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cover of episode The Nuqul Group Works to Preserve Its Founder’s Legacy

The Nuqul Group Works to Preserve Its Founder’s Legacy

2025/4/15
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The Nuqul Group, founded in 1952 by Elia Nuqul, grew from a trading business into a diversified conglomerate with interests in paper production, banking, insurance, and more. The company's success is attributed to its resilience and ability to adapt.
  • Started in Jordan in 1952 by Elia Nuqul, a Palestinian refugee
  • Initially focused on trading fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG)
  • Expanded to 26 companies by 1996
  • Core business is the largest tissue producer in the Middle East

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At Harvard Business School, we have a tradition dating back more than 20 years where we ask members of the graduating class to reflect on a question posed in the poem "Summer Day" by Mary Oliver. The question is, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Put differently, that question might just as well be,

What do you want your legacy to be? Without a prompt like that, most of us don't dwell from day to day on our legacy. It's not even something we give ourselves, but rather what we leave behind for others through our actions, our values, and the relationships we form. About the best any of us could hope for is that we leave behind a legacy that others want to carry forward, that we've made a difference in the lives of others that's worth continuing.

Today on Cold Call, we welcome Christina Wing to discuss the case Gassah Nukul and the Nukul Group, Preserving a Father's Legacy. I'm your host, Brian Kenney, and you're listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.

Christina Wing's research focuses primarily on topics surrounding families and business, including family dynamics, operating companies, family offices, and legacy opportunities. Christina is like a three or four-peat customer here on Cold Call. Christina, it's great to have you back. Thank you. It's great to be here, Brian. These are always really fun conversations, and we are really thrilled today to have our protagonist on the podcast as well. Ghassan Nukul is the chairman of Fine Hygienic Holding and the protagonist in today's case. Ghassan, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Brian. Good to be here. I thought this case did a beautiful job of talking about that in the context of your family, Ghassan, and company. We'll dive right in. Christine, I'm going to start with you and ask you to tell us what the central theme is of the case and what your cold call is when you start the discussion in the classroom. So the central theme of the case is...

about a family, a country, and a business that all have had extreme resiliency. And my cold call is,

If the title of the case is preserving legacy, how are we preserving legacy by selling and breaking up the company? That's a good one. That probably sparked great conversation right off the bat. How did you hear about Nucle and what inspired you to write a case about it? I had been following the family for a while. I have a fascination with the Middle East and seeing the growth that they were able to achieve over 70 years in a country that's had a lot of hardship.

made me have to know the story because you can't just be good at business. You have to have a lot of heart to be able to keep doing these things for that long. And that's why I wanted to go to Jordan and meet this wonderful family. Yeah. And we'll talk more about the impact the business has had, which is really astounding as you look at it over the last several decades. Ghassan, let me turn to you for a minute and ask you for our listeners to describe Nucule Group. What's the business that you're in?

Sure. Thanks, Brian. We are a diversified family business started in Jordan in 1952 by my late father, who was, as you know, a Palestinian refugee who came to Jordan in 1948 penniless without anything. He started trading in FMCG, fast-moving consumer goods, and then 1958 was the first, if you will, industrial activity. He started producing hygienic paper.

I joined him in 1985. We had four companies and we expanded the group between 1985 from four companies to 26 companies by 1996.

Today, the group has different activities. The core business is the paper business. So we are the largest tissue producer in the Middle East with five paper mills all over the Middle East and converting plants. We are basically producing diapers, adult diapers, tissues, toilet, kitchen, napkins, wipes, and so forth. But we're also diversified. So we are in banking, insurance, edible oil, lifestyle, HR softwares, stationary, sleeping solutions, real estate, and so forth.

Okay. And you're into the third generation of the family, and we're going to talk about how that's working, too. That's really, a lot of that's at the heart of the case. But also central to the case is your father's story, which I almost read a little bit like a screenplay, like a picture playing out in a movie. Really remarkable what he was able to achieve, given, you know, where he started. What does it mean to you to carry forward his legacy, especially, you know, you're in the second generation, the leader of Nucle Group. What does it mean to you to carry that forward? That's everything in my life. Absolutely.

If you ask me, Brian, what's your story? What's your mission? What's your drive? This is exactly it, frankly. It all revolves around this and the story of my father, as I mentioned,

When I joined him, Brian, I felt I was fortunate. I was fortunate given his story. At one point in time in his life, this is literally true, he had no food to eat. And this is the essence and the power of this group, that we are resilient, we never give up, and every hit we receive, it makes us stronger. I said, the least I could do is to evolve,

to grow, to expand, to institutionalize, and to continue growing with this company and at the same time preserving the legacy, the reputation, the values, the ethics, and what have you. I wrote a mission statement that I still live with today.

to make a difference in my family, my business, and my country. And believe me, Brian, believe me, every word of this statement lives with me, and it is the thing that I commit to every single hour of every day.

I love that. It ties right back to what we're talking about with the Portrait Project here. These are moments where you step back and actually think about, where am I going and what does it mean for me to leave something behind for others? So that's great. Thank you for sharing that with us. Christina, I want to turn back to you for a minute. One of the things that you and I have talked about in the past with family businesses in particular

is this challenge of balancing the legacy of the firm, the core values that the founders had in mind, with modernization and trying to keep those two things in balance with each other. How do you see this playing out in Ghassan and Nukil Group's story? So what's so interesting is people always think legacy means one thing and it stays there. The legacy can be, as Ghassan just said,

taking care of the integrity and the kindness in which you do things, but that still means that you can change the business. Where people get stuck is when they think the legacy needs to be that we make toilet paper the exact same way we did 70 years ago today. That would just be ridiculous. You have to modernize where you do things, how you do things, and the entire supply chain. Where the confusion comes is when the founder isn't willing to accept change

Now, in this case, the founder, I think that these two kind of had some tough conversations, but Ghassan was able to move his father into evolving the businesses, but keeping the same principles of how we approach them. That's like the art and the science here. Mm-hmm.

And Ghassan, the case does talk about some of the conversations, the frank discussions that you had to have with your father and that maybe your children will be having with you at some point as you think about continuing this legacy going forward. One of the things that you did was to sort of spearhead the institutionalization of the business as it's described in the case. Can you tell us why that was important and what it means, first of all, to do that and what the steps were that you took to do it?

Sure. Remember when I mentioned that when I joined, he had four companies. And the minute he saw his son joining the business, we went to go from four companies to 26 between 1985 to 1996. It was a one-man show before I joined, and then it became a two-man show. With this, Brian, rapid expansion, not only in Jordan, but elsewhere in the Middle East and the U.S. as well, because we invested in the U.S., plus investment.

in different industries. So it's not one industry. We became the bottleneck. So our projects got delayed. And I'll be honest with you, we started making mistakes because we could not cope. And third, I'll say something very, very personal. I'm very uninhibited on this. At times, I'd go home and I'd cry. I used to cry because I couldn't cope anymore. And the last thing I want to do is to turn him down.

So basically it dawned on me that instead of crying and complaining to him, what am I going to do given the mission statement I shared with you earlier? So I started putting down what are our issues?

what are our struggles, what are our challenges, it became obvious to me that the only solution, the only way forward is to institutionalize the business, including separation management from ownership. It was in 2004. Yes, it was a tough battle with my father.

Like Christina said, my late father was very accommodating in the sense that he believed in me. He trusted me whether in college, because I was doing very well in college, as well as the changes he saw in the business. And allow me to say it, the new leadership style I was bringing to the company, right? He trusted me. But remember that he had his own habits, right?

He was a self-made man attending to every detail, asking him not to talk to the foreman or an engineer or what have you, just talk to the GM. It was unthinkable. It took a lot of perseverance. It

It took a lot of preparation from my side. I did something very important. And in my opinion, it was the pillar for this journey, which what we call in the group, I made it in my own hands with a team around me. It's called the GSM, the Group Standard Manual, Brian. Because when you delegate, when you bring top people, when you give authorities, you need two things. You need to tell them what are the systems and the ethos and how we do things.

And you need to give them the authority, but with controls and monitoring because you want to make sure that things are, you know, checks and balances.

So here came, all of a sudden, something called governance, corporate governance, which I never knew it was called governance. But I did it, and I realized in one conference, a family business in Dubai, that this is what's called corporate governance. And I said to myself, oh my God, but I have it. I just need it. So I didn't do it out of a fad or fashion. I did it out of business necessity. The last thing I will mention here is all of a sudden, Brian,

the results, the profits started going up into different levels. So this gave me a lot of leverage with him that, see, it's working. We should have done it earlier. Right. But what you're describing, Christine, I want to ask you about this. That sounds like one of the most difficult transitions to make in a family-owned business is separating out the management from the ownership and making yourself vulnerable enough to accept that there might be people who you can bring into the organization that can help to improve it when you've always done it on

on your own. Can you talk a little bit about navigating that sort of transition, Christina? This transition is brutal because founders want to sweep in and micromanage. And in order for this transition to happen, there has to be great respect

for the founders and the family and what they've done. But the family has to also acknowledge that the business has outgrown the ability to be managed by a one or two man show. And so those things have to happen. Otherwise, it never will work.

Once those things happen, it still has a high chance of failure in the first two years because we have people that if their business is their baby. So you're asking them to stop tending to their baby and let somebody else tend to their baby. And it requires a lot of trust.

Once you get past the two-year mark, it tends to work. But in that two-year mark and the year preceding, there's a lot of tears. It's very, very hard. I can also see, you know, Ghassan mentioned, you know, his father's used to picking up the phone and calling people that he's probably been working with for decades.

at this business and why can't I just call this person who I know will get this thing done for me? That's hard. We see that happen in every business where a new person comes in and they're supposed to be playing a leadership role and people are kind of working around them. How do you start to navigate those kinds of changes when perhaps the founder is a bit of a cult of personality within the firm? Well, I think the hardest part is when you take away operations from a founder, they suddenly have a lot more time.

And so they need to feel relevant. And so relevancy is kind of what all of us want. If you have a founder who's used to working seven to nine o'clock at night, and then you take away the hundred emails and the phone calls, their identity kind of slips. And so you need to find other ways for them to be relevant. And just because you go from being owner operators to owners,

you know, taking on a more investor-like role doesn't mean you're still not valuable. So you need to get those people to move up in strategy, up in how they review things. But if you just cut them off cold turkey, you know, many people actually die. Like their heart has been torn out. Yeah. Ghassan, does this sound familiar to you? Yeah. I'll mention one thing, Brian. Christina is spot on. My father had more time and you know what he did?

Every time, a new project. Believe me. Believe me. Yeah. He's always very ambitious till the very last day on the job.

You also made another big decision, Ghassan, which was not just separating the management from the ownership, but you also brought in outside advisors in the form of private equity. Can you talk a little bit about that decision? What drove it and what the results were? I am the son of the founder. I'm the new chairman. I am leading the organization. I'm very passionate about it. I had a great team. But at the end of the day, I did not work outside the family business. And this is a minus in my opinion.

This gets into the importance of professionalizing the family business. Can you talk a little bit about what the best practices are in regard to that? I really dislike the word professionalize.

professionalizing the family business because I feel like it indicates that family businesses are only professional when they bring in outsiders. And so I do think that a business can be professional with family members, but I also think a business can be professional with non-family working in it.

And so I just, I think that's a point of clarity because it doesn't mean that all businesses can only be professional once family leaves. In this case, when we use the term professionalization, we really mean a great overhaul of all of the functions and creating a business that can succeed without family because we employ so many people and this business is very important to the country.

And so in doing this, you have to go slow to go fast. And what Ghassan mentions about finding out about all the debt is something that happens in a lot of businesses. A lot of founders kind of indirectly hide mistakes in a way because they're confident that they can turn it around because they always have.

And then when something like an illness comes in and you find out, oh, my goodness, there's this whole amount of debt I didn't know about. You need to make a big decision. Are we going to sell this business or are we going to turn it around? And in Ghassan's case, he turned it around in the best way possible, which was by bringing in some outside capital.

And then working very disciplined with the private equity firm to reduce costs and get everything else going up. But this is not an easy thing to do. It is very hard to go from 100% ownership to not 100% ownership.

and suddenly have other people having a stake in how you make decisions. Because in this case, Ghassan wants to hold this business forever. A private equity firm needs to leave, which means you have a clock against how quickly you can make these changes. And what you're describing to me sounds like it could cause a lot of tension within the family. Ghassan, I'm curious, as a frame of reference,

Some of us watch Succession on television. We realize that's probably the worst-case scenario. But I would imagine that in any family enterprise of this magnitude, there's got to be disagreements and tensions that happen all the time. How do you navigate that? Sure. One of the things that I did proactively from learning through conferences on governance, family businesses, and advisors is the family constitution.

And I did that early on in 2008, 2009. It took us one year and a half with the top consultant. And I involved my brother. And what we would do, we would come every month with the consultant. He was out of Dubai, PwC, to Jordan to meet with the family, to give them an update on the progress and share with them the tentative decisions so far if they're aligned. So there was buy-in. Two things I would like to mention on the constitution.

You are addressing all potential conflict areas today on behalf of the future, which means that there could be some friction and some issues. So it was not an easy and smooth ride, I have to admit. But in my opinion, doing it then...

is much safer than waiting until things happen, and then you need to address them. Now, as you think about engaging the next generation to bring them up the learning curve, to be engaged in the business, that probably poses a new set of challenges. How are you engaging that next generation and bringing them along? I involved my three sons with all the issues and frictions I had with my siblings.

And the reason is for them to see and know what could happen, how do you address them, how do you support them, because whatever is happening today might happen between them in the future. So that's one. The second point, we now finalize the draft of the family constitution between myself, my wife, and my sons, already a family constitution.

Thirdly, which is very important, is the values and the ethos of the things that I learned from my father and the mission and the journey we have to endure. When I say the journey we have to endure, is even if family members do you wrong, you don't reciprocate.

You continue to do what is right. You follow your principles. And I'll be honest with you, probably it is the toughest thing to do, but I learned it from my father. And it comes from wisdom, age, experience, and endurance and good luck. But the good thing about all of this, I want to tell you, Brian, is my three sons have been absorbing all the story of my father so that they know today this was not easy to achieve. Make no mistake. There's no guarantee.

you cannot guarantee there will not be issues. What you do today is you take as much as possible precautions, and I can give you more examples, so that you minimize this possibility.

And if things happen, how do you solve them? Right. And that gets back to your point about resiliency. I mean, obviously, this enterprise has been able to overcome all kinds of adversity over the years. Christina, it sounds to me like what Ghassan has done with the Constitution and the other steps he's describing is really taken a formalized approach to

to bringing in that next generation, to maybe giving it a better chance to succeed that way. Is this something you've encountered in other family businesses that you work with? You know, a lot of family businesses create a family constitution. Very few, uh,

know what the family constitution says. They create it, they sign it, they put it in a desk drawer, and they don't live by it. I think the difference here is that Ghassan has so much love for family and so much respect for what his father did that he lives the constitution, so there's no way to not know what's in it.

And by being so truthful with his children about the history and problems and educating them and allowing them to understand their responsibilities, many parents hide that.

I think is a good sign that this family is going to last a little bit longer than most. But they're living the Constitution. They're not just signing it. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Ghassan, let me ask you, at the heart of this, we're talking about legacy. You talked about how important it is for you to preserve your father's legacy. But what about yours? We all have a legacy, like it or not. Everybody has a legacy.

How are you thinking about yours in the context of what you've been able to do with the enterprise and kind of taking it to the next level? Brian, I'm going to interrupt for a minute. His legacy is being a grandpa now. He finally has a girl in the family. Three sons finally produced a girl. Christina, she's taking my heart, my soul, my mind, everything.

But I have good news. The second grandson, my first grandson, my second grandchild, will be coming in July. So we're expecting the Ghassan Jr. Congratulations. That's wonderful on both counts. Yeah. It gives you more motives to work harder, believe me. But tell me, how do you think about your legacy? First, the sentence, making a difference.

In everything I do, trust me, and everything I behave with, my mind is set on making a difference. Today, Nucol Group has become in Jordan more than others, but in the Middle East, as a reference in many modern family business, symbol of private sector, in the corporate social responsibility, in many things, even the quality of service, quality of products. And I'm not boasting, believe me. All I'm saying is that it was a result of

Christina, let me ask you a little bit, just in terms of if we think about the cultural, the regional context of Jordan, you know, the history there that Ghassan alluded to. Does that shape the governance and growth strategies of the family a little bit differently than it would if they were in a different geographic context, political context? Well, I think that context always matters.

and different countries need different things. And in this case, I mean, the culture of the people in this region is very much family first. And so there are, you know, every Sunday family dinners, there's Ghassan goes by and checks on his mom every day. There are expectations of certain family things that

are really important to how they live. What's interesting about a place like Jordan is you have all that close family part, but it's hard to do business there. And you also want to be global. And so where do you make your money and how do you contribute globally?

money and contribute to the country. And so being a leader in a place like this, you know, doing philanthropic, giving scholarships, mentoring people, these aren't things that have been in Jordan for a long time. And so it all needs to come into context of

one, the success that's happened, but also how hard it is to keep it going. Yeah. This is hard. Jordan doesn't have a lot of natural goods. They have to import things in to make things. And so to be productive in this country, you have to work like this. And they're very proud of their country as well as their business and their family. So it's complicated. And

Get back to resiliency. That theme keeps coming up. We haven't talked about your mother at all, Ghassan. Can you maybe describe the influence that she's had because she plays an important role in all of this as well? My mom brought Brian the soft side to the family. My mom came from a better-to-do family. She went to a very important boarding school, and she brings the confidence. She's a pianist. She's full of life.

And my father, because of his hardship, was more serious. So she brought to the family the love, the affection, although my father gave me a lot of love in different ways, a lot of love. And this, to me, is the source of power. This love, this family spirit makes me want to protect this family, to take it to another level, to be, if you will, the guardian, etc. The energy I get from her is unbelievable.

Tell us about the Nucle Foundation. What are the kinds of things that you're focused on in the foundation, and how does that play into the legacy? Sure. Remember I mentioned making a difference, right? Yeah. And institutionalization. So my father had smaller philanthropic activities, but they were not structured. They were not institutional. They didn't have budget. They didn't have a product impact assessment. It was about scholarships because he was deprived of higher education. My wife, Tala,

who's a special lady and had a great influence on me, I give her credit. She was the one, she looked at me one day telling me we're not doing enough. And the business corporate social responsibility is different than the family for the rest of us. So this is separate, this is family. So we educate Jordanians from all over walks of life and make them employable, make them positive agents in society. Employability is 91% among graduation. So we work on that soft skills,

entrepreneurship, leadership, personal finances, giving back to the community, networking, it's beyond. If you meet Brian, our scholars today, and when they first came, you will know exactly what I'm talking about. I was going to say, this man makes time for everybody and he has no time. And on top of the scholarships, the mentoring, the kind of encouraging them to learn English in very good ways. It's unbelievable. I'm very impressed.

It reminds me of a case that we talked about on this podcast not too long ago with another family business that was doing the same thing in Turkey, you know, really trying to create a foundation for education. That's another way of sort of carrying a legacy forward at a national scale. That's really impressive. Brian, can I share something personal with you? And if you allow me. Yes. My father-in-law,

one day told me, you know what Hassan, I never told you this, but do you know that you are the only one I know of among the family businesses in Jordan who built on his father's reputation and legacy by starting the foundation and you named it after him. What legacy he needs more than that when you are doing things and making a difference in the lives of young deserving Jordanians. To me, Brian,

This is the impact. I'm not doing it for public relations. Believe me, I'm not doing it. It's the impact, the changes you may see in the lives of these young Judeans when I meet with them, when I've met with some of them. It's so rewarding, I can't even tell you.

Yeah, no, I believe it. And thank you for sharing that. I'm sure that, you know, that that's very true. Ghassan, as you look ahead, can you talk a little bit about what your vision is for Nucle Group? Where do you see Nucle Group, you know, five, 10 years down the road? I'm going to be very honest with you and realistic.

One of the things I'm worried about is, frankly, I don't want for my sons to go through what I have been going through. Like Christina mentioned, there's nothing easy. I'm very proud of the success. I'm very proud of the achievements. But at the same time, it all came at a very, very high price. Now, I'm very disciplined. I'm strong. I have my hobbies. I do my sports. I travel. I make no mistake. I enjoy my wealth, if you will. But at the same time, it comes at a very, very high price. Now, the high price is not the hours.

is the frustrations, is the disappointments. And this is maybe the things are, this is nature of life in family businesses. So I don't want it for them. So I'm thinking very wisely, how can I...

eliminate that or reduce that. So this is one thing that I'm working on. The second thing, I want Nucle Group to continue to be the beacon for family businesses in the region. Yeah, so continuing with the modernization and the march forward. I get it. I get it. Christina, let me give you the final word here then and tell our listeners if there's one thing you'd like them to remember about the Nucle case, what would it be? The one thing I want them to remember is that

What was created 70 years ago should and is changing constantly. Legacy doesn't mean having to be in the same businesses the same way. The legacy can be the integrity and the love that you show for family and country. And as it evolves, it enables generations to create their own legacy and still maintain and preserve the legacy before.

And so you don't have to have the exact same thing that the people before you had in order to continue their legacy at,

but you have to create your own as well. And I think this case is a perfect example of a family that put family first and the family is gonna stay together. The business is being split up a little bit, but we still have the family and the legacy and individual legacies. It's a beautiful story, but it is hard. And it takes dedication to the thing you care about the most. And the thing they care about the most is family.

And they put family first. And doing that has allowed them to be able to put country and business also as an important part. But you have to have a pillar. That's a perfect way to end the conversation. Christina, Ghassan, thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we'd be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, email us at coldcall at hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I'm your host, Brian Kenney, and you've been listening to Cold Call,

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