One thing that keeps sitting with me as I re-read the first chapters from Sheikh CEO is this idea that speed and patience are not opposites. They actually need each other. When you look at Dubai, it’s easy to focus on what we see now, the skyscrapers, the ambition, the pace. But this didn’t start here. It started generations ago. Sheikh Mohammed’s grandfather was already making a bold shift, moving from a pearling town into a trading and shipping hub. That alone required vision, especially at a time when the future was uncertain. Then his father built on that, laying infrastructure, expanding, opening things up. Not flashy, but foundational. And now, with Sheikh Mohammed, you see the full expression of that vision: structure, leadership, global positioning. The part everyone recognizes. But what struck me is this: none of this works without both patience and speed. Patience to build over decades… Speed to act decisively when the moment comes. It’s like a skyscraper. From the outside, it looks like it rose quickly. But the foundation took time. Quiet time. Unseen work. I think that’s the tension a lot of us struggle with; wanting things to move fast, but not always honoring the season of building. This book is reminding me that both can exist at the same time. And maybe that’s the real work: knowing when to move fast, and when to keep building, even when no one sees it yet.

What struck me early in this book is something Jarrar states quite plainly — that most leadership literature is written from a Western context, and that leaders operating in emerging markets are perpetually doing a kind of invisible translation work just to make the lessons applicable. That observation alone was worth pausing on, because it names something I have felt but rarely seen acknowledged in print. The frameworks we are handed in leadership development — the models, the MBA vocabulary, the case studies — are almost always built on assumptions about institutional stability, regulatory predictability, and organisational maturity that simply do not map cleanly onto what many of us navigate every day. Reading a book rooted in this region, where the conditions are familiar, felt genuinely different. What gives the book its credibility is who Jarrar is in relation to the subject. He is not an academic who studied Sheikh Mohammed from the outside. He served as Director of Strategy within the Sheikh’s own Executive Office, was the founding Executive Dean of the Dubai School of Government, and played a direct role in building some of the foundational systems of Dubai’s governance — the Dubai Strategic Plan, the government performance measurement system, the leadership development programmes that followed. He was inside the machinery. So when he lays out what he calls Sheikh Mohammed’s eight governance principles — among them that the UAE is the foundation, that no one is above the law, that economic diversification is non-negotiable, and that leadership ultimately exists to care for future generations — it does not read like analysis. It reads like testimony from someone who watched those principles operate in real time, under pressure, with consequences. The principle that I am parked on at the moment is the fifth: a credible, resilient, and excellent government. In the context of where I work — across multiple schools, multiple leadership teams, different cultures of accountability — that phrase lands with some weight. Credibility is not declared, it is demonstrated through consistency. Resilience is not a personality trait, it is a structural design choice. And excellence is not a standard you set once; it is a posture you have to actively maintain.