| Ghiath Sukhtian , Chairman and CEO of Munir Sukhtian International, talks to Jordan Business about management by attachment and emotion.
Looking at an old picture of Munir Sukhtian in his pharmacy in Tulkarm in 1933 hanging behind the desk of his son Ghiath, one can feel a sense of nostalgia and pride at once. Munir Sukhtian who died at the age of 50 in 1960 may have passed away too soon, leaving behind a small pharmaceutical company, but now over 45 years later, his vision survives through his three children. The company has turned into an international conglomerate generating over 400 million dollars in revenue last year and employing over 4000 people. The group operates in pharmaceuticals, agricultural, and telecom sectors and has a foot hold in Middle East, North Africa , European and American markets.
Launching from the platform of the Munir Sukhtian Group where he is Vice-Chairman, Ghiath has led the formation of Munir Sukhtian International's portfolio of wholly owned and joint venture companies through hard work, business development savvy, and good relations with his brothers, friends and partners.
Going back as a young man of 25, Ghiath Sukhtian, had to take over the family pharmaceutical business in Palestine right after Israeli occupation. Fearing his family hard work could be lost when Israel closed down their pharmaceutical and toiletries import business, he devoted his time to finding new ways to carry on the family business. Fiddling around in his mother's garage in Nablus was the start of turning a distribution company into a manufacturing industry.
Mr. Sukhtian is now working on merging his regional operations into one Arab company. Which he describes as his dream , and turning the third generation business into public shareholding companies.
Funny, down to earth, and vibrant, Mr. Sukhtian is one of those businesspeople you wish there were more of. He talks about paying his dues to Arab societies and building engines of growth through hard work, honesty, excellence, and most importantly values.
One of the founders of the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL), Mr. Sukhtian is a member of the World President's Organization (WPO), and serves on several non-profit boards including Georgetown University 's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and the MicroFund for Women where he is the proud Chairman.
JB: How would you describe your managerial style?
GS: I have always believed in hard work. Early on I realized the importance of wealth-and that wealth is related to added value. When you look at a personal computer, it costs about JD600, but it is not worth more than JD3 in raw material, the difference is accumulated knowledge. My biggest advantage is that I believe in creativity and values based leadership. Lastly, I never make a product and wait for people to come and buy it, I go to them and hound them until I convince them to buy.
JB: What is your weakness?
GS: I have had no formal training in management. In our time, people studied economics but not management techniques; thus, I depended on personal relationships and loyalties to run large organizations. And you can imagine how much this is taxing on a manager. Therefore, I drive myself by very personal and close attachment to my assistants and I use my emotions rather than the science of management and that could be costly.
I don't know how my brothers and I did it. All we did was hard work. I was really challenged because I felt that the legacy of my father, grand father, and family was in danger. It was really difficult at that time. My father's company had two branches, one in Nablus , and one in Amman . My older brother Nidal took over the Amman Branch and I took over Nablus Branch. Sometimes I didn't even have the money to pay the salaries in Nablus , and I had to borrow from a friendly money exchanger at the end of the month. Israeli occupation shut down all import businesses and all the banks. The first thing I did was to take over my mother's garage in Nablus , and half of her kitchen utensils and along with a few technicians and a couple of pharmacists, I started making medicines! Doctors and pharmacists were very nice, they knew that we were not Pfizer, but they prescribed and bought our medicines and that was the beginning. I asked a friend to teach me how to deodorize kerosene, rented a shop and started producing a household pesticide which later became the basis of our toiletries business. And that was probably the most exciting time in my business career. The Israelis were trying to force us to become their resellers, and myself and others found a way to circumvent that –manufacturing.
JB: what made you expand outside Jordan ?
GS: Jordan is unique in many ways, mostly positive, but its main challenge for a manufacturer is its small population. Consider the Europeans who were motivated to make the EU on the grounds that countries such as Germany and France were too small markets to protect their industries. How does it then feel to be running a business based on Jordan alone as a market? The challenge becomes much more serious when there is no guarantee of smooth and stable flow of goods from Jordan to outside its borders because of various reasons. Our weakness is that we are vulnerable to forces outside our borders who can and did many times stop our goods and services from flowing to their markets for non business reasons. That is why I feel that the most important action of the Jordanian Government is to provide relationships with its neighbors that will allow for a stable and continuous flow of Jordanian goods to those markets without politically motivated interruptions whether that be for personnel or goods. The easy way for Jordanian businessmen is otherwise to setup facilities in those neighboring markets, which I did.
JB: Are you moving into Corporate Governance?
GS: Our company is over 70 years old, and three generations have successfully managed to harmoniously and efficiently run the business mainly by devoting every minute to our business. At this size, we all agree as a family that the business needs a different form of structure and governance. Only a couple of our children work in the family business and thus we need to go to the next stage which is the public sphere. We are in the process of creating public shareholding companies that control all of our businesses worldwide. This will introduce corporate governance of a different level of sophistication which is not easy. Up till now we were lucky that because we have some sophisticated partners in our businesses, we had to institute very strict governance methodologies.
JB: What is next for your business?
GS: After IPOs, I will do more of the things that I love. For example, gradually, I find myself more drawn into the MicroFund for Women which is to me a true pride and joy. We have disbursed last year 19,095 small loans to needy women and I am proud to say that our repayment rate is more than 99.9% which beats the performance of any bank in the country and it goes a long way to show how decent our people are especially those women who happen to be poor. We need to grow and need all the help we can.
Additionally, I must say that I love reading and when I look at the books that I have bought throughout my life and have not yet come around to reading, I think I will have a lot of joy in a any free time which I can get. I shall never retire completely from business, but I know that the new generation of young women and men who are coming into business in this country with their ideas, energy, and training will be easily able to do a much better job for the country's business future. |
