Andy Wirth and Tony Harris moved halfway across the world to help build Neom: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s futuristic new city in the Saudi desert. But what they found wasn’t the desert utopia of Neom’s marketing. Instead, they found a project bleeding cash, led by a screaming CEO, where very little was actually being built. WSJ’s Rory Jones and Eliot Brown explain how Neom fell years behind schedule – and went billions of dollars over-budget – thanks to a culture of runaway spending and never telling the boss “no.” Hosted by Ryan Knutson. Further Listening: - Neom, Pt 1: Skiing in the Desert Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Tony Harris, the education expert you heard from in the last episode, was just a few months into his job at NEOM when he got his first real impression of the project's CEO, Nadmi al-Nasser.
He called all of us together. And at that point, I think there were about between 400 and 500 people at the camp at that time.
The denizens of NEOM piled into the camp's cafeteria. Saudis, expats.
He called everyone together. and he literally started screaming and shouting. It was as though your four-year-old was having a tantrum on the floor. What was he saying when he was yelling? He was admonishing people for not working hard enough, essentially was his message. And what was going through my mind was, this can't actually be happening.
And I thought to myself, okay, very soon what's going to happen? He's going to stop his performing and somebody's going to come in and there's going to be some interesting intervention and there's going to be some little lesson about how not to manage. But oh no, this was for real. This was for real. I was shocked. I mean...
you know i have lived all over the world i've i've taught all over the world i've encountered people from different cultures i've never seen anything like this nadmi al-nasa has built a reputation over the decades of getting things done
Reporter Rory Jones. Like he is a doer who is going to execute and he's going to bludgeon his way through whatever project he's working on and he's going to get it finished on budget and on time. And this is the kind of guy that MBS brings into the project pretty early on.
Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's crown prince, was on a mission to construct what amounted to a brand new futuristic city-state within his country. Neom was his vision, his baby. But every visionary needs a right-hand man. MBS's was Nadmi. Nadmi, everyone we talked to called him by his first name, became Neom's CEO in 2018.
He's an engineer by training, with round glasses and a trim salt-and-pepper mustache. He came to the CEO job with a track record of delivering on big projects. He'd expanded Saudi Arabia's biggest oil field in the 90s and built a new university complex on the Red Sea. And according to Rory's reporting, he made no apologies for his, let's call it aggressive, management style.
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