WEF Middle East - Second day

Some great quote ran around during the second day -

"If goods do not cross borders - Armies will" -Sam Hamdon, French Liberal Economist (Must be the only one...)

Al Makhtoum, Dubai's leader gave a great speech in the middle of the second day. he illustrated the danger in the current state of education in the middle east by bringing up two statistics:

• "Arab books printed last year represent only 0.08% of the total books printed - less than the books in Turkey" - very sad given the great Arab scholars of previous ages.

• "Due to unemployment the region is short 15M jobs, and given rate of population increase the region needs to manufacture 75M new jobs in the near future" - Definitely not a sustainable situation, requiring an immediate shift in priorities in favor of education.

Then he announced an amazing endowment of $10B fund (yes that was not a typo...ten billion us dollars) - dedicated to building knowledge base, research and leadership in the private and public sector across the region. The endowment will provide scholarships to the best universities around teh world, construct research centers in the Middle East and invest in the creation of mid market companies across all sectors. They will focus on the improvement of governnance and creation of job opportunities.

I loved the statement he used

"Get out of tone of dispare and arm our people with opportunities, motivate the young to explore the unknown - it is our responsibility to encourage them and motivate them."

Arming the young with opportunities is the right tool to put in their hands. If this mega initiative works it could be a key transformative initiative in this region. Improving the real natural resource of the Middle East - the young kids.

Again, an echoing of the messages from the first day - echoing the success of "silicon valley" as replicated around the world

"A key advantage to the venture economies is the social acceptance and willingness of people to fail. Countries that do not know how to live with the individual failure will not get the overall growth coming from a swarm of ideas - some good and some failed"

A great comment later from Rachid - minister of trade of Egypt

" Governments are realizing that they work for their local businesses - they have to set the policy that will make the businesses succeed or their economy will stop growing. The policy has to encourage companies to take risks"

to understand the countries that transformed themselves one must look at Sheikh Mohammad Al Khalifa's observation about his country - Bahrain - where oil is only 11% of the GDP but financial services already account for 26% of the GDP - showing the road for a country that will become a net importer of energy in 7 years' time.

Minister Rachid from Egypt made a very interesting observation that shows how much the region understands the short lived nature of this oil boom -

" the future does not depend on oil - it depends on people. Look at history and learn about the future"
"The world will not accept that all the money syphons off to the region through a global "oil tax" - they will invest in other solutions"

At the end we had a great panel about the future of green energy - but that's in another post.

Comments

[Bigbluejlr]

Hello Shai, thanks again for your feed back ! Did you had a chance to hear something from Saudi Arabia ? This country does not seem to face the new challenges, they are lacking also of skilled people and jobs. People are mainly kept quiet with petrol money learning Coran. What do you think ?
By the way a big European congress about electrical vehicules is taking place in Brussels this week end
www.ele-drive.com.
http://www.clean-auto.com/ sorry for them in French ...

[Elke Speliopoulos]

This has been truly fascinating to read so far - thank you so much for sharing!! It is very encouraging to hear about the constructive work being done, rather than to read about various destructive forces' undoing of good around the globe that makes the news every day.
You do need someone to take notes for you next time you attend something like this, don't you? ;-)

[Jay Liew]

Hi Shai,

A simple Google search for your email didn't result in anything, so my apologies for the little off topic to this blog post.

I just saw this interesting video clip of a new form of energy transfer, and remembered your quest to change the world by ridding us from our reliance on oil. Perhaps you might find this video clip interesting too. Good luck!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kKtKSEQBeI

Best,

Jay

[Steffen]

Hi Shai,
very interesting to read your blog. Just one comment: the quote "If goods do not cross borders - Armies will" is often attributed to the French Economist Frederic Bastiat.
Cheers
Steffen

[Moshe]

Shai Shalom

I would be very glad to work with you and make this great vision to become true

all the best
Moshe

[Satish]

Shai,
Very Very interesting to read your blog just couple of things or your thoughts how far are we from realizing alternative energy source share your thoughts or is it a wish list or illusion "good if we have it" kind of, interestingly one of the comments stated about Saudi Arabia, its true i havent heard anything visionary from thier leadership about this,though UAE,Jordan and others have

[Ben]

Hey Shai,

Are you interested in the CEO position at our company? www.wirama.com

Best regards,

Ben

[Maher]

Shai,

We met a few months ago at a conference. Until recently I held a similar position to your ex-SAP one at Lawson Software (I am now on my third startup). I am originally from Syria. I live in San Francisco. I agree with your assessment of King Abdullah of Jordan - I had an offshore team in Amman years ago with my ex-startup. Would love to get together for coffee and chat - we have many things in common. Shoot me an email if you are interested.

Maher

[Mike]

Hello Shai,

Your recent entries have been fascinating to read. I must admit, I started visiting your blog because of my work in enterprise technology, but keep coming back because of the insights like these. It hearkens me back to a previous life working with peace and development initiatives in Colombia. If I can be so bold, I would recommend reading a book called "Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence" by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, which I think does an incredible job of putting these ideas in perspective and grounding them in decades of research. If you have a chance to check it out, I would love to get your thoughts.

Keep up the great work.

[Rick Bullotta]

Google.org investing in EV technology!

http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/19/news/economy/google_plugin/index.htm?postversion=2007061911

- Rick

[Rick Bullotta]

Google.org investing in EV technology!

http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/19/news/economy/google_plugin/index.htm?postversion=2007061911

- Rick