6th Dhul-Qa'dah 1447H |
Assalamu'alaikum, |
Last year, I was sitting at a retreat for CEOs of Muslim charity organizations. Every person in the room was Muslim. |
During an icebreaker, each CEO was asked to share a book that had shaped their leadership. |
One after another, they named the same canon: Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni, Jack Welch, Simon Sinek, and so on. Not one person mentioned Al-Ghazali, Ibn Khaldun, or the Seerah. |
That moment stayed with me, and it eventually became the seed of my new article, which we just published: How to Decolonize Our Muslim Corporate Cultures |
For close to two decades, I've been writing about how Muslim professionals can bring Barakah into their work. Almost all of that work has been aimed at individuals, helping them live spiritually grounded lives inside secular corporate cultures. |
But over the last few years, I started getting invited into Muslim-led organizations where the CEO is Muslim and the majority of the staff are Muslim, and I noticed something uncomfortable: |
Even when 90% of the staff are Muslim, the corporate culture still acts and feels like a secular corporate one. |
The company may have a prayer room. The athan may echo through the corridors. There may be Qur'an recitation at every event. But the deeper operating logic; how time is structured, how people are managed, what "success" means, and how leadership behaves, is often imported wholesale from corporate America/Europe or corporate Asia. |
In other words, we are running our companies as if they were still colonized institutions. |
In my latest article, How to Decolonize Our Muslim Corporate Cultures, I lay out the full argument: |
How a century of one-way intellectual traffic (global business, Western business schools, and McKinsey-style consulting firms) shaped our Muslim organizations The difference between treating an employee as a "human resource" versus as an amanah, and why that single shift changes almost every HR policy you have What a decolonized culture actually looks like A vision for an Ummatic corporate cultural model, a distinctly Muslim way of building, leading, and sustaining organizations that the whole world could learn from
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If you are a founder, CEO, leader, manager, or anyone working inside a Muslim organization, or simply someone who cares about how our Ummah shows up in the professional world, I'd love for you to read it, reflect on it, and share it. |
👉 Read the full article here |
And I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Hit reply and let me know what resonates, what you push back on, or what you think is missing. This is a conversation I want us to be having as an Ummah. |
Sincerely, |
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P.S. If you're a Muslim leader or founder who is ready to begin this work in your own organization, we've built Barakah Culture Company to help. This is a new venture I'm starting that will serve as the B2B arm of our training and consulting work. You can take our free 10-minute Culture Assessment at barakahculture.com; it will give you a more honest picture of your organization's culture than most leaders ever see. |
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