Hockey legend Mark Messier teaches great leadership lesson in Bratislava

note: this piece was originally written for the Orange Business Live blog

On May 10, 2011, the Orange Biznis Forum meeting took place in Bratislava, Slovakia. The guest speaker at that meeting was the much revered Canadian Ice Hockey legend Mark Messier, who is now retired. Mark had come to share with us some of his best tips with regard to team management and leadership inspired by the strong moments in his rich and long career. This business meeting had taken place the morning after we had witnessed the splendid victory of the Ice Hockey team of the Czech Republic, at the Orange arena in Bratislava [footage of the match available from our Posterous account]

a living legend

It’s not everyday you come across a living legend, and even though I’m rather new to Hockey, I could well sense that we were experiencing a very special moment when Mark Messier came to talk to us about leadership and management at an Orange Business Meeting organised by our Orange representatives based in Bratislava, the Capital town of Slovakia in central Europe. Mark played hockey for 26 years and he retired only six years ago. He played in Edmonton, Canada for 12 years and then joined the New York Rangers with whom he won the Stanley cup in just three years. He is credited for the amazing turnaround of the New York City team, despite incredible media pressure.

I have taken extensive notes during that meeting, so here are my takeaways from Mark’s presentation. An impressive and extensive biography of Mark is made available online on Wikipedia.

the wolf inside you

Mark opened his presentation with an old Cherokee quote: “there are two wolves inside you” he said, “one good and one bad; guess who wins? The one you feed!”.

The real challenge is how to convey a “positive and energetic attitude”; something he understood when talking with his uncle Victor Messier “some sort of Guru and philosopher”, in a “Buddhist kind of way” according to his own words. Victor showed him the pictures of one Alex Grey, an artist interested in anatomy whose paintings were trying to make personal energy visible in 7 foot-high paintings. Mark described this as a defining moment. Although he admits that this kind of revelation could happen in various ways according to who you are and how you feel. What is important is to understand “how you can capture the energy in order to show a positive attitude which can lead you to success”.

the status of Social Media in the Middle East straight from the Arabian horse’s mouth in Cairo

I have just come back from Cairo, where I was invited by the heads of the Cairo Orange Labs (see the video here) and their French counterparts in order to perform a presentation of what we do at Orange Business Services in the field of social media for a large carrier. I had the opportunity to present in front of a panel of representatives its form various carriers from the region including our local partner Mobinil. In this presentation, I not only presented what we do at Orange Business Services in Western Europe and in the United States, but also what is happening in the Middle East itself, as seen through the eyes of this excellent report entitled the Media Arab Outlook, the third edition of which can be accessed from this link.

The exchange of views that we had during that meeting was quite frank and quite direct and very eye-opening on the status of social media in the region. As a matter of fact, the development of social media in the Middle East is a bit schizophrenic. On the one hand, the uptake social media sites like Facebook in the Middle East, and particularly in Egypt is tremendous. The numbers which are quoted by the Media Arab Outlook report are even probably grossly underestimated. The report quotes something like 900,000 Egyptian users of Facebook whereas the audience mentioned almost immediately that this number was far below what it really is.

Of course, the status of broadand adoption (see picture below) in these countries is not at all what we are witnessing in Western Europe and the United States, which is easily understandable. If we except a few places in which broadband equipment is close to 0 because of local warfare or particularly difficult situations like the one in Sudan, Egypt is unfortunately coming at the bottom of the list in terms of broadband adoption namely.

Optimists would see that as a tremendous opportunity for carriers to equip the country with better broadband and better Internet access in general. Yet, it seems that in this kind countries the usage of the Internet is collective, a bit like what happened in India 10+ years ago and is still happening now in poorer areas; I suspect that people are grouping together around one Internet access and lend each other computers. The cybercafe, I was told by some attendees, has become so central to the life of villagers in Egypt and other Arab countries, that “cybercafe” itself was turned into a verb in Arabic, and is now part of the everyday vocabulary, and is commonly used by farmers and workers alike. Sometimes in India, it’s even shop owners who actually resell their Internet access to their clients when they shop. I also witnessed in Lebanon, more than 10 years ago, that people went to each other’s homes to look at the computer, check their mail and do things on the Internet.

Therefore, on the one hand, we have a tremendous uptake of social websites like Facebook, at the same time a terrible lack of broadband in countries like Egypt, and other countries doing a little bit better like Saudi Arabia and others doing a lot better, understandbly, like Qatar and the  United Arab Emirates.

There is also this widespread feeling that there is a terrible lack of content in Arabic available, because the vast majority of the country does not and will not speak and write in English. After all, Germans prefer to StudyVZ and Xing to respectively Facebook and LinkedIN, so it is perfectly understandable that Arab people favour local platforms. At the same time, local versions of the equivalent of Facebook and the like, are few and far between. There is one successful platform coming out of Jordan (Jeeran, see the report on page 72), and there is the famous Maktoob which was taken over by Yahoo! recently (important question: will it survive this change?).

Facebook in itself is not an issue in the Middle East: people type either in English or in Arabic on the same walls and fan pages and it doesn’t really matter to them. But the main question is that of the ownership of Facebook which is definitely seen as American, which poses problems not only in terms of “not invented here” syndrome, but also from a political point of view (think about who created Facebook for instance and his origins even though he considers himself an atheist, and imagine how it resonates in the Arab world, regardless of westernised political correctness if I am allowed).

So, at the end of the day, there are tremendous opportunities in the Middle East for the development of social networks, in an area where conversations are anything but a view of the mind. It’s a way of life, which preexisted in real life way before the Internet arrived. Those service providers who will be able to seize this opportunity and provide social media platforms and services in Arabic, from/in partnership with independent Arab-owned media companies, will reap the harvest of a booming sector and, judging by the liveliness of the Facebook fan page of Orange Tunisia, which has now reached a little bit more than 110,000 users in just a few months, we can imagine what can be done in terms of advertising, brand loyalty programmes and co-creation.

8 lessons learnt from entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley

I have just come back from a week spent in the Silicon Valley, during which I was
able to have meetings – as
part of a press tour – with various start-ups in the areas of IT infrastructure,
software , storage area networks to name but a few of the subjects that were tackled
during that trip. Beyond the various interviews and discussions that we had with
leading entrepreneurs in the Bay area, I have tried to highlight the eight points
which, at this very moment and in my opinion, are making the Silicon Valley stand
out from the rest of the world in terms of high-tech innovation; here they are:

• above all, the Silicon Valley is about a state of mind in sync with entrepreneurship; the whole Valley is resonating with the desire to foster free enterprise and innovate,
• secondly, there is the possibility for such entrepreneurs to find easy money and the real ecosystem to launch new ideas and new services,
• thirdly, swiftness of action, which enables a new high-tech venture to be set up in something like 3 months or even less,
• fourthly, the strength of the Silicon Valley is in the software, what ever the application concerned, even in the infrastructure business. We have indeed seen several start-ups work up to 4 years in order to develop a new operating system and therefore try and get a leg up in competition,
• fifthly, a true myth, which enables the Silicon Valley to live on, despite the current credit crunch and the crisis that everyone has been through,
• the sixth characteristic of the Bay area is private money, often coming from families or entrepreneurs (not VCs) who have succeeded; ethnic funds are also involved significantly (Indian and Chinese mainly),
• the seventh reason is a sense of a global perspective, whereby Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are thinking global even before the opportunity arises to launch beyond their local markets,
• lastly, the intensive use of offshoring for software developments, with unlikely countries like France being used as cheap alternatives to Bay area developers (a junior php developer in the silicon valley is paid $60,000
  to 80,000 a year, a senior developer $120,000 to $150,000 per annum).

As a conclusion, it’s not just one reason that makes the Silicon Valley different from what is seen elsewhere, often copied and rarely matched, even in the United States. This region is really a maelstrom of innovation and entrepreneurship.

note: picture Yann A Gourvennec, Orange Business Services: the photo was taken at the plug and play tech centre in Sunnyvale.