SABANCI HOLDING CEO AHMET DORDUNCU'S SPEECH AT THE COMMEMORATION OF SAKIP SABANCI

10-04-2008
Dear Family Members,
Colleagues, and Close Friends
of Sakip Bey,
 
On the fourth anniversary of Mr. Sakip Sabancı’s leaving us, we have been gathered here once more, in order to refresh our memories.
 
4 year after Sakip Bey’s leaving us.  In fact, he has hardly left...  With the traces he left from his life, he is always at our elbow, he keeps being a guide for us in every step we take, in every decision we make.  He goes on being a model for us not only in our work, but in every aspect of our life.   He has being so not only for the Sabancı Group employees who feel themselves too close to him, but for all the people on his land.  He is always with us with his love for his country, love for the humans, value he attached to art and artists, his social responsibility concept, loyalty, friendship, effervescent personality, and never-ending energy; besides, Sabancı Group, Sabancı University, Sakip Sabancı Museum, and tens of other social works keep creating his contributions and adding values at the elbow of the society in which he lived and which he used to love so much.
 
Although he played a very important role with his leadership initiative in the creation of a giant Group of Companies acting globally and entering into partnerships with multinational companies, Sakip Bey did always keep his modesty, and developed wide-ranging ties of love and affection with people from all walks of life.  The best example to this fact is that late Sakip Sabancı is still being elected as the first person to remember in most surveys for the most favourite and followed person, and a personal brand name in the business world.
 
One of the outstanding characteristics of Sakip Sabancı is his writing habits.  It is not his books only what I mean, but he used to collect everybody around a table, without discriminating them for their ages, when he was about to engage in any business, listen to the ideas, write them down in detail in his special notebooks with his own hand, and follow therefrom.  This is a substantive evidence of the importance he attached to institutionalisation.
 
He stated at every turn how essential institutionalisation was in order to ensure continuity of organisations.  In his book “HERSEYIN BASI SAGLIK” (Everything Begins with Health) he emphasised that the organisations should be based on systems, as in the adage “do not lean on a wall, it collapses; do not rely on a man, he dies.  By saying “no organisation is possible without the humans, and no institutionalisation, either,” he noted the importance of the human factor, and that it should not be omitted, as well.
 
Now we, the Sabancı Group, within a structure that has been taking significant steps towards institutionalisation with a participative managerial concept he had taught us, in the direction he wished and pointed us, have been expanding our business, as a harmonious, sharing and successful team, in a sound and steady manner on the one hand, and trying to contribute to our environment and our country with the values we create on the other hand.  Thus, I think we keep commemorating him every day and with all our employees, as he always wished.
 
I would like to end my words by stating once more our respect and yearning for him.  Sabancı Group will go on working with might and main to go even further, being a successful Group of Companies, creating value for its native country and shareholders, and aware of its responsibilities; in a way deserving of Sakip Sabancı’s admiration.