From Big Four Consulting to Boardroom Leadership: Abla Darwish's Rise as the Region's Most Influential Transformation Executive

Abla Darwish has emerged as one of the Middle East’s most influential transformation executives under 40, known for leading complex organizations through structural change and embedding strategy as a daily practice rather than a corporate exercise. Her work has helped enterprises cut cycle times by more than a third and incubate high-return platforms while building capabilities that last.

Strategy That Becomes Reflex

“The hardest part of strategy isn’t writing it; it’s embedding it so deeply that it becomes the organization’s reflex,” Darwish said. “Too often, strategy lives in a deck or a speech, separate from how decisions are made. I approach it as an operating system: it defines how choices are taken, how leaders show up, and how value gets created.”

She requires leaders at every level to present the strategy back with examples from their own business units. “Not only did this prove understanding, but it also revealed the interlocks and synergies across silos. When you’re forced to teach it, you own it, and when you see how it connects beyond your area, you can’t unsee the bigger system,” she explained.

Embedding, she adds, is about making strategy unavoidable. It gets hard-wired into governance, KPIs, and incentives until it becomes instinctive. “Over time, people stop asking ‘what’s the strategy?’ because it’s already in the way they plan, review, and decide. Embedding is about moving from message to muscle, from something you hear, to something the organization breathes.”

Why Most Operating Models Fail

Darwish has also overseen enterprise-wide operating model redesigns, where the main challenges often repeat themselves. “From all the operating model redesigns I’ve led, the biggest barriers tend to repeat themselves: structural complexity, fragmented ownership, and scepticism born from change fatigue,” she said.

She rejects the idea of one-size-fits-all models. “What I’ve learned is that you don’t overcome these by imposing a textbook ‘best practice.’ Benchmarks are useful for orientation, but they can’t tell you what will work inside your system.”

Her approach is to design with the organization, not for it. “That means setting a clear north star. Faster cycle time, sharper decision rights, enterprise value over silo value, and then testing it in real situations,” she explained. “Leaders must run live cases, present the model back, and show how it connects across functions and businesses. That step is critical because it surfaces interlocks and creates ownership.”

And crucially, she adds, operating models must be treated as evolving. “It must evolve. Test, learn, adapt until people start to feel the benefits. And that’s the tipping point: once leaders experience fewer handoffs, faster decisions, and lighter work, momentum takes on a life of its own.”

Real Innovation that Scales

Darwish also challenges the assumption that innovation must be disruptive to matter. “We’ve been taught to equate innovation with disruption. Moonshots, category killers, the next big thing,” she said. “But most of the real impact in business doesn’t come from dramatic leaps; it comes from relentless, almost obsessive, refinement of what already exists.”

She cites technology and retail as examples where small, continuous improvements compounded into big outcomes. “The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, and the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. What set them apart was incremental innovation. Sweating the details of design, usability, and integration until the ordinary became extraordinary.”

Disruption, she notes, still has its place, but companies should not frame it as a competition. “They aren’t rivals; they’re complementary. One reinvents the system, the other refines it. And often, they happen simultaneously.”

Bringing Digital to Traditional Industries

In industries such as retail and real estate, Darwish argues that digital transformation is less about technology adoption and more about cultural change. “The hardest part of digitally transforming traditional assets like retail or real estate is that digitalization simply isn’t in their DNA,” she said. “These sectors were built on physical assets, long leases, and contractual certainty, not agility, data, or platform thinking.”

The challenge, she explains, is rewiring both governance and capability. “The first success factor is shifting from asset-first to experience-first thinking. A store, a mall, an office building; these are no longer just spaces, they’re platforms for interaction. When you reframe the business around data, personalization, and customer journeys, digital stops being a ‘bolt-on’ and becomes the operating lens.”

For her, the key to lasting success in digital is clear: “The hardest currency in digital isn’t capital, it’s trust. Customers, partners, and users need to believe the system works for them. Without that, adoption stalls. With it, even an imperfect solution can grow.”