Saudi Arabia has been on a journey of unprecedented change and development. Nowhere has this been articulated more succinctly than in the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan, which envisions a near-complete transformation of the country’s economic makeup. Part of this plan sees a huge commitment to the Kingdom’s tourism industry, turning the sector into a driver of long-term growth.
CEO Middle East meets Jerry Inzerillo, the Group CEO of Diriyah Gate Development Authority (DGDA) to discuss the journey Saudi Arabia has been on to develop its tourism sector, while also sharing insights on how leaders need to adapt to the requirements of a younger, post-Covid-19 workforce.
Inzerillo, a hospitality industry veteran of more than 50 years was voted Corporate Hotelier of the World in July 2021 and discusses how he has sought to overcome and adapt to the leadership challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
How has your own management and leadership style developed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic?
I may surprise you by saying that my leadership style over decades now has had to evolve but only by 5 percent, 95 percent has stayed the same. I’ve always been culture-driven, anywhere I’ve served the employees always come first.
Where I’ve had a debate with my boards in the past as CEO is over questions around salary structure or bonus payments. I do pay my people more than most and I do give them bonuses more than most. But you have to hold me accountable on my KPIs and my results, and I’ve always delivered the results.
Where Covid has been very interesting is that people have a different manner of working now. In the younger generation, meaning 30 and below, they’ve done something sociologically that is unprecedented in the last 50 years. They have watched their grandparents and parents and no longer aspire for the same working life, that is not the life they want.
As CEO, you have to be closer to your staff now than ever before. What’s become more difficult is getting management teams to work together. There was an old adage that the most difficult thing for a CEO is identifying talent, it was always very difficult, but now it’s actually the second most difficult thing. The most difficult thing now is to get people of different backgrounds and different experience levels, especially in emerging economies that lack expertise, to work together.
That’s very complex. It used to be motivating your line staff was always the hardest thing because your management were aspirational, they had careers. It’s reversed now. Most CEOs now have a harder time managing their executive teams than they do their line staffs. It’s a very interesting dynamic. Now in the Kingdom, what’s super interesting is that I can’t think of anywhere in the world right now that has such unprecedented positivity and opportunity.
What is unique is that you have continuity of leadership because one family runs the country, and they’re fair, and they’re benevolent. You’ve got work ethic, because His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is process-driven and he’ll hold you accountable. You’ve got resources, and you’ve got vision.
What you don’t have is time. Now on the other side, you have a very young population, over 70 percent of the population is under the age of 35, you’ve got Saudi women coming home who have a rightful place in the workplace now and are highly educated. You’ve got a lot of talent where Saudi Arabia didn’t have 30-40 years ago, because of the vision of the Kings to send its youth to get educated.
Where the Kingdom does not have expertise now, because it just started, is in tourism, marketing and entertainment, you have to import that with expatriates for the time being while the expertise is being improved locally.
So now what happens is that when you have these giant complex global projects, you actually have to import the talent before you can home-grow it, and to home-grow talent it’s going to take three to five years. So you have enormous time pressure.
You’ve got great directors, so to speak, that are willing but can’t get the chief’s job done.
My biggest challenge here is much more difficult than I’ve ever faced, which is to build a harmonious diversified team that can hit the time compression.
Over your career, is there anything you would have done differently?
Honestly, I wouldn’t have done anything differently over my long career. Of course, I have taken some enormous twists and turns during my time and made some big decisions, but now that I think about it, every one of those decisions has led me here to this place.
Now I am a part of something so much bigger than me, the transformation of Diriyah, Saudi Arabia’s most important cultural heritage site, and a reform programme that will change the lives of everyone in the Kingdom for the better. But there is something important I’ve learned that has led me to where I am, and that’s to incorporate kindness and inspiration into everything I do.
In New York during the 1960s, there were laws that said you were not allowed to work past 8pm if you were under 16. When I told my father that I had an opportunity to work as a busboy at a hotel, in desperation, I asked him if I could lie about my age. My father refused point blank. He may have been a man of principle, but he also loved me, and knew how badly I wanted this break. So, he came up with a compromise and said I could take the job if I got permission from a judge.
Later that day, we found ourselves on the subway heading down to the family court in Williamsburg. After my father had explained our circumstances, the judge took my documents and scribbled in my birth year as 1954 which was correct. But the good judge was thoughtful enough to make the four look like a zero. So, if somebody checked my card, they would think I was born in 1950 – 17 – and old enough to work.
I worked my first function on May 2, 1967, at The Gotham Hotel – putting in a 12-hour shift clearing tables and taking the dishes, the glasses and cutlery into the kitchen. For that shift, I came home with more than I would make in a week doing odd jobs. From this I learned a valuable lesson that has stayed with me my whole life. That is a simple act of kindness can change the world.
That simple act of kindness from a judge in Williamsburg in 1967 certainly changed my world and put me on the path to where I am today. And so, I have tried to make kindness my guide.
To my mind, the man who exemplifies this idea more than any other, is the late and great Nelson Mandela. A man who, after 27 years as a prisoner of conscience, went on to unite a divided nation. In 1990, a few months, after he’d been released by the apartheid government, I was asked by the mayor of New York to coordinate Mandela’s visit to the United States.
It was one of the great honours of my life. To work closely with this great man, to witness his leadership first-hand is something that has left an indelible impression on me. I was lucky enough to call this great man my friend, and my daughter had the honour of calling him her godfather.
In all the years I knew Mandela, I never once saw him talk down to anybody. Whether he was engaging another world statesman or talking to a busboy in a restaurant, he only ever treated people with dignity and respect. He embodied what it meant to be a true servant leader, and I can only hope I can live up to his incomparable example.
What advice would you give to young aspiring leaders?
One thing I’ve realised is that there will always be people out there who are smarter, more beautiful, or wealthier than me. But I learned I couldn’t control any of that. What I could control was my behaviour, my work ethic, my preparation, and my tenacity.
There’s a Japanese proverb that I love. And that is: “Get knocked down six times, get up seven.”
You need talent to succeed. But talent alone is never enough. You’ve got to work harder than the next guy. You’ve got to do things with grace, humility, and sincerity. And, when you get knocked down – as you surely will – you’ve got to pull yourself up again. If you live your life this way, you don’t have to worry about rewards, you don’t have to worry about salary or promotions. If you work hard, and if you’re prepared to serve alongside your people with humility, the outcomes will take care of themselves.
You know, it’s funny. A few years ago, I was at an event in Dubai and a young man in the audience stood up and said: “You know what, we really appreciate you being here, but we’re never going be you. You’re the Great Wall of China.”
I couldn’t help but laugh because this was so preposterous to me. So, I said: Please, don’t look at it that way. You’re young and you’re looking at a long career. You’re building your own wall, brick-by-brick. There will be days when you feel like you’re not adding any bricks to your wall; there’ll be days when you feel like your wall is going to fall over. Just focus on adding a brick to your wall every day. Serve with all your heart and passion. 50 years later, you will be that wall.
Talk to us about the Diriyah project. What led to you becoming involved and what does success for the project look like for you?
I’ve been fortunate to have a 50-plus year career in tourism. I’ve always seen tourism as an ambassadorial role to bring people together. This has allowed me in various positions, including several CEO positions, to see tourism globally and regionally. I have a deep relationship with pretty much every region in the world now.
I’ve watched Asia grow, I’ve watched the Middle East grow. I’ve had Saudi friends like I’ve had friends from all over the world, and I had been vaguely aware of Diriyah because my Saudi friends told me about the Birthplace of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In 1998, my friend Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who’s had a big presence in the hotel industry, gave me a letter of permission to come to Saudi – you needed an invitation letter in those days – and I went to go visit Diriyah. I asked him at the time if I could have permission to go see the birthplace of the Saudi royal family, thinking that you need special permission, but he said, ‘No, you just jump in the car and go there’.
So in 1998 with a friend of mine on a hot summer day we visited, and we were the only two people there, you could walk right up to these fabulous mud palaces and mud ruins. You could walk up to this pre-UNESCO designation, historic city in the oasis, in the wadi. It was really broken down and it was in very poor condition.
It just so happens that the governor of Riyadh at the time, who is now the King, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, said that Saudi Arabia can only be great if it acknowledges and celebrates its history, and its long history. It’s not a young country. So he started fixing Diriyah up in 1998. I loved the fact that it was something that the Saudis can take pride in. When I found out that the King was fixing it up, it meant a lot to me, and I went back and forth to the Kingdom frequently, I was happy that the King was doing it, and when the site received UNESCO World Heritage designation in 2010 I was thrilled.
So now you move the clock forward, and the governor becomes King, and now you have a King who’s an historian, a King who is very proud of the rich history of Saudi Arabia. You have a King who wants to tie the national identity to Diriyah. That’s fantastic if you’re a marketing guy, if you are tourism guy, because we didn’t have that in the UAE, we had vision but we didn’t have something that we could define as the national identity as other countries do, like the Acropolis to the Greeks or the Colosseum to the Romans, which were emblematic symbols of a culture. Well, Diriyah now is the emblematic symbol of the culture. I felt that Diriyah should be the symbol of its heritage, which is 300 years old. We proved that recently, because Diriyah was the symbol of the G20.
When we did the iconic photo of all the heads of state for the G20, it was at Salwa Palace. That photo got 2 billion clicks on global media when we released it. This is evidence of the value placed on Diryah as a treasure of the Kingdom. But if you’re going to have 7 million people come and visit it, you can’t have over-tourism.
It’s not a theme park. Now, we’re all for theme parks. We love them. We have Qiddiya in Riyadh, it’s home to the largest Six Flags [theme park] in the world, and it’s meant to entertain from a pop culture perspective. No one appreciates pop culture more than His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but he also loves and understands history. So Diriyah is the Birthplace of the Kingdom. It’s the cradle of culture of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s the ancestral home of the Al Saud.
So now we must create a concentric city around it so we can preserve it and offer all the amenities that could support people coming to visit where the Kingdom started, where the house Al Saud started. That led to Diriyah becoming a master plan.
How do you measure success? Is it the number of visitors or is it more around changing the conversation regarding Saudi national identity?
The number of people who visit Saudi Arabia in terms of measurement of success is actually one of the smallest components. The major element of success is to reacquaint all Saudis with their ancestral home, and that it’s a source of national pride, of identity. That’s the principal measurement of success. In other words: “We as a people, we started here, it’s our home. It’s where the Arabian Peninsula started. We were a poor nation, and within record time we became a G20 country.” Saudi Arabia is not only a member of the G20, but there’s never been a country to attain G20 status faster than Saudi Arabia.
How does Diriyah tie in with the Saudi Vision 2030 plan?
It’s a brilliant question and it’s currently an answer that most are not focusing on, but will become very evident as we get closer to 2030. Here’s the premise: It is felt by The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that Saudi Arabia’s greatness should not be solely measured on its bright future, Saudi Arabia’s greatness should be anchored on its past. So Saudi Arabia is not just about its future. What Saudis are saying is: “We are not starting the clock now. We started the clock 300 years ago.”
So, in the same way one would celebrate France’s rich history, England’s rich history, or Spain’s rich history, Saudi Arabia can celebrate its own history. But how do you celebrate your history? Do you celebrate it in economic terms?
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman want to celebrate it on the richness of its national identity, which is defined by its culture and heritage. So we’re not bringing a new culture and heritage of 30, 40 years, we’re bringing something of 300 years. That’s why Diriyah is the anchor for what the bright future is. Diriyah is more than a giga-project. Diriyah is critical, because it anchors the Kingdom on its identity and on its soul, and the soul cannot be measured with money. The soul is measured on its culture and its people. That’s why it’s very important.