Telling it like it is...

...or not.

There are what I think are some great quotes in a story in Gulf news today from Mr Ali Al Shihabi, who is CEO of Rasmala Investments.

They're a bit of a diversion but they do they actually lead me in to what I was originally going to post about, which is poor communication.

I'll start with some of Mr Shihabi's pearls of wisdom.

Communication, unfortunately, is still a weak skill among business, political and economic leaders in the GCC. They have to understand the importance of communication.

The traditional Middle Eastern approach of pretending that everything is fine, when the rest of the world is not, is counter- productive.

He goes on to make another valid and important observation:

Enough of the largest, biggest island the size of Manhattan or Hong Kong and underwater hotels.

That kind of hype is unnecessary because Dubai is a serious business model and by continuing that hype, you've brushed a very serious sector with the Disneyland or Hollywood brush.

This gives the wrong image. It tells the world that these are rich people spending their money and they don't know how to spend it.

Absolutely spot on. Particularly now when the world's financial system is collapsing. As Mr Shihabi says, it scares investors who will be frightened off instead of being attracted.

The world must surely be suffering from Dubai-biggest fatigue by now.

But back to the communication thing.

I was prompted to comment when I heard the presenters on Dubai Eye this morning talking about clarifying something by getting an official on the show.

They've done it before, as has the rest of the media, but getting the official line never clarifies anything. An added problem is the deference of the interviewers, who won't ask for clear answers and simply accept whatever is said.

An official is usually asked to clarify because we, the public, are running into problems with something.

What happens is that the official rambles on in officialese. In amongst it you may get either that there are no problems and never were or there were problems but they're now fixed.

I hasten to add that this is not a problem unique to Dubai, it happens all over the world. I've posted about some of it before, for example here.

You remember the fiasco when the Salik road toll was introduced? Thousands of motorists couldn't find forms anywhere, the website wasn't anywhere near ready...yet we were assured there were plenty of forms everywhere and there was nothing wrong with the website.

There's still a problem with it. I've had payment top-up problems, and Alexander over at Fake Plastic Souks recently posted about his problems with topping up his Salik account.

The latest of course is the ID Card fiasco.

A few short weeks ago we had an announcement that expatriate professionals, identified as white collar workers and specifically university degree holders, have to register by year end.

Panic.

Officials insist that everyone knew months ago about the deadline because they publicised it extensively. Thousands of us saw no earlier information.

In spite of officials 'clarifying' the situation we still don't know exactly who must register by December 31. For example, what about non degree-holders who are professional white collar workers? Housewives?

We're told that the few offices can cope with the numbers by the deadline , but simple mathematics shows they can't get anywhere near it.

The website was nowhere near ready when the announcement was made and couldn't cope with the traffic. When we did get into it the bar code form wouldn't print for many people. For many more the information they entered was changed arbitrarily by the website.

And there were many more problems with the site. A comment left on one of my postings about it: having the same problem with printing the bar codes. And guess what... you HAVE to enter an occupation. So now my 3 year old son is classified as a sales and marketing professional

Officials have told us there was a problem with bandwidth but that's all fixed and the website is now running perfectly...except maybe a bar code problem or two.

In reality there are still problems with the site.

As for the rest of it, there is no problem. Fill out the form, make an appointment, take your pasport and, bingo, you've registered. There may be a short wait.

Today I received an e-mail with some stories from the real world, which I'd like to share with you.

A colleague arrived at the Al Barsha registration centre at 6:10am this morning… there were already over 350 people waiting outside, many of them sleeping on the floor. It looked like a scene from a refugee camp. He turned around and left again.

Our PRO went to the Karama registration centre this morning, at 5:20am (!)… there was already a queue of over 1,000 people. At around 7am, an official started handing out small bits of paper, asking people to fill in their name, mobile number and occupation. When the gates finally opened, many streamed to the one and only appointment-machine in the centre, to try to obtain an appointment to register for their card. Our PRO was among the first, and laughed when he was given "next available appointment: April 2009"

In the other queue, an Emirates ID employee sat at a desk, collected the bits of paper from everyone waiting, and sent them away (?!), saying "we will call you and give appointment".

See, as the officials are telling us, there is no problem, everything is working well and we'll all be able to register easily by the deadline.

As Mr Shihabi said The traditional Middle Eastern approach of pretending that everything is fine...is counter-productive.

The things which are wrong cannot be fixed if the people in charge deny anything is wrong.




By the way, Mr Shihabi's excellent observations are well worth reading and they're here.