Extending Managerial Skills — A Case From a Telecommunications Company

A major finding of a symposium held in Abu Dhabi in 1979 by the Stanford Research Institute was that the major challenge in the Gulf States in the 1980s would be a lack of managerial talent. This factor is now exercising the thoughts of many commercial, industrial and financial enterprises and organisations in the region both in the public and private sectors. Facing the joint needs of rapidly expanding organisation, the demands of maintaining growth in a stagnant economic environment, and a far reaching programme of localisation of jobs, the pressures placed on managers in the region are intense. It is a situation in which western countries, with their longer history of management expertise, are finding severe problems: these are magnified for the newly developing Arab manager, who also has to contend with his problems in a glare of publicity where every action is subject to intensive analysis.