Tekfen Holding TBulletin 35

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Tekfen celebrates its 60th anniversary
Very few companies are lucky as to celebrate such a meaningful anniversary, and we are proud to
share this happiness with all the members of the Tekfen family.
To this day, we have worked together to bring Tekfen to this point, and together we will continue to
carry it further in the decades to come.
Let us not forget that the future belongs to those who build it.
Tekfen Holding Board of Directors
SIXTY
There are very few public companies in Turkey
that are sixty years old and can boast of having
a corporate culture.
The values we have inherited from the founders
of Tekfen, and which are written indelibly in the
genes of Tekfen and the members of the Tekfen
family, values like integrity, honesty, industri-
ousness, serving one’s country, and respect
for people and the environment will continue
to be our guide. For this invaluable legacy, we
feel infinitely indebted to Feyyaz Berker, Nihat
Gökyiğit, and Necati Akçağlılar, who is no lon-
ger with us. And since this is the anniversary
issue, I would like to share with you a personal
memory concerning each of our founders.
Working with Feyyaz Berker is both easy and
difficult. It’s easy because he trusts you and en-
courages you to take initiative, solve problems,
and make decisions. It’s also difficult because
this moral and material trust and delegation of
power implies taking an immense responsibil-
ity. He is always democratic and expects you to
express your opinion unreservedly.
Working with Nihat Gökyiğit is easy and dif-
ficult for more or less the same reasons. The
similarity of business styles of two characters
so different is surprising. The main difference
between them is that Nihat Gökyiğit wants to
get personally involved in doing the job at hand.
I witnessed the most striking example of this
in 2005. We were organizing a concert in Lon-
don to accompany “The Turks” exhibition at
the Royal Academy, and we took with us the na-
tional flags of 23 countries represented by the
members of the orchestra. The flags got crum-
pled in the suitcase, and had to be ironed. As I
was leaving the hotel with the suitcase packed
with the flags to take them to be ironed, Nihat
Gökyiğit saw me and asked, “Where are you go-
ing?” and added right away, “Wait, I’m coming
with you!” He can be endearingly stubborn that
way.
With Necati Akçağlılar, I had only one encoun-
ter, and I wish there were more. I had gone to
him concerning the payment of the budget of
a reception. He first looked at the budget, then
looked up at me over his glasses and said, “So
who is going to pay for all this?” He was very
polite, but he also called me to account!
We have asked “the great engineer Professor
Zihni Sinir”, the famous Turkish cartoonist,
to depict Tekfen’s world in the form of a giant
caricature, and we are pleased to present the
enclosed poster, hoping that you will like it and
hang it on your walls.
I would like to take this opportunity to congrat-
ulate each and every one of the members of the
Tekfen family, and wish you a happy, peaceful,
productive, and safe new year at our company.
Dori Kiss Kalafat
Corporate Communications Coordinator