the United States and executive coursework at Stanford focused on leadership and design thinking, on top of the operational experience picked up at GM. Since taking the role, his focus has been on how a diversified, family-founded group like Alghanim modernizes without losing what made it successful for the better part of a century, applying some of the discipline and customer-experience thinking from his automotive career to businesses well outside the car industry.