A rally winner, a licensed pilot, a Harley rider, a CEO, a board director at the central bank. An architecture for the professional whose load is not declining.
Tara has handed over. Phuti stands on an inheritance. The third case is a woman still carrying a load that has not declined, who has openly admitted in the French-language Moroccan business press that her passions have receded. Her architecture is a study in what survives when resolution is unavailable. That is the architecture most readers will actually need.
Miriem Bensalah-Chaqroun is Chief Executive Officer of Les Eaux Minérales d'Oulmès, the Casablanca-listed bottled-water company that produces the Sidi Ali brand. She is vice-chair of Groupe Holmarcom, one of Morocco's five largest industrial-commercial-financial conglomerates, founded by her father. From 2012 to 2018, she served as president of the Confédération générale des entreprises du Maroc, the CGEM, making her the first woman in the MENA region to lead a national employers' confederation. She sits on the board of Bank Al Maghrib, Morocco's central bank. She has held board seats at Renault-Nissan, Eutelsat, and Suez.
The clocks running loudest in her life are the organisational clock and the comparison clock, in forms specific to her geography.
The organisational clock runs loudest because the load is quantitatively unusual even by senior-executive standards. She runs a major industrial company, she governs a multi-generational family conglomerate, she serves on the central bank's board, and for six years she was the public voice of the entire Moroccan private sector in negotiations with government and unions. During her CGEM presidency, she managed a period in which strikes in the private sector increased by 96.7 per cent year-on-year.
The comparison clock runs loudest because she operates without a template. When she took the CGEM presidency in 2012, no woman in the MENA region had done it before. In her own words, quoted in the 100 Femmes profile of Moroccan women leaders:
Being the first means every action carries interpretive weight beyond its own content. Every choice is read as a signal about what is possible for those who come after. The professional herself becomes the model, in real time, without rehearsal, without a predecessor to consult.
To understand Miriem's architecture, you have to understand what she was before she was a CEO.
In 1993, she won the Trophée des Gazelles, the legendary women's off-road rally that sends competitors across the Moroccan desert in four-wheel-drive vehicles navigating by compass alone. She is a licensed pilot, rated for both VFR (visual flight rules) and IFR (instrument flight rules), the certification required to fly in adverse weather. She is a serious Harley-Davidson rider. A competitive golfer. An equestrian.
In 1995, she undertook a solo motorbike tour of several thousand kilometres across Morocco. On a bend near Alhoceima, in the north, she crashed. The wound was serious enough that she had to be treated in Nador. The detail that survives in the record is her own account of what happened next.
This is a story about identity. The woman who says that sentence is telling you what she is, and what she refuses to stop being, even when her body has given her a specific reason to consider stopping.
Fast-forward to the period of her CGEM presidency and her executive responsibilities at Holmarcom. The French-language Moroccan business press tracked her closely. They tracked, specifically, what was happening to the life she had built before the load arrived. In 2015, the Moroccan weekly La Nouvelle Tribune described the situation in a passage that deserves translation in full.
Translated: this mother of three indeed has very little free time. So much so that she devotes herself less and less to her favourite passions, such as golf and horseback riding.
Read that as an architect would. The passions have receded into reduced form. The golf and the equestrianism have less time than they used to. In the same period, Miriem Bensalah-Chaqroun remains a rally driver. Remains a pilot. Remains a motorcyclist. The identities that pre-dated the load are still operating in her life, in reduced form, in the spaces she can still protect.
The Maintenance Plan defines Reliefs as short practices that interrupt the overdrive cycle during the day. In most presentations of the framework, Reliefs are small. Three minutes of slow breathing. A walk without a phone. A cup of tea in silence.
Miriem's case demonstrates a more difficult version of the same principle. For the professional whose load has not declined, and for whom Guardrails have already been installed as far as they can be, the question moves beyond what small practice to add. The question becomes what identity to refuse to lose.
Miriem rides a motorbike. Miriem flies planes. Miriem drives rally cars. These are load-heavy, skill-intensive, risk-real practices more than they are relaxation activities. What makes them Reliefs in the Maintenance Plan sense is that they sit structurally separate from the professional identity. When Miriem Bensalah-Chaqroun is on a motorbike, she is a rider rather than the boss of bosses. The Relief is the existence of an identity the professional role cannot consume.
When the load does not relent, Reliefs become refusals. They are identities the professional refuses to let the schedule consume. This refusal discipline goes beyond scheduling.
The refusal is to allow the professional identity to become total. The refusal is to let the Harley go. The refusal is to give up the pilot's licence because there is no time to fly. The refusal is to answer the question who are you with only the title on the business card.
In the La Vérité description that has followed Miriem through the press, she is called "a symbol of female quiet power." The phrase is apt in a way the profile may not have intended. The quiet power sits in the garage with a motorbike in it, a garage the CGEM presidency could not quite reach.
One final observation about the Miriem case. The architecture she preserves is unevenly maintained. The record shows that. The golf receded. The equestrianism receded. The practice operates as a managed decline with a floor she refuses to cross, rather than a steady state. That honesty is part of what makes the case useful. The reader still carrying a full professional load needs a picture of what is possible when balance is unavailable, which is the preservation of the floor.
Miriem Bensalah-Chaqroun has held a specific line inside the fight against the Seven Clocks, rather than winning the war. That line is the instrument.
The question the reader is meant to carry away from this case is the hardest of the three. What is the one non-work identity you will refuse to let disappear, even if it shrinks, even if it recedes, even if the professional load only increases? Name it. Protect what is left of it. Refuse to cross the floor.
The 5M cohorts help senior leaders identify the non-work identities worth protecting across a lifetime of senior responsibility, and design the structural refusals that keep those identities alive when the load does not relent.