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Thursday, 5 September 2019

My Morning Routine: Manal El-Jesri, Public Affairs Manager for Methanex Egypt

Manal El-Jesri, Public Affairs Manager for Methanex Egypt: My Morning Routine looks each week at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Manal El-Jesri, Public Affairs Manager for Methanex Egypt, an affiliate of Methanex Corporation, the world’s leader in methanol production.

My name is Manal El-Jesri, and I’m the proud mom of 22-year-old twins Aida and Salah Hamed, who have just finished their undergraduate studies in the UK.

Whenever I’m asked what I do for a living, my first impulse is to say, “I’m a writer.” Writing is, and has always been, my main craft. It is the tool that helps me connect with the world, and it has always been at the heart of what I do for a living. That has been the case as a professional writer and journalist for the first 15 years of my career and today, as the Public Affairs Manager for Methanex Egypt.

Methanex Egypt is the country’s only methanol production business and an affiliate of the Vancouver-based Methanex Corporation, the world’s leader in methanol production, storage, marketing, transportation, and distribution.

Mornings are my favorite part of the day. I usually wake up around 6am, weekends included. The first thing I do is head to the kitchen for my lemon water, a habit that I picked up over the past year. On most days, I then spend 10-20 minutes meditating. I practice Transcendental Meditation, or TM, a simple, effortless meditation technique that helps with relaxation and focus. I learned meditation four years ago and have been practicing regularly since. As a person who enjoys silence, TM provides me with immediate access to an ever-present sanctuary of stillness and silence inside my mind.

I try to keep my mornings devoid of non-urgent work, although it took me years of discipline to stop myself from reading and responding to every single email immediately. As a public affairs professional, I am always accessible to my team in case of an emergency, so if I am needed I will get a call. While technology is great, being constantly plugged in is not healthy.

For a while, I did try to keep my mornings devoid of coffee as well, but sadly (or not) I failed. The smell of good coffee in the morning is one of the joys I look forward to every day. I usually check Enterprise and the BBC News app over coffee, before heading out to the office.

I always joke about the fact that my team at Methanex is the smallest in the company. I work with two professionals — one based in Cairo and one based in Damietta — and together we ensure that the story of who we are as a business, as an employer, as a partner and as a neighbor is relayed to all of our stakeholders. We also ensure that we listen to and engage with all of our stakeholders.

Our plant, Egypt’s only methanol production facility, is based in Damietta, a coastal city with a unique character and a great community. A key element of my work is to ensure we continue to engage with our neighboring communities — and one of the main channels for this is through our social responsibility program. Earlier this year, we signed an agreement with the UN’s International Labor Organization to extend their successful Canada-funded youth employment project ‘Decent Jobs for Egypt’s Young People’ to Damietta. Last June, and in recognition of this work, Methanex received an award from the International Council for Small Business at the United Nations headquarters in New York — part of the UN’s celebrations of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) day. The two-year partnership seeks to implement the project’s successful interventions in Damietta to create 500 jobs over the lifetime of the project through promoting entrepreneurship and facilitating job matching processes.

Our social responsibility program is part of our responsible care (RC) ethic, which governs how we conduct our business as a global petrochemicals company. Safety and process safety are key elements of RC. On 9 September, together with our partner, ECHEM, we will hold Egypt’s second Process Safety Management conference. Now we’re in the process of making this happen, every day includes a lot of talking via phone or Skype, a lot of writing, a lot of meetings and a daily healthy dose of laughter, which is the privilege of working with a fantastic team of people.

One of the best things I’ve watched recently is Fleabag, which I just finished watching on Amazon Prime Video. It’s one of the best TV programs I’ve seen in years — witty, funny, sometimes sad and highly entertaining. I definitely recommend it (for anyone who is 18+).

I also recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commandatore, an enjoyable and unpredictable novel by one of my favorite writers. I always enjoy delving into Murakami’s unique universe of realities and alternate realities that exist in parallel.

Methanex is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, and currently operates production sites in Canada, Chile, Egypt, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. The Egyptian Methanex Methanol Company is a joint venture of Methanex and Egyptian government partners: Egyptian Petrochemical Holding Company (ECHEM), Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS), Egyptian National Gas Company (GASCO), and the Arab Petroleum Investments Corporation (APICORP).

While our stakeholders understand our business and product, friends and family often ask me what methanol is. Methanol is an essential ingredient used to produce hundreds of everyday industrial and consumer items. It is also a clean-burning, cost-competitive alternative fuel. In Egypt, methanol is a key ingredient for tens of Egyptian industries. In recent years, we have provided methanol to support Zohr’s development operations, making adjustments in our systems to enable the loading of small barges that could take our methanol from the loading jetty to the mega field directly.

With the growing demand for cleaner marine fuel, methanol is a promising alternative fuel for ships. It has the ability to help the shipping industry meet increasingly strict emissions regulations. Methanol significantly reduces emissions of sulphur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter, making it a safe, cost-effective alternative marine fuel.

In my free time, I read — a lot. I also like to spend quality time with one or two close friends.

The best piece of business advice I’ve ever been given was to always be true to yourself, because good things happen when you are. I learned this from a leadership coach I worked with, Scotty Johnson.

My calendar keeps me organized, coupled with my Moleskine notebook. No fancy apps for me.

Enterprise is a daily publication of Enterprise Ventures LLC, an Egyptian limited liability company (commercial register 83594), and a subsidiary of Inktank Communications. Summaries are intended for guidance only and are provided on an as-is basis; kindly refer to the source article in its original language prior to undertaking any action. Neither Enterprise Ventures nor its staff assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy of the information contained in this publication, whether in the form of summaries or analysis. © 2022 Enterprise Ventures LLC.

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