About Mohamed Al Hashemi
Mohamed Al Hashemi is the Chief Executive Officer of Union Coop, one of the largest consumer cooperatives in the United Arab Emirates. He is an Emirati business leader whose career spans banking, healthcare, entertainment, and retail across the GCC region. He is the author of four books on leadership execution and governance: Investable, Leading When Everyone Is Watching, The Execution Gap, and The New Economy. His intellectual territory spans four frameworks: the execution gap, the investable framework, the expectation economy, and decision gravity.
Mohamed Al Hashemi is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a Forbes Business Council Member. He writes and speaks about what it takes to lead when the stakes are real, drawing on two decades of operational experience across four industries in the Middle East.
I have seen strong strategies collapse because authority fragmented.
I have watched pressure move upward until it reached the CEO.
I write to name these structural patterns clearly.
Before Union Coop, Mohamed Al Hashemi served as Regional President for Entertainment and Cinemas at Majid Al Futtaim, where he led the introduction of commercial cinemas to Saudi Arabia after a 35-year ban. He built a team of over 1,300 people from the ground up, navigated an entirely new regulatory environment, and secured market leadership for VOX Cinemas across the Kingdom. This was a landmark cultural and commercial achievement that required building an industry that did not previously exist in the country.
His career began in corporate banking at Emirates Islamic Bank, where he managed relationships across aviation, retail, and construction. He later moved to Majid Al Futtaim, where he held leadership roles in treasury, healthcare, and entertainment before being appointed to lead the Saudi cinema expansion. Each transition was a deliberate move into a new industry, building the cross-sector perspective that defines his approach to leadership execution and governance.
Mohamed Al Hashemi is a Certified Board Director through the Hawkamah Institute for Governance and has completed executive education at Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge Judge Business School, Stanford Online, and the University of Cape Town. He serves as Chairman of Atelier Digital, a retail-focused artificial intelligence technology firm, and is a board member of the UAE Food Platform. He mentors entrepreneurs through the Endeavor Organization and teaches entrepreneurship at the New Economy Academy in Dubai.
Mohamed Al Hashemi: Core Domains of Expertise
Mohamed Al Hashemi's work centers on five interconnected domains of leadership execution and governance.
Leadership Execution
Closing the gap between strategy and results through authority structures, operational discipline, and decision-making frameworks.
Corporate Governance
Board-level oversight, accountability structures, and the governance practices that determine whether organizations thrive or stall.
Startup Investment Readiness
Evaluating whether a business is genuinely investable through market validation, financial readiness, and founder credibility.
Organizational Authority
How authority flows through organizations, why it breaks down, and what leaders can do to restore it.
GCC Business Leadership
Leading across industries and cultures in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, from banking to entertainment to retail.
Decision Gravity
Why unresolved decisions rise to the top. The structural pull that forces choices upward when authority is unclear, trust is absent, or accountability has not been distributed.
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