Speaker

Mario Harik

Mario Harik

Chief executive of XPO — one of the largest less-than-truckload (LTL) freight carriers in North America — and a software engineer who joined the company as its third employee before rising to run it.

Harik grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, sheltering from bombing as a child and later fleeing with his family through Egypt and Canada. He taught himself to program young — starting on a Commodore 64, reading his elder brother’s computer-engineering textbooks — took his undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut, and did graduate engineering studies at MIT, where meeting far stronger programmers taught him the humility he now treats as the antidote to ego. He joined XPO in its earliest days as chief information (later technology) officer, working for more than a decade alongside founder and serial company-builder Brad Jacobs, from whom he took his lessons on thinking big and on capital allocation. He became CEO in 2022, after XPO spun off its warehousing arm as GXO and its brokerage as RXO to become a pure-play LTL carrier.

Core positions

Harik runs the business as an engineer: strategy decomposed into big levers, each into daily KPIs read for both level and rate of change, each KPI into an action plan with a named owner — married to the belief that people, unlike code, cannot be managed to perfection. He treats service as a product sold pallet by pallet, holding individuals accountable through technology and AI while coaching rather than punishing. He holds that the team is the largest lever for creating value, hires for skill, seriousness, and collegiality, and grounds all feedback in data rather than the subjective. Above all he prizes learning without ego, and defines winning as realising a team’s full potential rather than beating rivals.

In the wiki