The Ernest C. Arbuckle Award is the highest honor that the Stanford Graduate School of Business bestows. It's presented annually to a leader who has achieved distinction in management and who has demonstrated a genuine, sustained commitment to addressing the changing needs of society. Tonight, as you know, Hamid Moghadam will become the 56th recipient of this award. Hamid Moghadam earned his MBA from the Stanford GSB in 1980. Three years later, he co-founded AMB Property Corporation with Doug Abbey and colleagues, and John, who's here with us tonight, too. Doug's a lecturer at the GSB, and he is going to lead our fireside chat later on with Hamid.
Many of you know, of course, that Hamid led AMB through its IPO in 1997 and through its merger with Prologis in 2011. Under his leadership, Prologis became the global leader in logistics real estate, and one of the top 100 companies in the S&P 500. In January of this year, Hamid transitioned from CEO to executive chairman. Now, Hamid has received so many honors for his leadership over the years. I'll just mention a few of them. In 2006, he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. In 2013, he was recognized as the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year representing the United States, and the Harvard Business Review ranked him the 17th best performing CEO in the world.
He served on the Stanford University Board of Trustees, the GSB Advisory Council, the boards of Stanford Health Care and Freeman Spogli Institute, and he chaired the Stanford Management Company, overseeing the stewardship of our endowment. Hamid's also mentored countless students. He supported faculty and contributed to the intellectual life of the school, and I think that's exactly what alumni excellence looks like at Stanford and at the GSB. Alongside with Christina, he has invested in the intellectual life of the GSB in so many ways that will outlast us all. Together, they established the Moghadam Family Professorship, and they are the primary benefactors of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford. And this is a program that supports interdisciplinary scholarship, courses, and public dialogue on Iran's history, culture, and place in the world. Hamid, what you've built in business is extraordinary. What you have given to the university is lasting. And the way you have done both with integrity and purpose is exactly what Ernie Arbuckle would have recognized and admired.
I should say a few things about what Hamid has built. In 1983, he co-founded AMB and built it into the global powerhouse in logistics real estate. 3% of the world's GDP flows through his buildings, 3%. For someone at his level, Hamid is uniquely accessible. He takes the phone call. He responds to the email. He talks to the kid at the bar, who's obviously the most junior person in a room full of important people. Hamid is the rare CEO who develops other CEOs.
It's early 2021, we've emerged from COVID, and we're on the offense. We're one of the biggest buyers of shopping centers in the country. Hamid calls me out of the blue and says, "Jahan, your number one job as CEO of this company is to build the best relationship with the 30 tenants that matter, figure out what their pain point is, and solve it for them." I did what I always do when Hamid gives me advice: I listen. And it was a couple of years later that I realized what he had done. That wasn't just tactical advice. That was the Prologis playbook, one that he had spent 40 years writing based on the premise that when the rest of the industry is obsessing over capital, you obsess over your customers. That's how Hamid develops other CEOs.
Hamid shows up early, he stays in touch, and he gives you a piece of how he built one of the great American companies. That is genuinely rare. Most CEOs at his level go on to build a great company. A smaller number go on to build an industry, and a very, very small few go to build other people who then go on to build their own companies and their own industries. Hamid has done all three, and that is a legacy that compounds. There is just one Hamid, and he is in every circle that I've seen him in always the most respected man in the room. Hamid, congratulations and thank you.
What Stanford gave me wasn't a direction; it gave me a way of thinking and, maybe more importantly, a comfort with uncertainty. That turned out to matter because the most important decisions don't come with complete information. When I started working, I wasn't trying to build a global company. We were just trying to learn, do a good job, and take advantage of opportunities as they came along. Over time, the opportunities added up. If there's a pattern, it's probably this: things evolve, you adjust, you make mistakes, and you try to stay relevant. What looks like a long-term strategy in hindsight is often just a series of decisions made along the way, with many mistakes among those decisions. What I've come to appreciate over time is how much of any outcome depends on circumstances, timing, people, and access to opportunity. There are many people with similar abilities, greater abilities, who didn't get the same chances, and that's where a place like Stanford really matters. They create opportunity. They bring people together. They change trajectories, sometimes in ways that are hard to see at the time. I'm certainly a beneficiary of that. A couple of things seem to hold up over time: be open to change, take on things before you're completely ready, and pay attention to the people around you. In my case, that turned out to be the most valuable part of being here.
So you're one of the few CEOs that's taken a company from a startup to an S&P Global 100. Real estate's a simple business—four walls and a roof, the industrial business is, that is. So, yet, as you look at the history and the trajectory from 42 years ago, you've made so many decisions that have fundamentally changed who we do business with, how we're organized, and a constant evolution of looking around the corner. And as you used to say, we have to avoid being roadkill, because if you're not doing that... So give us a little bit of a hint as to kind of the discipline and the thought process that led to all these significant changes over the years.
