Ihssane Mounir, Boeing’s sales chief for Asia, arrived in U.S. at age 17 with no English but plenty of drive.

Ihssane Mounir, 42, holds what is probably the most demanding sales job at Boeing.

As senior vice president of sales for northeast Asia, he heads up Boeing sales to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

He sees his wife and four school-age kids about one week a month — the rest of the time he’s traveling.

For Mounir, it’s been a remarkable ascent. At the age of 17, he arrived alone in the U.S. from his birthplace of Morocco. He didn’t speak English.

But he had sufficiently impressive high-school results that Wichita State University had given him a conditional acceptance to study aerospace engineering.

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