Word: partners
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With all the turmoil in the Middle East, few took much notice when Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris signed a deal last December involving a firm from a neighboring country. This was no routine transaction. Sawiris, CEO of Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, in Cairo, purchased 9.9% of Partner Telecommunications Co. Ltd., in Tel Aviv, considered to be the biggest investment, valued at $150 million, ever made in the Jewish state by an investor from an Arab country. Sawiris expected the rebukes he received from some fellow Arabs for doing business with Israelis even as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still rages...
That's a nice sentiment. But what mainly drove the Partner deal is Sawiris' ambition to succeed everywhere he can--Israel included--beyond the borders of the Land of the Pharaohs. He is part of a new generation of entrepreneurs that, at last, is taking Arab business global. The obstacles continue to be immense, from corrupt bureaucratic Arab regimes and regional conflicts to anti-Arab bias in the West. Arab tycoons are still seething over the way political pressure forced Dubai Ports World to abort its buyout of U.S. port operators earlier this year...
...part by going where others feared to tread, getting mail across Beirut's green line during the Lebanese civil war and using donkeys to get parcels past Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank. Ghandour got his break when FedEx and later Airborne Express made Aramex their Middle East partner. The U.S. firms gave Aramex invaluable lessons in everything from quality control to technology. When DHL acquired Airborne and dropped Aramex, Ghandour learned another lesson: the turnaround. He got busy marshaling the regional players that Airborne had left in the cold into a new alliance. A leader in the Middle East...
...EADS), owner of Airbus. And that might still be one too many. Delays in building the A380 megajet led to the ouster of EADS co-CEO Noël Forgeard as well as Airbus' top boss. Filling Forgeard's spot is Louis Gallois, head of France's railways, who will partner with EADS's remaining CEO, Tom Enders, a German. At Airbus, naming Christian Streiff CEO should placate two of EADS's largest shareholders, the French government and Germany's DaimlerChrysler. Streiff, from Lorraine, speaks German. But as Warren Bennis, leadership guru at U.S.C., says, "Chemistry is less important here than...
...hard to say what is due to the alliance, and what is due to your own effort. For example, if you have your own purchasing strategy, how much of the purchasing cost reduction is due to the fact that you have access to the data of your partner and you knew exactly what was the cost of it, and access to his supplier versus your own effort, or streamlining your process and organizing a better job between purchasing and engineering? And frankly it's irrelevant. What is important is to deliver the result... And that's what we need...