If you have flown a ground-hugging fighter jet at 450 knots, where the consequences of a mistake are starkly binary, most other decisions must seem mundane.
But Mohammed Alardhi, who realised his dream of becoming a pilot and rose to be chief of the Omani Air Force, sees a link between his teenage self’s need for speed and his current role as executive chair of Investcorp, the fast-growing Bahrain-based investment manager.
“The pushing of the envelope — that’s still what I try to do,” the 61-year-old says. “I don’t think it’s adventurous, because you don’t want to be adventurous in investing, but taking calculated risks, I guess, is something that is there and calculated risk is what also happened [when I was] 17, 18 years old in the air force.”
Alardhi has sat at the controls of Investcorp since 2015, elevated from the board when the group’s hyperconnected, dealmaking founder Nemir Kirdar, friend of presidents, prime ministers and royals, stepped aside. But Alardhi is not alone in the cockpit. Investcorp has a separate non-executive chair of the board and two co-chief executives, who divide day-to-day oversight of global operations between them.
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