Ahmad Abdul-Qadir Forbes Article WEMBA Fall 2008 Dr.

LaPier, MGMT 899

Ahmad Abdul-Qadir, WEMBA Fall 2009 MGMT 899 Dr. LaPier

Meet Ahmad Abdul-Qadir, CPA, CFA, MBA

You might have seen him on the commuter rail a dozen times and never known that you were sitting next to one of the worlds most influential contemporary business leaders. As intensely as the fire burns within Ahmad Abdul-Qadir to leave behind a legacy, he finds the attention generated during the process of value creation to be an excessively costly distraction that he chooses to avoid. While observing Ahmad Abdul-Qadir operating from behind the scenes, however, it becomes clear why the on-stage production is so successful. We see large footprints in the earth, but the giant who left them is nowhere to be seen. At age 43, Ahmad is the CEO of Triple Bottom Line (3BL) Capital, a multinational corporation that has directly stimulated economic growth valued at an estimated $2 trillion worldwide. He has endowed both the acclaimed Brookings Institute and the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a 100-year old Michigan think tank focused on public policy and economic research. He has also endowed the School of Business at Oakland University where he earned his Masters in Professional Accounting in year 2000. Further, he has established (at last count) 22 entrepreneurial incubators throughout metropolitan areas in North and South America as well as Africa. Those accolades

notwithstanding, perhaps the most significant impact that Ahmad has had on the world is on the lives of untold millions whom he has helped to transform from desperate lives of economic dependency to flourishing lives of self-sustaining prosperity. Each of his urban incubators invites thousands of high school children annually to provide them with the basics of business and entrepreneurialism. Students also learn that respect, integrity, creativity and determination are the core principles of sustainable value creation. Ahmad explains, Although I grew up poor, I believed that everything should inherently function properly, and when I would see an unmet need, I would investigate the root cause. That curiosity to trace the source of problems affecting individuals, communities and nations led Ahmad to voraciously study history, commerce and world affairs.

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Some of the more obvious leadership strengths of Ahmad Abdul-Qadir are his charismatic nature that makes other want to come to the table to discuss or negotiate. He is effective at managing upwards, downwards, and across organizations, and his education and early experiences helped to shape him as a broad-minded problem solver who can seamlessly transition from high-level strategy to lowlevel detail. While his higher education provided him with a broad platform that made him conversant on a variety of issues, he felt that equipping himself further with the best tools possible would be a necessary step towards making a tangible difference in the world. He would go on to earn designations as a Certified Public Accountant, a Chartered Financial Analyst Charterholder, and a Certified Information Systems Auditor. He also earned a MS in Professional Accounting to be followed nine years later by an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Early Upbringing: stumbling out of the blocks

Ahmad was born on June 15, 1975 into a working class family in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His mother, born in rural Arkansas, had grown up in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul in a family of nine. His father was born and raised in Gary, Indiana in the shadow of polluted clouds from the bellows of aging steel mills. Track stars in high school, his father and two paternal uncles enlisted in the armed forces in order to escape from Garys bleak and violent streets. They all fought in Vietnam prior to returning home to start families of their own. Except for his maternal grandmother, a school teacher who returned to finish her college degree in education following the birth of her last child, higher education was not a commonly option explored in Ahmads family. While he would go on to earn four degrees by the age of 34 (bachelors in history, with minors in economics and Japanese from Michigan State University, a second bachelors in Arts & Letters from the University of Minnesota with a major in African Studies, a Masters in Professional Accounting from Oakland University, and an MBA from Wharton), Ahmad did not see higher learning as a step necessary to better his life, but rather as a step to bring him closer towards addressing questions that he had always wanted to answer purely to satisfy
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his own intellectual curiosity. Ahmad grew up reading incessantly, and his mother frequently had to force him to go outside and play with his siblings or the other neighborhood children. He read about faraway places, historical events, and his personal favorite: business. When I was probably eight or nine years old, I found a book about entrepreneurial opportunities working with computers. I didnt know what an entrepreneur was, and in the early 1980s computers were nowhere near as important in everyday lives as they are today, but the idea that a persons own ambitions and efforts could generate income fascinated me, Ahmad recalls.

Early Career: unbridled energy

Ahmad spent his junior year of college as a foreign student exchange scholar in Tanzania. He forged relationships with students and faculty at the University of Dar es Salaam, and was lucky enough to befriend a then presidential candidate. The experiences of living in one of the most impoverished nations in the worldthroughout a period of relative political instabilitytaught Ahmad a great deal about focus and perseverance. After completing his first undergraduate degree, Ahmad worked in healthcare policy at the Michigan State Medical Society before joining Arthur Andersen LLP in Detroit. The transition to Big Four public accounting seemed improbable at first since Ahmad did not have an undergraduate accounting background, but he enrolled in an evening masters program at Oakland University. Ahmad would work at the medical society until 5 pm and then four nights a week drive 85 miles each way from East Lansing, Michigan to Rochester, Michigan where he attended class at Oaklands main campus about 30 miles north of Detroit. When Ahmad was offered a position at Andersen, he became the Detroit offices first fulltime hire to have not yet completed an accounting degree, completing his Masters in Professional Accounting nearly eight months after starting at the firm. Still enrolled in an accounting degree program, Ahmads non-traditional background might have earned him negative attention from his staff level peers, but he worked hard to ensure that where he
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would make a name for himself was with his positive contributions to field engagements. He learned all that he could and was quickly promoted. I enjoyed working with some very bright people, some great clients and with one of the modern eras truly great firms, but public accountants did not have the depth or breadth that I wanted to have. I wanted to make things happen, rather than just audit what had already happened, Ahmad explains with a playful smirk on his face. Bored of public accounting after about two years, Ahmad left for the Dow Chemical Company where over three years he managed internal audit projects in eighteen different countries allowing him to enhance his multi-lingual and crosscultural skills. From Dow Chemical, Ahmad soared through the ranks of the consulting world, ending up working throughout Europe and North Africa between 2003 and 2006 before returning to the US to pursue an MBA. While in Germany working on financial and operational process improvements for a major pharma company, Ahmad met Michael Fluehler, then an employee of Altran Switzerland. The two of them became close after realizing that they shared an interest for foreign languages and work in developing regions. The alliance would prove fruitful and the seed for 3BL was planted in both of their minds although neither of them could yet articulate it.

Wharton & Beyond: building the mindset

Ahmad started the Wharton MBA Program for Executives (WEMBA) in May 2007. All MBA

students share a degree of optimism about the economic environment theyre likely to face upon graduation, but the months that would follow the inception of the WEMBA program would usher in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the intra-war period. Throughout the

program, several of Ahmads classmates were laid off, many from once highly-coveted Wall Street jobs. One of those unfortunate individuals, Jason Shapiro, became one of Ahmads closest acquaintances throughout the program. As Certified Public Accountants (CPA), both Jason and Ahmad were able to waive courses in managerial and financial accounting, thereby receiving the opportunity to take
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additional electives open only to those students granted waivers. Each substituted elective contained between ten and fifteen students, and it was in these close confines that Ahmad and Jason got to know one anothers ambitions better. In courses like Privatization and Entrepreneurship through Acquisition, the two bounced countless ideas off one another. Another classmate from the Entrepreneurship through Acquisitions course, Derrick Smith, a VP at a Wall Street boutique derivatives trading firm, also became instrumental in helping Ahmad tweak the vision to develop 3BL. Jason wanted to go into fundless sponsoring at one end of the private equity spectrum, Derrick wanted to be at the $10 million EBITDA end of the spectrum, and I saw scattered dots here and there, not particularly concerned about fitting into the predefined spectrum at all, he recounts. Along with Jason, Derrick and Michael from Ahmads time of consulting in Europe, the 3BL vision began to take roots. During his final year at Wharton, while sitting in MGMT 899, Entrepreneurial Value Creation, a course created and led by Dr. Terry LaPier and featuring a host of prominent business leaders as guest speakers, Ahmads perspective on the need to broaden his involvement changed radically. He became passionate about the need to increase his involvement in existing organizations including those designed to influence public policy. I recall one tremendously powerful session featuring two phenomenal guest speakers, Todd Stottlemyer and Michael Daniels. Listening to their approach convinced me that I had been neglecting an extremely important aspect of value creation, namely the tiny force known as government, Ahmad jokes. Less than one month after finishing the course, Ahmad had written letters to each of Michigans 110 State Representatives, 38 State Senators, the Governor, two Metro Detroit County Executives, five mayors of Michigan cities, both US Senators and all 15 Michigan Representatives in the US House of Congress. It was an election year, and due partially to the momentum caused by the election of our first African-American president and the hysteria of a terrible economic recession, I felt that the political environment was more welcome to new business ideas than at any previous period in my life, Ahmad reflects.
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When asked about what he wrote in the letter to political figures, he smiles, and states, I just basically introduced myself and let them know that in a time when there were far fewer answers than questions, I wanted them to know that I was offering my assistance and inviting them to discuss how I and other willing citizens could help out. He followed his letters with follow-up phone calls and ended up meeting about one-third of the recipients in-person. A few months and 200 hundred letters later, Ahmad realized that he no longer needed to do all of the heavy lifting on his own when he stumbled upon the Metropolitan Policy Program, one of the five major program initiatives of the well-known Brookings Institute. I found that the quality and

thoroughness of their research was singularly impressive, but it still concerned me that the most eloquent research reports would not necessarily result in the execution of community improvement programs, Ahmad explains. Reading through Brookings publications and attending several informative public Brookings forums helped Ahmad to crystallize his mission, and connected his vision for the developing world squarely to the economic destiny of the post-recession United States. This was a pivotal point in Ahmads career as it marked the first time in his life that there was no longer a need to decide between working in developing countries or in the United States. Avoiding this unpleasant either/or scenario helped to relieve some uneasiness in Ahmads mind since he had felt his heart and mind split between the two choices for years. While the nation debated one of the most controversial acts of Congress in recent history, the Detroit automotive bailout, Ahmad decided that Michiganders in particular needed something to galvanize around, and that they needed a reason to choose action over apathy. After trying to enlist the support of Michigans business and political leaders to co-author a book, Ahmad wrote and published, Vision 4 Michigan in 2009, which not only turned into a national bestseller, but became the blueprint for Michigans renaissance, inspiring tens of thousands of ordinary citizens to opt for constructive participation in Michigans post-manufacturing meltdown. You might say that the book was a way for Ahmad to give back, but he takes offense to the term as is evident from the sign of skepticism on his
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face when the phrase is mentioned around him. Giving back is an expression that people generally use when theyve reaped all the fruits of their labors and now realize that they have amassed more than they could ever possibly spend fulfilling their own needs, he explains. Ahmad believes that your entire life is a contribution dedicated to bettering the world in which we live.

Creating Ultimate Value

Ahmad provided the vision and charismatic leadership to establish 3BL on a simple path to creating sustainable value, based on three Is: Inspire, Impart, and Improve. He explains, whatever we do and however we do it, we need to ensure that we motivate our up-, over- and downstream clients (3BLs terminology for vendors, partners and customers, respectively), thus the inspire; confer a benefit via the deal or relationship: the impart; and ultimately, leave the world a better place than we found it: thereby completing the triangle with improve. What might sound like pie-in-the-sky consultant speak to the uninitiated, these simple principles truly define Ahmads approach towards all that he does. Ahmads intellectual curiosity and analytical approach eventually enabled him to co-develop a unique methodology to improve operations of companies by decomposing business processes into major value activity streams. These activity streams, in turn, are decomposed into value-add and nonvalue add activities. Where non-value add activities were discovered, Ahmads model would assess the process cost of either eliminating them altogether or replacing them with value-add activities that could produce a levered benefit on the overall process. The precursor to this value platform can actually be traced to a book that Ahmad published based on academic journal articles produced out of an independent study project in Operations Management undertaken during business school. This unique approach was facilitated by the close cooperation between Control Solutions International (CSI), Ahmads employer between 2006 and 2009, and Altran following the firing of CSIs Founder/CEO. With the founder no longer in the way, new working relationships were forged between CSI and their parent company.
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Ahmad saw the change of tide as a short-lived opportunity to establish rapport with Altrans senior management team, and to synergistically combine the business expertise of a $50 million boutique consulting firm (CSI) with a $3 billion engineering and technology firm. This resulted in Ahmad becoming the CEO of newly formed Altran Value Solutions (AVS) in 2009. Anxious to use AVS as a launching pad for Ahmads true passion as embodied in the business plan for 3BL, he negotiated starting a joint venture between Altran and his business partners to officially launch 3BL as a firm that would actually invest its own capital as well as management and technical expertise into organizations to create value. One of the Altran executives with whom Ahmad had worked with to obtain the CEO role at AVS, Patrick Dauga, was a French businessman who had successfully created substantial value for Altran in Latin America, where he doubled Brazilian sales within two years and increased Altrans sales in the region by over 60%. Based on Patricks familiarity and comfort in developing markets, he became one of the strongest Altran advocates behind the inception of 3BL Capital. 3BL officially opened for business in 2010 when it purchased two struggling minority-owned auto parts manufacturers based in rundown areas of Detroit for $8 million, redesigned operations and business processes, and sold the combined firm as one to a joint venture between Hyundai and General Motors for $65 million just one year later. Our first 3BL project was a major success, and we had our proof of concept right there, Ahmad explained. The early success allowed 3BLs founders Abdul-Qadir, Fluehler, Shapiro, and Smith to spend additional time honing their business model and carefully enhancing their company screening criteria. They also focused all of their attention and ambition into a short and simple motto that succinctly conveyed the purpose they had organized to achieve:

Eradicate structural poverty via focused deployment of management expertise and capital into effectively-governed, hi-potential start-up and existing ventures.
Within three years, 3BL expanded outside of the United States with investment projects in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa where many of the most significant achievements have been made to date. 3BL has worked with over 500 of Africas most important companies spanning all industries by
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overhauling every aspect of portfolio companies operations from manufacturing processes and logistics to information technology and human resource management. By some estimates, 3BL has helped to create over 5,000 new millionaires and has vastly expanded the middle class in regions where just a few short years ago over 98% of the economy was controlled by just 2% of the population. Far beyond the direct investments 3BL has been involved in are the innovative ways that the firm has engendered a culture of entrepreneurship. A 2016 survey co-sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank found that 3BL was considered the most admired corporate brand on the African continent. Ahmad downplays the success story by indicating, We never sought to brand 3BL as a corporate image. The essence behind the true triple bottom line is getting corporate and private citizens to think differently about their world and their responsibilities to it. We saw marketing as a means to shift the global mindset towards sustainable development, not merely as a means to earn profit. 3BL creates value by identifying where markets are impaired or fragmented and removes the impairments or connects the fragmented pieces. Where new organizations are needed to address social issues within markets, 3BL seeks to either establish them following the pattern of the Brookings Institute paving the way for the United Nations, or partners with existing entities to build out the necessary organizational structure accordingly. This simple model has been so profitable since its inception in 2010 that 3BL has been able to directly or indirectly create thousands of wealthy entrepreneurs who view their wealth as an obligation to further the 3BL cause. Rather than simply investing in passive activities to earn a fixed return, graduates of the 3BL system are committed to spending their time and energies educating the ignorant, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and housing the poor. Far beyond just giving charity, those affected by 3BL in general and by Ahmad in particular are actively involved in setting up sustainable institutions that utilize market forces as a growth engine to power the prosperity of the current and future generations alike.

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Guiding principles: the beliefs behind the vision

As a convert to Islam at age 19, Ahmads beliefs in the teachings of the Quran and the statements of Islams Prophet Muhammad shaped his natural inclinations in profound ways. Of the many wise statements of Prophet Muhammad, Ahmad found two particularly relevant for his own personal approach to business:

The Prophet said: the son of Adam (man) has a right to have only three basic things: a house to live in, a dress to cover his body and private parts, and a piece of bread and water.

These simple words inspired Ahmad to work towards establishing mechanisms that would ensure that people could meet their most basic needs. Recognizing that having extravagant dwellings, fancy clothes or lavish food is an additional blessing above and beyond the basic rights that Ahmad believed God guaranteed to all humans, he critically examined economic systems inherent capacity to meet the basic needs of society. A staunch advocate in market forces, Ahmad believed that there were always

profitable paths to achieve sustainable development, and that compassionate commerce paired with well-intentioned leaders is more effective and efficient in creating value than charity alone. That simple credo paved the way for the formation of Triple Bottom Line (3BL) Capital in 2008. The term triple bottom line is widely attributed to SustainAbility founder, John Elkington, who in 1994 published, Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. According to Wikipedia, triple bottom line accounting means expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account ecological and social performance in addition to financial performance. The second statement of Prophet Muhammad that Ahmad tries to implement in his daily activities is in relation to the fate of mankind after departing from the earth. Muslims believe in the hereafter, and that all of a persons deeds will be valueless in the hereafter except for three as described in Muhammads own words:

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The Prophet of God said: when a man dies, all of his acts come to an end, except for three, 1) recurring charity, 2) knowledge which benefits, or 3) a pious child, who prays for him (the deceased)

The concept of recurring charity is known as sadaka jariya in Arabic, and it is essentially a gift that keeps on giving, such as what we now know as a trust or endowment. This conceptarticulated by Muhammad nearly fifteen centuries ago is one of the major driving forces behind Ahmads work and vision. He believes that since you cannot take it with you upon death, the responsible thing is to use your wealth and means in a manner such that it will benefit those left behind, which, in turn, can confer benefits on us in the hereafter. There will come a day when we will all wish that we couldve done

more, Ahmad calmly explains. I want to live my life in a manner that minimizes that feeling of regret as much as possible.

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