AAB Plc

Recently we saw the announcement of the UK- UAE CEO Forum which will be co- chaired of Samir Brikho, CEO of AMEC plc and Nasser Al Suwaidi, the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development.

This long awaited announcement follows on from earlier efforts to increase bi-lateral trade between the two countries from £7bn to £12bn (42bn- 72bn AED) by 2015. The forum will serve as an important platform for the business community in both countries, allowing them to champion trade between the UK and the UAE as well as offer business leaders the chance to influence policy.

Whilst membership of the forum is yet to be announced, it will be interesting to see its composition, and what if any will be Small and Medium Enterprises SMEs. I say this because they are often overlooked by policy makers and civil servants; who when establishing boards, committees and reviews, see their own contribution and that of big business as the only necessary elements for policy development.

The mission of both nations to drive up trade is mutually beneficial. It will help Britain’s battered economy, giving UK based business greater reach and influence in the UAE. For the Emirates it offers greater offshore opportunities as well as the chance to help diversify their predominately oil and gas based economy. Further to this is, it will help energise and transform the UAE’s enterprise base, in order to make the private sector more appealing to Emiratis and help reduce the over reliance on public sector jobs.

To make this happen both nations have trumpeted the importance of a vibrant SME sector as a key catalyst for economic growth and innovation. But as someone who has seen his fair share of trade panels, forums and commissions- it is often the little guy who overlooked in the policy debate, due to the myopic view that big business is best. Don’t get me wrong I am not anti-big business. We all dream of running a big business one day, but until I do let’s help each other by letting SMEs have an equal say. Here’s why.

1. In the UK SMEs provide 60% of the private sector workforce and 85% to 95% of the work force in the UAE. So although small, collectively their contribution to GDP and employment figures is huge. As the UAE looks to encourage more and more Emirati nationals into the private sector, it will be a well- developed SME sector that will be responsible for providing jobs.

2. Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030 talks about ‘engine’ sectors that will fuel the high tech, high growth industries that Abu Dhabi aspires to. These industries are fuelled by innovation.
According to the UK’s Federation for Small Business, SMEs account for 64% of commercial innovations, their size is their strength as it allows them to quickly respond to demands of consumers more quickly than large business often at a fraction of the cost.

3. Tough economic times have seen many businesses fail. However many SMEs have weathered the storm. Their size allows them to expand and contract their business model to suit the current economic situation, so they prove more robust.

So what can governments do to support this vital part of the economy?

Well for a start, civil servants should listen a lot more to SMEs when formulating long term policy. It is SMEs and not big business that create the majority of industry innovation and jobs in both the UK and the UAE. So when it comes to developing policy aimed at boosting trade, it’s a no brainer to seek the input of the group that will provide the greatest contribution?

It is a plain and simple case of listen first and develop the policy after. This is something the CEO Forum aims to do, but without the views of SMEs from both the UAE and UK, I feel it may produce procedures that may hinder innovation and limit the potential for growth.

As I flew back from Abu Dhabi this week, I couldn't help but notice the number of fellow passengers reading e-readers. With my wife an avid reader of her iPad, it's a phenomenon hard to miss. 
Recently, the UK Publishers Association reported that there has been a significant increase in the sale of e-books, highlighting the growing popularity of digital readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad.
According to the trade body, digital books jumped by 20% to £180m in 2010. In a year, when book sales totaled £3.1bn, the digital book sector remains relatively small, but the trajectory is clear.
Academic and business publishing embraced digital platforms over a decade ago and continues to lead the field.
Company reports and academic journals are specialist materials but the advent of new technology is putting e-reading devices into consumers' hands and that is clearly driving growth in both sales of technology and content. 
Publisher Penguin which publishes celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Jamie Oliver, recently said e-book revenues were up 182% year on year and account for about 6%, or £63m, of their global revenues. So the publishing house that revolutionized the industry in the 1930s with its inexpensive paperback books, is now at the forefront of pushing books into the digital world.
The good news for customers is that, in the long term, digital books should remove costs of printing in the way that Penguin challenged the traditional norms of publishing 80 years ago.
Interestingly, in a world dominated by social media fuelled by the Facebook generation, it is business (along with academia) which has been ahead of the game in an online publishing.  Take the example of company reports which many of us have been absorbed with recently as we file our 2010 accounts.
Up until 2008 (and thanks to the Companies Act 2006) it was once a requirement for any UK listed company to send a printed copy of their annual report to every single shareholder. It was a hugely wasteful exercise that was neither practical nor sustainable and tended to aggravate environmentally-conscious businesses and shareholders alike. 
Luckily that is not the case now as companies are able to file reports online and distribute to shareholders and analysts electronically.  The Department of Business, Innovation & Skills estimates that UK listed companies have made £47million in cost savings. 
For investors and analysts, the publication of the annual report is not the event it once was since by the time it is published they have often already received far more in-depth information from other sources throughout the annual business cycle.
But the annual report remains a significant plank in the communications armoury of a business and its ongoing engagement with stakeholders, and the innovation in online reporting is certainly helping in an online world.
Penguin will continue to see its range of Jamie Oliver hardback cook books fill Christmas stockings, but a whole new trend in personal reading habitats is taking off.

Politicians have taken a bashing in the past couple of years following the mismanagement of the country’s finances and then the expenses’ scandal.

A year ago we saw the advent of a peculiarity in British politics – the Coalition Government and last night’s election results have allowed voters to give their first verdict on its performance.  And it has been a fascinating night of results.
Following a year of tough decisions regarding public spending cuts – although it’s fair to say that the pain is still yet to be felt – the Conservatives have curiously escaped unscathed.  It’s the Liberal Democrats who have borne the brunt of the voters’ wrath.  Traditionally the party that benefits from the protest vote, is this morning the recipient of the protest vote.

And much of the protest is directed very personally to the public face of the LibDems – Nick Clegg.  
What the vote highlights is the linkage between the reputation or standing of the LibDems nationally, and the reputation of its leader.

Politics, like business, is often about relationships.  Who do the voters trust to deliver their interests?    Nick Clegg and the LibDems came in to Government promising to be a moderating influence and to uphold cherished policies – such as tuition fees and electoral reform.  The spectacular volte face on tuition fees and the expected failure to deliver voting reform has severely dented the standing of the LibDems, and most of all the Deputy Prime Minister.

Leaders have an obligation to rebuild the reputations of their parties and to lead from the front, so here are our top tips on how Nick Clegg might begin to do that.

1. Promoting and managing the reputation of the LibDems is a Party-wide issue and not just one for the PR team or Nick Clegg. PR and Marketing will need to take the lead - but input from, yes, Clegg, but also other members of the party’s leadership.   Ownership for building the standing and reputation of your business must be a collective responsibility and that tends to only come from firm leadership and direction. 

2. Dilute the public face of the LibDems so that it is not associated with Nick Clegg and he alone. Bring to the fore other voter-friendly politicians to broaden the public appeal of the Party.

3. Take time to re-engage with your party membership and the voters at large what the LibDems stands for.  Take at look at your brand strategy.   Does your positioning make sense?  Are your policies understood and where are they being put into practice? Are your elected representatives – from MPs to local councillors walking the talking?

4. Take a more robust position in Cabinet.  Become aware of emerging issues and policies and particularly those that can impact the LibDems’ standing in the Coalition. The suspended health reforms presented by the Conservatives were an example where the LibDems seemed to sleep walk into agreeing a very unpopular set of proposals.  Task your cabinet members with carrying out a thorough review of every policy being delivered in the name of the Coalition – and be prepared to be voluble in your position.

The travails of Nick Clegg and the LibDems marks further growing pains for the Party.   Nick Clegg needs to draw a line in the sand and begin the process of renewal for him and his Party.  Failure to do so will almost certainly lead to certainly lead to further hemorrhaging in LibDem support, and the Deputy Prime Minister becoming one of the most vilified politicians of recent times.

It is inevitable that the capture and killing of the world’s most wanted terrorist should have developed into the news story of the century.

What is less obvious is that the killing and its immediate aftermath were minutely choreographed with public opinion and the media clearly driving the US agenda.

The Osama bin Laden story has everything: US special forces operating in the dead of night  in another country’s jurisdiction and, apparently without that country’s permission;  a ‘hidden’  village fortress that, according to Pakistani intelligence was raided in 2003 and then ‘fell off the radar’’;  the world’s no 1 terrorist living a more or less normal existence with his family just moments from Pakistan’s military academy; accusations and counter-accusations of how much the Pakistani authorities knew; and how bin Laden’s presence in a luxury villa just two hours’ drive from the country’s capital remained undetected for years.

Ignoring the obvious lapses in intelligence and alleged ‘leakiness’ of the ISI, Pakistan’s secret service, that resulted first in bin Laden’s escape from US special forces in 2001, and secondly, had him holed up in a cave on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border when - if the recent news reports are accurate – he was, in fact, living in relative comfort and had been doing so since 2005/6, the bin Laden killing has been a study in news management excellence.

From the moment that President Obama alerted the world’s news media to an important announcement, and then kept them waiting for two hours before delivering it, it was clear that whatever the story, it was going to lead the world’s news for days.

Bin Laden’s immediate burial at sea was a masterstroke. It removed at once the oxygen of publicity a funeral or burial would have provided, still less deprived his followers of a shrine or rallying point for protests and from which to announce reprisals. No martyr’s shrine, no photos, no TV footage glorifying his memory for eternity on the Internet to radicalise the next generation of Islamic fundamentalists.

This provided the cue for the world’s conspiracy theorists to imply a CIA plot designed to bolster flagging domestic ratings for President Obama. No body, therefore no dead bin Laden. Instead, it was left to a small caucus of advisers – and Obama himself in an interview with CNN – to control this most sensitive of issues: to ratify that they had seen images of the body and to confirm it was bin Laden.

The reported became reporters of one of the world’s most dramatic news stories – and who was going to doubt the word of the President of the United States of America on such an issue and then voice it publicly?

The President’s media advisors also clearly recognized the outpourings of grief and promises of retaliation that would follow publication of photos of bin Laden’s corpse. The decision not to publish must have been taken at the planning stages. However, the ‘will they, won’t they publish’ debate was allowed to run and dominated the news, within the news, for a full two days before the decision was taken not to publish the ‘gruesome’ image.

This neatly holed the conspiracy theorists’ case: acknowledge at the very highest political level that photos exist to prove bin Laden’s identity and death, then trump it with the argument for non-publication on the grounds of public decency and taste.

Even the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Mark Mardell, was moved to note in one of his reports how adroitly the US administration had trod the line between triumphalism and glee at bin Laden’s death and the need for sensitivity in case of inflaming Muslim opinion.

With an assured performance yesterday to the CBS network explaining why he will not release the images, President Obama’s administration is basking in the plaudits. Public opinion is with them and a US feel good factor at the clinical decisiveness of the Abbottabad operation and the diplomatic handling of its aftermath is there for all to see.

One wonders if the air-punching, gung-ho approach of previous US administrations would have prompted considerably more anti-US rhetoric and demonstrations than the isolated incidents of flag-burning to date.

Only time can tell whether bin Laden’s death – coming just shy of the symbolic 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the potential for further gloating by Al Qaeda –  will prove to be President Obama’s ‘Falklands Factor’ that ensured a second term for Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister on a wave of patriotic goodwill 30 years ago.

But there can be no doubt that, in the space of a week, a US President frequently accused of weakness and indecision has, in the eyes of the watching world, been transformed into the man of the moment.