“If your dreams aren’t scary enough, they aren’t big enough.” she smiles. At Ilham Kadri, optimism is combined with confidence. Always more “interested in the journey rather than the destination,” she embarked on the Syensqo adventure at the end of 2023, where she became CEO. This is the result of her time at Solvay, between 2019 and 2023. In this emblematic Belgian chemical company, she led the greatest transformation. Under her leadership, and with the overwhelming approval of 99.5% of shareholders, this group created one hundred and sixty years ago split in December 2023.
On one side, the chemical commodities were grouped together, under the historic name Solvay, and on the other, the chemical specialties within Syensqo. “Fundamentally convinced of the ability of science to find solutions,” Ilham Kadri describes “a scientific company with revolutionary solutions that lighten, electrify and connect,” developed by “innovators and explorers.”
Given his career, Ilham Kadri does not seem to have lacked much“inspiration” (the meaning of her first name). Nothing predestined her to work all over the world. She spent her youth in Casablanca (Morocco) in a very modest environment. Raised by her illiterate grandmother who encouraged her passion for science and studies, she has always shown ambition. “But I never dreamed of being a CEO. Arriving in France at 17 with a scholarship, joining a preparatory class and then becoming an engineer, what a victory!” she relates. After a master’s degree in Canada, Ilham Kadri completed her university studies with a doctorate in physics and chemistry at the École d’application des hauts polymers in Strasbourg. It was there, in 1997, that she chose industry. She recalls a “train that stops”, in this case a visit to Shell on campus. She enlists there “without speaking English well and without knowing Anglo-Saxon culture”but he likes the discomfort: “I thought I would learn.”
A great thirst for learning
Ilham Kadri claims this curiosity as the common thread of her career. At Shell, she moved from the laboratory to marketing. At UCB and Rohm and Haas, she learned product management, plant management and got involved in her first mergers and acquisitions. Then her new employer Huntsman taught her finance… She had a hard time with her first major crisis, between 2008 and 2009, where she found herself through the consolidations at Dow Chemical. As a young mother, against the advice of those around her, she left Switzerland to settle in the Middle East. In Saudi Arabia, she took part in the Sadara petrochemical mega-project of her new employer, which had partnered with Saudi Aramco. She recalls a “economic, industrial, personal and cultural challenge which has profoundly shaken [sa] life and allowed him to progress to positions of greater responsibility. She smiles as she remembers that busy period, when she traveled in an abaya and earned the respect of the Saudis.
She claims to have never entered a meeting room thinking she was a woman. She concedes “to have suffered a lot” young mother, but assures that there is no “has no choice between her baby and her job.” She talks about inclusion as a “engine of business success”criticizes the inequality sometimes due to maternity leave and has instituted sixteen weeks of parental leave for the spouse at Solvay. She believes “to meritocracy and diversity of thoughts and origins, not gender,” to the strength of the collective, to curiosity and to failures to bounce back. Ilham Kadri claims the necessity “to learn, unlearn, then relearn.” And insists on the need to unlearn, which she considers essential to move forward.
The work that characterizes her
The essay “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf
“It addresses the lack of resources society allocates to women’s education and the lack of female voices telling their own stories.”
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