Zahi Harakeh

Background

About Zahi Harakeh

My late father used to always repeat this phrase whenever he asked me about my work: Show them what you’re capable of. Throughout my career, I’ve always tried to abide by this. To me, a job is more than a 9-5 position. It’s an opportunity to leave my mark and have a positive impact. I’ve always operated with high integrity and given more than I’m responsible for because I have this fire inside of me that strives to improve and make things better. I’ve had successes in my career in 2 completely different industries: the fashion and insurance industries. Starting out in the fashion world, I worked in an entrepreneurial environment where I was able to take on significant roles in planning, operations, analytics, and e-commerce. My proudest moment in this industry was taking the initiative to build a new multi-channel and award-winning e-commerce division from scratch that generated millions of dollars. I decided to pursue my MBA at Georgetown because I felt I needed a new challenge. While there, I discovered Liberty Mutual’s corporate development program, so I decided to apply and fortunately joined the company. After spending 2 years rotating through various projects in operations, innovation, strategy, and underwriting in 3 different cities (Boston, London, San Diego), I joined the industry practices team at Liberty Mutual as the industry director for manufacturing. With very limited underwriting or manufacturing experience, I was able in a relatively short time to get up to speed and deliver key strategic initiatives, trainings, and underwriting guidelines. The portfolio of industries I managed grew to include manufacturing, wholesale, and retail for a combined $1B in premium. While I’m proud of the industry-specific work I’ve delivered at Liberty Mutual, I consider my best achievements to be those that solved a problem or improved an underwriting process. I went beyond my typical job responsibilities to build prototypes of tools that included examples to test and was able to get leadership buy-in in a corporate environment to approve the development of the tools in the underwriting system.