EP052 - The power of Middle Eastern remote teams with Marilyn Zakhour of Cosmic Centaurs
About the episode
This episode focuses on a particular region, the Middle East. Our guest, Marilyn Zakhour, has been working and managing remote teams for decades and shares her insights on how to build productive remote teams in the region. We also discuss the power and secret sauce that this region’s workforce has and why it is a great addition to global teams if they want fast, creative production within their teams.
About the guest
Marilyn is the CEO & Founder of Cosmic Centaurs, an organizational consulting firm focused on helping executives make better decisions about the workplace and implement sustainable organizational change. Previously CMO of EMAAR, & CEO of Dubai Opera, Marilyn combines her first-hand insight into the challenges c-suite leaders face with her experience as a teacher and facilitator to design and deliver meaningful, high-impact consulting missions and learning experiences.
To date, she has delivered 50+ trainings across a variety of topics including design thinking, strategic thinking, organization resilience, human connection at work, and many more. At MGF 2022, Marilyn moderated a panel titled ‘We Are Family’.
She also hosts 2 podcasts, the award-winning show "Who Run The World," all about female leadership and Centaur Stage, a podcast produced by Cosmic Centaurs exploring the stories, strategies, and leaders behind organizations that thrive.
Connect with Marilyn on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome on the Leadership Anywhere podcast. Today's topic will be super interesting. We will discuss in two things how to build better teams from an enterprise perspective, and also addressing one of the few regions on the world, which should be addressed, but it's not really driving the conversations around remote work and remote leadership, the Middle East. And I do have an amazing guest here, Marilyn Zakur. She's the CEO of Cosmic C Hello, Marilyn. It's lovely that we have you here.
Yeah. Thanks for having me over, Peter. I'm very excited about this conversation.
Me too. Thanks for your time. So tell me a little bit about yourself. I know pre call you mentioned you are dialing in from Lebanon and you are working in the Middle East mostly with companies and you have a really amazing journey from enterprise to startup to corporate and back and forth. And you are now managing your own company. How did you end up here? What's your story?
Yeah, thank you so much. So I'll tell you a little bit about my background. I'm Lebanese. Originally, I now live in Dubai. And in between, no worries. And in between these two moments, I started architecture at school. I never built anything in the physical world. And then I spent 10 years of my career in the tech world. Starting from very low level job doing data entry, I grew into project management, UX design. Then I oversaw a small digital agency out of Lebanon and France. And that agency became part of a bigger group that was an e commerce business. And so I oversaw product development and lots of different kinds of teams from marketing to content. And then by the time I was in my late twenties, I was overseeing a relatively sizable team across seven different cities. And it occurred to me that I didn't know anything about, like we would go into investor meetings and I wouldn't know what EBITDA meant. And I thought maybe I should. And so I went and got an executive M B A at insead. And when I was there, I realized that so many of my colleagues who came from larger organizations were not very happy at work, which sounded strange to me because I loved work. And so I said when I finished my, time and my first company, I'd be curious to go see what the corporate side of work looks like. I was living in Paris. I moved to Dubai in 2018, and I went to work here for a company called Imar, which is the biggest real estate company outside of China. And I worked for the chairman of the organization. I always joke that it was like being a Charlie's angel, because in this world, we're not very high on high levels of clarity and documentation, but rather You know, Charlie would call me and he would give me different missions. And so in my time there the two big missions that I spent time on was I was the chief marketing officer of the group and the properties division, and then I was the CEO of the Dubai opera, because in this part of the world, the opera is not an institution government backed, but a money making operation that was built by the real estate business. And so I did that and then the pandemic started. It was a lot of fun, but obviously the building shut down. No one had a sense of how long it would last. So I went home. I was like, great, what am I going to do now? And I think I'd always wanted to start a business. And because I was quote unquote incompetent at every job I'd ever had, I knew it's not about my expertise, right? Like it wasn't about me being the smartest or most knowledgeable person in the room, but really about building organizations and systems that allowed people to do their best work. And so I wanted to start a company that did that, of course, in the beginning of the pandemic, the biggest kind of question marks for all leaders beyond the economic uncertainty was also how do I run a distributed business? How do I manage teams that are remote? And having had some of that experience in my first role, I started a company with that as our first service. We're actually called cosmic centaurs as a bit of a joke. Because everybody was on zoom wearing corporate shirts and pajama bottoms and centaurs are, of course, mythical creatures that are half man and half horse. And so it was a bit of a reference to that. But also with this long term perspective that Although, for example, we're a fully remote company ourselves we're small, seven person, fully remote business. So I am definitely a believer in the model. I also was never a kind of fully black and white advocate in the sense that I've always known that those choices are complex and it's not about this versus that. I don't like the binary side of this debate.
Same as me.
Yeah. And so my long term perspective is we developed our own framework called the omni channel organization, which is actually helping leaders think through a more complex world where it's not just about where we work or how, or where people are sitting at their desk, but a more broad vision of how do you build good organizations, including the discussion of working conditions, but working conditions aren't just where we work from there, what is my job? What processes do I have to live with? How do I create value here and not just am I sitting at home or working from an office? And yeah, we're almost four years old now. And it's been quite the journey.
First of all, this was an amazing journey in general where you spent like years in really interesting places from all different sizes also, all different markets. You also mentioned that you started from Paris and later on, from the Middle East and so it's like super important and super interesting. You already made me curious about this whole omnichannel organization, we should talk about that, but before we talk about that what drove you to that point, what were the your experiences, you mentioned the Charlie's Angels because it was no, seriously, I love that example. I love that example because it works so much in the same way in, I don't know, some European countries as well that, people and also leaders are managing on the fly by. They just, they don't document, they don't do anything. Everything is one on one. Everything is like verbally delegated and it's, I guess it's more prevalent in the Middle East. What were the experiences that you had during your time before you founded the Cosmic Centaurs? I guess those experiences shaped how you started to believe in this whole omnichannel organization thing.
Yeah, absolutely. I even would say that my experience with the world of work and with all of this thinking even started when I was a kid because my mother was a single parent. She had two jobs and oftentimes, even just in order to see her on the weekend, I would go and play while she was leading, her team to do some delivery on a Saturday or Sunday. And so I think the first thing that kind of set me up for this was that even though she was working so hard, she always enjoyed it. She really loved her job and it set work for me is a value, not an obligation. So I'm obviously privileged to be able to say that but I really love work. I think for so many of us, it should be a place where we are able to find a sense of purpose and meaning for our contribution to the world.
Yeah. And by the way, you started to working early. So when you mentioned that you were meeting people and in your late twenties and went to MBA around that time as well.
Yeah.
And I guess you also attended some university or whatever before that. And so you actually started really early.
Yeah.
Or I don't know what's early, but it depends on the culture. I think it depends on the culture. Yeah. Yeah.
And in Lebanon and some Middle Eastern community is there is no time to waste. And so driven to 18 you finish school, 21 you finish university, and you go straight to work, I even have my first job was when I was 13, which is quite unusual in the Middle East, because usually kids aren't asked to work when they're, like, it's not like in the US, for example, where they get summer jobs, but I did because, precisely because of this, I always thought work was a great thing. And so that kind of gave me the inner motivation for wanting to build better workplaces. And then I think of my first job, which I was in for about nine years what really, I think the big lesson there was around, I very quickly, even though we were a very small organization, relatively, we were about 200 people at our biggest moment. But it's not a big multinational, right?
Yeah.
And we were quite multinational, because we were present in, I think, three cities in North America, five cities in Europe, and then Lebanon. And as a consequence of that, we had to learn really fast, how to enable people to do their best work. It across so many different contexts and cultures and regulatory environments and, personal choices. And so this idea that the best way to have talent contribute is to create the right environment for them, not what the way I want to work has nothing to do with the way you want to work. We can still both create value. And so trying to create what I call today, a one size fits none approach to work is not meaningful and it's not the smartest way forward. And that's what leads to this thinking around this omni channel piece, which is to say, you come like me from the consumer facing side, right? And the consumer facing side, marketeers and product people have spent decades since essentially the invention of the internet and e commerce as we know it, figuring out how do we serve our customers where they are or where they want to be, figuring out how to create a great online experience, a great in store experience, a great phone customer service experience. And so I took a lot of that learning from the marketing side to say we are clearly able to do this for our customers. So what's getting in the way of us being able to do this for our employees? I always, an organization sells two products. It says it's actual product or service to its customers. It also sells its cultures and its ways of working and its process to its employees.
Yes. And it's more connected now than ever, by the way, the two.
Exactly. And you can really see that relation, that strong relationship between them. And so I took Omnichannel from that world and said, can I help leaders in an effective way? Learn from how we treat our customers to treat our employees in a similar way, where we're able to design a great experience for them, because the data tells us that if we know how to do that, we get effectiveness, happiness, loyalty, productivity, all the good things that managers worry about all day long.
And you said that one size that not fit anyone which is great because you also mentioned that you had the team were scattered across three different continents. Sorry, like US, right?
Yes.
And Europe, it's mainly, France.
We had New York, Montreal. We had Dublin, London, Brussels two cities in France, and then we had Lebanon.
Huh. So again it's three totally different, actually four multiple cultures that are inherently different in how they work together. Because just for the audience most of the remote companies that I talk to, and I guess everyone is talking with are for example, European remote or companies or US remote companies. And most of their people who are working remotely are either from that country or from that continent. So the culture difference from, for example, from person from Paris or or a person from Budapest it's not that much. We understand each other but culturally from, for example, Beirut to the U. S. or U. S. to Europe or Europe to Beirut, it's like these are three different insane, huge steps in terms of culture. I'm not saying it in a bad way or whatever, but it can be different. It's just different.
Yeah. It can't be bad, but it can be good. You're reminding me of what I used to say at the time. So we had developers in Lebanon and we had developers in Canada. And so they were just the Anglo-Saxon and they were all committing code to the same product of course. And so it, I'm gonna tell you just a little bit of a funny story, it's my perspective on how to deal with these cultural distances.
Of course.
The Canadian guys and girls, they were really structured, very kind of architectural engineers. Their line of code was like, beautiful. They wrote poetry and they developed systems that could sustain scale because when you live in those environments, you live in a place where infrastructure works.
Of course.
So you build infrastructure that works. Opposingly, in Lebanon, where we don't have a government, most of what people in Europe or the U. S. consider a given, like water and electricity, is not a given. You excel at building things that operate temporarily at a small scale, but you do that really fast, right? Because when electricity goes away, you have a generator. And if your building generator dies down, you also have a subscription with the guy from the neighborhood.
Yes.
Developers in Lebanon were so much faster at building the first iteration and creative as well, in terms of solving Yeah, they were looking for Exactly. Problem with zero resources. Yes. It's, yeah, it's like a Balkanese, eastern European mindset, by the way.
That is very true by the way. We have spent a bit of time in, for example, in Bosnia and I felt at home. I was like, okay, I get you guys, and in that sense, that could have been a destructive combination and at first it was because neither of them understood the value of the other. But once you spend a bit of time making that value explicit, and you ensure that people are being used towards what they're really good at and that those things are very different things, then you create magic. At first it wasn't the case, right? Like when those two teams started working together, they were enemies.
Of course.
And so the first thing that I did is I traveled a lot between both locations. And when I did travel, I didn't just go there for 24 hours for a meeting. I stayed, I stayed for two, three, four weeks. I built human relationships with the people on each side. And when I felt like I had enough, because the process, because that was a process of change management, if you want to look at it this way, because you're trying to get people to see things differently. And so when I felt like I had enough allies, I then took most of the team members of the Canadian US team and brought them to Lebanon for a whole week and showed them the value of being there and, you visited, so the hospitality, the warmth, the food but they were received by the Lebanese team as their hosts and Lebanese take that very seriously.
Yes.
But they also saw the environment that these people evolve in. And I think that in bridging human, and that's why, by the way, good remote companies have massive travel budgets.
Yes.
And they do make it a point to bring people together because even though we can substitute a lot of human interaction with good systems, good documentation, good software, there is still a place where the human connection element cannot be replaced. And so bringing them together, I may I put together like a massive hackathon they had to commit like they had to develop work under pressure in short amount of time make completely mixed, obviously. And then as a follow up to that bringing those people who were now friends in a way to rethink the process and to have very explicit conversations about the problems and the issues and to work on them in a disciplined and serious manner where both sides have something to say, both sides have value to add and to act as the facilitator of that relationship building and the process. It was maybe like a six month exercise all in all between like me traveling, building allies, bringing them over. Then using the momentum of that week together to really solidify the relationships that had started. And it was a focused and intentional exercise. So what happened after that is we had a product that they'd been working on for maybe over a year and a half before I became responsible for it they were like maybe a year late on releasing it. And when we did this and figured it out and we collaborated we ended up releasing it about four months later and it was a beauty. And I remember even the call where we were going live with that product. So we were pressing the go button. I was in Singapore at INSEAD at the time like 2 AM for me or something. And I just launched a zoom call on the Slack channel. And I still have a screenshot of that call where people just joined in from all over the world, and it was like the most beautiful celebration. And yeah, to answer your question, it was a very intentional process that really relied on the, I think the universal fundamentals of human relationships.
This is a beautiful story and beautiful example. Thank you for sharing it. The next question is not a trap, but I still want to ask it. Do you think that you could have made this connection and change management, everything fully online. So without the travel.
Yeah, I think you can do it to a large extent. So I actually, we do a lot of research around the topic of human connection because We fundamentally believe you can have systems and processes and all of those really matter. But if there's a reason, for example, why in Gallup's engagement question, which is engagement survey, sorry, which is recognized as like the standard for engagement, one of 12 questions is about, do you have a best friend at work? So we do a lot of research around that. I like to look at examples from other worlds, like the gaming world. If you think of gaming or e sports, there are entire teams with a lot of proximity to each other that accomplish crazy things. And maybe not only have they never met in person, they might even know each other as a pseudonym.
Yes. Yeah. Or an avatar.
Obviously, Ready Player One is a great example, but if you're a fan of this film, if you watched it, the team that wins actually wins because they end up becoming friends as opposed to the big machine that has thousands of people that are well trained and have all the tools. And so we do a lot of our research around this topic. And one thing that we know from academic research is that mutual knowledge. So how much I know about you that you know, I know about you is one of the greater predictor of highly successful teams. So there are things you can do, and we're very big on research around rituals. And those rituals can be professional, like a standup, a retrospective, reviewing a dashboard, whatever. And they can be interpersonal. And we've even designed okay, celebrating birthdays, milestones, playing together online, like whatever. We've even designed a game called cosmic conversations. It's a very simple, prompt card game, and it has questions to get to know each other as humans and questions to get to know each other as colleagues. And I've now seen, cause we've had this product for about, I think, two and a half years now. And I've seen this through and through the power of simply asking somebody a question and listening to their answer with intent. And forging those connections and realizing that your favorite tree is my favorite tree that you just went through a personal experience that I went through five years ago that I can relate to, that you are grieving someone and I can help that your favorite snack, is M& M's, figuring out those small things about each other that really creates, it's just fundamental universal human behavior. And so when you put these into rituals, meaning you come together collectively to do something over and over again with meaning and intent, what we've seen is that mutual knowledge develops. The connection to your job's meaning and purpose increases your willingness to stay. So all of these kind of great KPIs to hit as a team works better. Now do I think that it's as easy to build that connection online as you do, in person? Certainly not. But do I think it's possible? Yeah, I ran a whole team of people I've never met for the longest time. We now have met because we, once the pandemic, but for the two years, our culture was strong. Our connection was present, but it takes a lot of intentional work. Like I know, I noticed that the months where, let's say as a founder, I'm a bit more on the delivery side, or I'm a bit distracted with a project. And I don't have as much time on the rituals. Things slip up. So you do have to be very disciplined, but yeah, I definitely think that you can build connection in that way.
I agree. Oh, just to reply back on that. I agree, but the farther the cultures are from each other. Yeah. I think the more important is to meet in person in either on a third party place or that culture's own location. It's really hard to understand how people are living in certain conditions, which is wiring them to think in a certain way. And that can be good and bad, by the way. And sometimes when I say culture, it doesn't even mean that it's a location bound culture. Let's say all of your teammates are moms with kids at home, but you are the only male, no kids, whatever. And that's you have to have a really, huge amount of empathy to understand how they are living and working all the time and why they are distracted, for example, on Slack and whatever. So these are, not just location wise cultures, but but how they live together and the more diverse is the culture within the team I think the more you need to actually meet in person a little bit, at least to have some certain grasp. And also the more diverse team, I think also the more you need some projected trick as for example, a card game or something that triggers people to talk about their life. Because if we are in the same culture and, everyone is Central Eastern European or Southern European, we also understand Southern Europeans as well, by the way or Latin America or Latin American or Latin culture. And this is great commonality. We bound each, like this and when the first Nordic comes into the discussion, it's Oh, okay now that's a different conversation, right? And we might need some like card games or tricks or something to actually have a meaningful discussion together. Not because, it's not personal, it's just, it's culture.
No, theoretically we were not designed to have to interact with people from so far away.
Yes.
We created the systems, the technology, the transportation means to do what our bodies are not designed to figure out.
Yes.
So it does, it will never come naturally to us. Maybe in a few hundreds of thousands of years, like our intrinsic kind of neurological behavior will change, but until then we need support, and you're absolutely right that support comes in the form of facilitation prompts, creating a quote unquote what you could think of as an artificial environment in the sense that it's not like organically occurring, that allows for this connection to happen. Otherwise it definitely is not the way we would normally behave.
The other funny thing that you opened with is a Charlie's angels. Sorry for calling that out too, but that was so funny and descriptive by the way. Have you seen any kind of other, I wouldn't say bad leadership experiences, but like more like a which are not really bound to remote work. And it's more I don't know, interesting example on how people manage, not just in the Middle East, but like anywhere else.
So some examples that I see continue to see, I don't think that most people have this figured out is. When we think that the decision of, for example, having a distributed or remote team only impacts that in the sense that I'm a holistic thinker, everything impacts the next thing. I always say if you want to do anything differently in an organization, you want to think of this as a network and you can't upgrade one antenna and say, we're 5G now. You have to, everything has to work together and what I often see with people who want to take advantage of remote work, whether for outsourcing, whether for cutting down on office lease expenses, or even because they fundamentally believe in, they want to be digital nomads and they want to give freedom to people, like whatever their original motivation is, the mistake that happens is not understanding that this means we have to be incredible at documentation, or we have to hire people who understand a common language to a kind of very advanced degree, like everybody has to be a good writer in English or whatever is the common language we choose to have, not understanding what this means in terms of processes, in terms of synchronous versus asynchronous choices in terms of Personal life choices. You were talking about mothers on the team, like how do we understand their availability and their ability to contribute? All three of, like me and two of my senior leaders, were all mothers, so it's so easy for me to know how to support others. But what before I was that I was probably completely useless at this. And again, this comes back to the Omni-channel piece, but for me, bad leadership in. Any choice, any organizational choice, including one around remote or distributed work is not understanding what the other antennas are. So verification responsibilities, accountability process, management systems communication systems, internal comms, leadership capabilities, all of these things like thinking, Oh, we'll just go remote today. I was meeting with an organization that we supported in the past and we did a project around, let's say one of the antennas for them. And when we were done with it, we're like, guys, we've been telling you this since the beginning, this is just beginning. And if you don't also implement this, and that, this change that we made for you, isn't going to have the effect you desire because the organization will naturally just digest it and nothing will happen. And they said, yeah, but we just hired a transformation person. So we'll let them handle it. And I met with that person today and they're like, I wish you'd come because we still haven't figured out this, and that, and so that to me is the fundamental mistake as leaders, not understanding complexity and trying to use one tool to solve all problems.
This is beautiful. Thank you. This is a really good answer. And I completely agree with you. Let's address a little bit about the MBA stuff, because I'm also interested in that a little bit. Because so my Inherent view on enterprise management practices in general, is that if you are trying to work in a remote organ or a distributed organization as a leader, most of the management practices that you learn from school or and sorry, I'm not that, but maybe it's a controversial view, most of the practices that you have, you should do unlearn a little bit during the journey, but some of them are still and even more so important and valuable on that journey too. But it's really hard to tell that which one that you need to unlearn and throw it out on the window and which ones that you need to really capitalize on that and not just like relearning it, but also expanding it a little bit more. So what's your stake on that? How did you, why did you went to MBA? A, B do you think that what you learned there is still valuable in a distributed work environment? And if so, which ones of the sorry.
So I went to go do an MBA because I was managing a really large team. We were fundraising. And I felt like there were some fundamentals, basics of how do you manage a business that I just never touched because I did architecture, including all the financial aspects. I think that was for me, one of the biggest motivators. And in an MBA, you learn, you have a generalist curriculum, right? You're in marketing and supply chain and finance and this and that. And here's what I'll tell you. I'm first of all, I'm a good student. So I really did focus on the learning part and not just on the networking part. Although I have found tremendous value in both. And five years later I think a lot of what I remember most MBA curriculums are case study based curriculums these days. And I remember the stories like there is you cannot imagine for obviously our brain is designed to remember stories. But I think stories are what, how we make sense of the world and how we learn lessons that aren't just direct lessons. Where you have an emotional, sorry to jump in, but where you do have an emotional connection. That's when you actually can learn things. And for stories, you, if you have a connection, emotional to that story, you will never forget that story and the learnings from the story. And because of the case study method, you end up having a connection, not just because of the story itself, but how other people reacted to it. The questions that they asked, the way they answered something obvious to you.
Oh, that happened to me as well. Like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Or what are you talking about? Wait, let me think about why this person has such a diverging perspective on this.
Sure.
And so I still cite these stories almost on a weekly basis. I'll be like, Oh, this reminds me of the time in Nissan where this happened or yeah, Fujifilm managed a really amazing turnaround. It was pretty incredible. Did you know, they do cosmetics now? I do refer to a lot of these because it allows you as a manager to anticipate things that aren't just coming from your own personal experience and I think that lives with me to this day. And particularly with regards to managing distributed teams, I think everything I learned about multinational enterprises really applies. Because, the pandemic came and we're like, Oh my God, how am I going to learn to do this? Actually there are companies that have been doing this for centuries.
Yes.
Including the Jesuits, the Jesuits is the first form of a multinational organization, right? And they've been doing it without the internet. So can you all relax because we have it easy. So in that sense, there were a lot of lessons for how to manage. Globally across cultures, across contexts that came from the MBA learnings that were meaningful to be applied back the early work around remote and distributed work, not to mention what we do today, which is broader organizational consulting. Now, of course, what you can, the difference between what you study and how it's applied, even the stories, they're all post rationalized like when you read about how the CEO did this incredible thing, you obviously know that's a narrative arc and that around it, there was a lot of noise and messiness and experimentation and distraction and so on. So I think where it's important to separate is there's a difference between the story we tell you and how it actually happens. And in real life, it'll happen in that messy way, but just because it's messy and requires agility and experimentation and so on, doesn't resilience and resilience, definitely a big word for me. It doesn't mean that the thread shouldn't exist, right? I think it's, again I'm someone who really likes to talk about paradox, because two things can be true at the same time. So it can be true that the post rationalized version of how you run a company, how you manage its finances, how you, whatever is too good to be true, but it also did exist. It just existed in a more messy reality that we cleaned up because otherwise it would be too boring to tell.
Of course.
So that to me, I still think is, I refer back to what I did in the MBA from an academic perspective all the time. And I also refer back to professors and thought leaders that I have maintained relationships with. And who gave me, they've been studying this like small, tiny thing for 20 years. And it'd be like, have you looked at the work of this person around whatever ambidextrous organization or task complexity and interdependence, or these very important concepts that allow you to conceptualize what you're doing beyond just being a good practitioner.
Perfect. And now you're working from Dubai the, I guess your team is scattered across in Middle East or around that, right?
Yeah. So I'm working from Dubai. We have had team members in different places in the world. So because the we've had people in Italy and France so on. Currently three of us are in Dubai. And then two of us are in Lebanon and two in Egypt.
And the clients that you are working with are mostly from Middle East.
Now they are in the pandemic. We worked with Belgium, the UK, France but I think in post pandemic, we've shifted to people wanting a more local presence, even though We're not typical consultants in that we don't work from our clients offices ever. And we still have some clients in the region that we've never met. But they the time zone and mental proximity is what clients are looking for today. So yeah, most of our clients are in Dubai or in Saudi Arabia today.
In terms of culturally that's also important, I think. And are they open to this whole distributed work? And in terms of what aspects, so let me give you an example. I think let's use the example of India, for example, not done because it's comparable, but just just interesting example. So in India, in the last for example, 10 years ago, it was mostly a target for outsourcing, right? Obviously, because of cost and other aspects. Now in the last, I think, during the pandemic as well, but like two to three years ago a generation grew up, I think. And I can, I think I can safely say that they are more well versed in terms of like this Western Type management techniques right and right now they are actually, they are the ones who are outsourcing stuff in, in, in some cases, and they are the ones who are running the companies and I don't know, 10 years ago, if you wanted to make made Silicon Valley company or like something like, very successful in, in the U S market from India. You had to travel to the U S and do that there. Now you don't need to it's not the case anymore. And it's an interesting shift in terms of how people became more confident more proud from that market. And now I wouldn't say most but a very valuable size of the discussions around remote work, asynchronicity all the management techniques that they do are actually coming from that continent. And that's super interesting to see how that it's how that it is changing in a positive way. So how do you see any kind of trends like this in the Middle East or what is your overall experience in there?
That's really interesting. And even though we speak a common language across, a few most of the countries. I think at least I'm going to talk about Lebanon, Dubai and Saudi, which I know, better than others, almost like there are three different universes.
Of course they are.
Dubai is I think more than 85 percent of the population of Dubai are expats.
Yes.
There are 190 or whatever, 200 nationalities represented here. They often either work for global multinationals that have offices here or larger regional conglomerates or groups. The predominant management culture is Anglo Saxon because of the kind of historical political proximity between the UAE and the UK, but there's also that kind of East meets West thing where if you are working for a regional company, for example, trust is a very high value in these organizations, which is why I didn't have a job description, but the chairman would trust that I would do the job, even though sometimes I was completely incompetent or unqualified. So it's a very fragmented market from the management culture perspective, because depending on what kind of company you end up working with, you might go from one extreme to the next.
That's already an interesting insight, by the way, because most people treat the Middle East as one single entity or some, right?
Yeah it's not the case. I think management culture and working culture is very different. You have Saudi, where Saudi is undergoing an incredible transformation of their work culture for many different reasons. So yes. Okay. The one that the we like to talk about in the West is women entering the workforce on mass, like I think they're now at more than 35 percent of the workforce, which if you just look back 10 years ago, of course, it was quite rare to see women in the workplace. Although I feel like that transition, at least for the organizations I collaborate with was very natural and almost we forget how recent it is. The other big beautiful challenge that Saudi is faced with is this kind of national vision to make it the center of the world in the sense of we want to build global companies from here. We want to bring investments to here. We want to build. Globally competitive economies and organizations. And while there is definitely quite a few consultants in that area, I feel like there's still a lot of national identity. And because in Saudi, the demographics are not like this at all. So the expats are like, what, I don't know, five, 10, not even, because the majority of the population is Saudi, even though within Saudi, of course, there's different cultures. There is this moment of what does it mean to manage a Saudi company being born? And I don't know what the outcome is going to look like, but I can tell you that it's not...
Very young, by the way. So most of them entered the workforce on the university quite recent years ago.
Yes, absolutely. And so it's a management culture in emergence. So we don't know what it's going to look like, but it's going to be very Saudi because it's a big market and they're strong and bold. Lebanon which used to be a few decades ago, let's say a business center of the region because of the economic crisis is in some ways now transforming into an outsourcing destination. Because Lebanese tend to be a little overeducated. We're all multi.
Yes, I know.
We're good. Yeah, we're exactly, of course, especially with people who have an internet connection.
And mostly they're on the coast, like Beirut. So Again, that's a bit of a transformation because Beirut used to be more of a kind of in a leadership position with a lot of the global companies before they headquartered in Dubai. They used to have their headquarters there and it's lost that prime position. And now a lot of the talent is seeking opportunities to work for companies that are not headquartered in Lebanon in order to benefit from dollar salaries. Instead of the melted down local economy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I sense that it's almost like a land of opportunities. So it's a it's a huge growth and there are many, I would say open windows where people can actually do really amazing stuff like yourself. Let's close this up with some questions on if people want to do anything around organizational building especially during that market where you're active there where can people find you?
Yeah. So obviously you can find me on LinkedIn under my name. You can find our company Cosmic Centaurs C O S M I C and then Centaurus, C E N T A U R S dot com on Instagram, on LinkedIn, wherever.
It was a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this actually. You ask amazing questions.
I glad that you enjoyed it. Thank you.
