In a Climate of Middle Eastern Business Growth, Stagnant Equals Dead
If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, go see how business is done in other parts of the world, meet with your counterparts with a natural curiosity to listen louder, you’ll become complacent. That stagnation will be the death of your personal growth as well as that of your enterprise.
After a 10-day business trip to Dubai, UAE, it took me less than a day to grasp the sheer amount of growth going on in that part of the world. The competition, the vision, the scrappiness, was fascinating to observe. If you think what happens a 17-hour flight from you can’t impact your business, think again: In an increasingly competitive global business environment, every business model will face disruption. Ignore this fact at your own peril.
You may already be aware of Dubai as the business hub of the Middle East and North Africa, but if you haven’t been there recently, you may not realize the pace at which the city is expanding, or what that means for the rest of the globe. Just looking around downtown on this visit, I counted 47 construction cranes. Most of the growth is funded by foreign direct investment. In Dubai they’re building a vision, and attracting companies with the right types of partnerships that believe in that vision and want to invest in it.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi among its seven emirates) has developed a vested interest in growth. Governments and private industry alike are investing in making that happen. There is no tax. They’re putting in infrastructure. Abu Dhabi just saw the opening of a new Cleveland Clinic healthcare campus. They’re building what will be the world’s biggest airport — the current one isn’t able to keep pace with the huge growth in passenger traffic. This kind of alignment on a vision of the Middle East’s future will impact the business climate around the world.
The Middle East is creating synergies as it coordinates this growth. They’ve taken the tired western concept of “industrial parks” to a new level, grouping businesses into free economic zones with names like Internet City, Media City, Healthcare City, and Motor City. (Yes, I found the Ducati motorcycle dealership. BMW, and Honda too.) They’ve ramped up a fully functional metro rail system; the world’s tallest building (the Burj Khalifa, over 2700 ft.) is fully operational. This is enterprise readying itself for unbelievable scale.
All this is evidence of one simple fact: If you stay stagnant, you are going to be disrupted. Business climates in many other parts of the world act scrappier than we do; more driven than we may be; they are supported by their governments in enabling their private sector growth in ways dramatically more impactful than ours at the moment. While we struggle with bureaucracy and gridlock, our competitors are doing everything they can to remove obstacles from profitability, learning while performing, and scale. This is just my perspective, but the sheer amount of investment and growth, the recapitalization and revitalization that I observed cannot be denied.
If you haven’t visited Dubai, you are naïve in your perception of the Arab world. If you think Arabs are misinformed, or undereducated, or oil-rich but civilization-poor, you couldn’t be more wrong. Their business people are often western-educated. They’re running multi-million if not billion-dollar enterprises and institutions. And, importantly, they are highly driven. They work six-day weeks (Fridays are their weekends). Do they have obstacles? Yes. Mid-June to Mid-July is the holy month of Ramadan, observed by fasting. Nothing much happens then. Then comes summer — a lot of people vacation elsewhere until the temperatures come down from highs in the 120s, lows in the 90s. But come September, it picks right back up. Their economy is booming, thanks to investing in their future.
It takes less than a day on the ground in Dubai to realize that this economy runs on relationships. Relationships are unequivocally the arrowhead, not the feathers on the tail end of the shaft. Sure, your business is welcome, but they want to get to know YOU. Your genealogy, where you come from, why you are here, and your perceptions of the Middle East matters to them more than any product or service you offer. To earn your repute in this culture, you must be well read, well spoken, and engaged. Be ready to articulate your unique point of view, with passion and conviction!
I had a fascinating conversation with a media executive who has been in Dubai 17 years. According to him, the single biggest reason expats from the U.S. and Europe do not succeed is fundamentally about relationships. He has paid fortunes for expats who look fantastic on paper, who are in fact brilliant, but they arrive in Middle East and they do not understand the culture. They can’t navigate the nuances.
If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you will become complacent. If you don’t go see how business is done in other parts of the world, you will become complacent. If you don’t meet with your counterparts with a natural curiosity to listen and understand and figure out what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, you’re going to be complacent. That stagnation will be the death of your enterprise.
“Our way” isn’t the only way. There is tremendous beauty and insight in diverse perspectives. Dubai is a good place to witness this in action.
Nour Takeaways
- The Middle East is investing in growth and scale. Fail to consider the impacts on your business at your own risk.
- The coordination between government and private industry across sectors and boundaries is creating unprecedented readiness to scale.
- In the Middle East, business runs on relationships. You will fail in this nuanced culture if you fail to develop your strategic relationship skills.
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David Nour is an enterprise growth strategist and the thought leader on Relationship Economics® — the quantifiable value of business relationships. In a global economy that is becoming increasingly disconnected, The Nour Group, Inc. has attracted consulting engagements from over 100 marquee organizations in driving unprecedented growth through unique return on their strategic relationships. Nour has pioneered the phenomenon that relationships are the greatest off balance sheet asset any organizations possesses, large and small, public and private. He is the author of several books including the best selling Relationship Economics — Revised (Wiley), ConnectAbility (McGraw-Hill), The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Capital (Praeger) and Return on Impact — Leadership Strategies for the age of Connected Relationships (ASAE). Learn more at www.NourGroup.com.
