By Barry Stern, Ph.D.
I’m sitting alone in an outdoor café in Dubai next to the water show at the foot of the worlds tallest building, the half mile high Burj Khalifa. What a wonderful sensory and professional experience here! Working with executives with cultural sensibilities different from mine requires me to amp up my interpersonal antennae. Perhaps I can take this trans-cultural mindset back to the US, one in which my interpersonal assumptions are more limited and my ears more tuned to others’ frequencies.
I leave with a profound appreciation for Dubai and a strong desire to return. Here’s just a taste of east meets west, religious meeting secular:
- I’m in the world’s largest mall (largest, tallest, and most, as in “most cranes” are phrases I hear a lot here). Although it’s 85 degrees outside, I’m looking through a glass window, where men in dishdashas and women in habayas are skiing, snowboarding, and tobogganing. Yes there really is an indoor ski slope in the Mall of the Emirates.
- I roam amongst the stores, smelling an exotic mish-mosh of gold, spices, Cartier, and Persian rugs. As one of the 5 daily Islamic calls to prayer echoes through the loudspeakers, my eyes light on a nearby Coldstone Creamery.
- I’m in a taxi crossing over to the “Palm,” a man made island built in the shape of a massive palm leaf. Hotels and restaurants abound, each palm frond budding with condos of various sizes and shapes. The Burj Al Arab hotel built in the shape of a sailboat by the shore of the Gulf is within close eyeshot.
- I travel to the old Gold “Souk” and here I have the sense of an older, but not ancient, Dubai, as the smells, teeming people, traffic and mosques create the gritty, earthy experience that I find myself gravitating towards as I travel.
But the promise of the juggernaut that built Dubai appears somewhat unrealized. The magnitude and creativity of the new construction everywhere has reached beyond its grasp. A countless number of unfinished buildings with motionless cranes adorn the skyline. I’m told that before our global financial crisis this Emirate had the largest single concentration of cranes on our planet. It’s easy to believe.
And, Dubai has only partially delivered to the talent that arrived here. Some Dubai expats abandoned their corporate apartments, drove their company-leased vehicles to the airport, left their keys and jetted out, their lives and their futures probably in tatters. How many were left on their own to pick up the pieces? What are our responsibilities to employees when massively disruptive events leave lives and careers hanging in the balance? These questions stand in high relief as I leave this land of dancing waters and fossilized cranes.
Barry Stern is vice president, Consulting Services and Delivery for Development Dimensions International (DDI). Follow him on Twitter.
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