LEARNING
arabIC LESSONS what the world can learn from dubai
Speakglobal spent a short but highly informative and entertaining time with Dr Tommy Weir, head of the Emerging Markets Leadership Center.
CEOs turn to Dr Tommy Weir for advice on both leadership and how to grow their organisations. Dr Weir has helped many of the world’s leading company executives achieve better performance.
D
r Weir’s latest book – Leadership Dubai Style: The Habits to Achieve Remarkable Success – is the result of his abiding curiosity about what makes the Gulf state, where he now lives, so successful, or indeed, successful at all, given that it has little oil (less than one-twentieth of neighbouring Abu Dhabi’s) and was until the 1960s a cholera-ridden backwater. The full answer is, of course, highly complex. It lies partly in the state’s adoption of a common currency, partly in dubai’s status as a free-trade
port. but above all, it is a consequence of the contract between the rulers and the people. At irst glance, such an agreement may seem easier to achieve in an absolute monarchy such as dubai’s than in liberal democracies. but the principles are universal and globally applicable: the mechanisms that make this desert sheikhdom prosperous are equally useful in western factories and boardrooms, and should be adopted more widely. CONSENT AND RECIPROCITY what we should remember is that even the most dictatorial regimes ultimately depend for their continuing existence on the consent of the people - think of Egypt and Libya, both of which looked impregnable until the populace inally said “Enough”; once that happened, not even their armed forces and secret police could sustain them. dr weir is clear about this: “Citizens have ways of voting though not necessarily in the polling booth”. Loyalty is a two-way street; government is reciprocal; western executives have much to learn from feudal Arabs.
THE CHEESEBURGER THEORY One of Dr Weir’s most celebrated notions: imagine that the only cheeseburger you’ve ever had is a McDonald’s; you naturally think it’s the best, but perhaps only because you’ve got nothing to compare it with. So when Dr Weir takes you out for a cheeseburger and he drives straight past the golden arches, you think he’s taking you for a ride in more than the expected sense of the term. But soon he brings you to a family-run joint (rather like Dubai), where you discover that there’s more to burgery than meets the eye. What goes for fast food goes a fortiori for business methods: in order to stay ahead of the game, we must always be on the lookout for new approaches; we must never allow ourselves or our colleagues to use “That’s the way we’ve always done it” as a reason for not trying something diferent.
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SPEAKGLOBAL | ISSUE 6