Ahmed Nawara was always expected to join his family’s automobile parts importing business, the Al Manar Group. After graduating from university in 1997, he assumed a role in the organisation, along with his twin brother, Mohamed.
Like many next-generation members starting out in their family business, Ahmed felt a disconnect between his fresh-out-of-school expectations and his real-world experiences at the firm. He wanted to establish himself and impress his father, whose decades-long dream was to have his sons join the business. But even with everything he’d learned at university, it was challenging to make an impact in a well-run company staffed with industry veterans. Eventually, both Ahmed and his brother found themselves at a crossroads. They could continue their struggles, or they could make a change. Ahmed watched his brother leave the business, choosing to strike out on his own. He stayed.
Ahmed committed himself to a new manufacturing project for nearly 12 years, and his efforts eventually delivered success, diversification, and growth to his family’s firm. At the same time, he realised that he had not grown along with the business, and in many ways, he had become the very example of the status quo he had been fighting against when he first joined. Ahmed’s troubling epiphany not only motivated his return to academia and his professorship at the same university he had once graduated from, but it also set him on a personal journey of self-development that would reshape his life and his family’s business legacy.