When is a gift just a gift?

What may seem inappropriate in some cultures (being wined and dined by the agency, for example) is normal, if not expected, in others. It’s an especially touchy issue in the Middle East, where turning down a gift can be seen as a grave insult.

“I think it is a bit presumptuous for anyone to believe that an account will move because of lunch or dinner,” says Philip Jabbour, group director of marketing and new business development at Starcom Mediavest. The media buying agency says it doesn’t hand out gifts to clients or potential clients. “Such meals are casual, and at times necessary. What if a day meeting drags over lunch and you invite client for lunch?”

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Trouble at the diploma mill

Three years ago, Ron Bruder was building shopping malls in America. Now he’s in the Middle East, but as a developer of human capital, rather than retail centers. As founder and CEO of Education for Employment, an NGO aimed at boosting the skills of Middle East graduates, he believes graduates have been shortchanged by their colleges and universities.

“A lot of the countries that we’re operating in, there’s a disconnect between the level of education people get and the jobs that they don’t get. It’s an acknowledged disconnect, I’m not telling tales out of school. They go through four years of college and at the end of the day, the joke is they maybe get a bride from a better family, but they don’t get a job. We’re trying to change that,” he says.

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What lies beneath

Credit cards are an essential part of Gulf life, and not just to finance designer clothes and flashy watches. Some bills are practically impossible to pay unless you have the requisite plastic and thus, until the advent of proper debit cards, most wallets held at least one card bearing a Visa or MasterCard logo. These days banks offer credit cards to new customers as a matter of course, and that includes Islamic banks. Yet unlike their mainstream counterparts, Islamic banks, to their chagrin, must field awkward questions about what lies beneath the stamp of Shari’ah compliance. Read More

Safe landing

After 33 years of going nowhere, Gulf Air has made one safe landing that promises to reverse its fortunes. With Oman completely pulling out of the beleaguered airline at a dramatic extraordinary general assembly in May, Bahrain has regained its 100 percent ownership. Most believe the latest turn of events will help the kingdom redefine its priorities and establish itself as a tourism destination using Gulf Air as a catalyst. It’s a case of better late than never as the airline, by its own admission, was bleeding over $1 million a day and even more if other costs such as financing are included. Another estimate suggests that the carrier’s accumulated losses and costs, including for 2007, would amount to 254 million Bahraini dinars ($675 million). Gulf Air was founded in 1974 and was owned equally by the governments of Bahrain and Oman, after Qatar and Abu Dhabi withdrew in 2002 and 2005 respectively. Read More...

Wise move

Given that May was another bumper month for outlandish project announcements in Dubai – the truly gigantic shopping development at Dubailand, which will triple the emirate’s retail real estate, was the biggest – it was welcome indeed to see one new project that is not only grounded in reality, but in history too.

Pearls of Dubai, an initiative by the Dubai Multi-Commodities Center, isn’t going to set the precious stones world alight, but that’s precisely why it’s worth looking at it. It’s not the biggest and not the best project in Dubai, but it has something that is lacking in so many projects in this former pearl diving town: a smattering of authenticity. Read More...

Stalled

Salik, Dubai's first attempt at fixing its commuter traffic problem started today, and everyone in the emirate has an opinion on it. So what's Kipp's view?

First up, Day One cannot have been good for business productivity. There will have been a good number of people who bought the Salik card and enjoyed a clear run along the tolled Sheikh Zayed Road, perhaps most of them shaved a little time of their commute. For the majority, however, journey times increased dramatically; a straw poll in the Kipp office suggests commuting times tripled, many took over two hours on journeys that last week took 30 minutes. Read More...