* Tamkeen * Positively PosiTeam: A Glimpse Inside Cisco-Israels Training Of Palestinian Entrepreneurs Tamkeen in Arabic means “empowerment” (or “enablement”) — thus the perfect name for a business initiative that the Israel office of Cisco Systems has been funding and operating for the past two years for Palestinian entrepreneurs. While the program’s details have received scant attention in the news media – even, surprisingly, in the Israeli press – they have the potential to help transform a fledgling Palestinian tech community into a future regional powerhouse. And, to say the least, that would be great news for an entire Middle East that has been mired in conflict and economic disparities for nearly a century. Not long ago, this reporter journeyed to the Holy Land to see what Cisco and the Palestinians were up to. The visit included stops at Intel in Jerusalem, which is pioneering outsourcing programs with Palestinian companies. In Ramallah, which is emerging as the West Bank’s tech capital, I dined in a fashionable restaurant with a group of Palestinian entrepreneurs – soaking up the excitement of their start-ups and their future ideas and dreams. But it was near the Dead Sea, in separate locations (including the ancient city of Jericho), that I sat inside two Tamkeen.Net training sessions – in rooms filled with Palestinian CEOs and mid-level managers being coached by Israeli Jewish tech experts. The Cisco subcontractor conducting the sessions – aptly named PosiTeam – has conducted close to 100 days of trainings since 2011 – for 70 Palestinians from 24 different companies. If a fly on the wall would expect to witness harsh glares, and disagreements about borders, blockades and the pending resumption of peace talks, that fly would have landed in the wrong place. It’s all business inside PosiTeam –- complex powerpoints about new-product development, discussions about branding, marketing and sales. If you’re not versed in project management jargon, you’d be lost in about ten minutes – as I was. “We are building up the capacity of these companies and helping them to compete globally,” says Tammy Avigdor, a former Cisco senior manager who co-founded PosiTeam with Avital Brown, an education consultant (and a close friend from their elementary school days in Israel.) To recruit the companies for the program, they turned to a West Bank consulting firm called LionHeart, whose CEO and deputy director — Palestinians Sam Hussieni and Rima Shehadeh –- have been working overtime to make sure such a sensitive initiative is successful. So far they have lots to be proud of. Five years ago, when Cisco began its initiatives in the West Bank, the ICT sector’s contribution to the Palestinian GDP was less than 1%. With help from the likes of Cisco and PosiTeam, as well as Intel, that figure is now over 6%. The latent talent is certainly there. For one thing, Palestinians boast among the highest rate of college graduates in the entire Arab world. Moreover, they’re wired up and ready to go. One recent study found that cell phone penetration is 95% in the West Bank, with half of them smartphones. To show how serious Cisco and the PosiTeam instructors are, the Palestinian CEOs who attend the monthly sessions are required to have most of their managers participate, too. That fits in with the holistic worldview of Cisco CEO John Chambers — that each piece of a corporate (or society) ecosystem has to be addressed and improved for any real and lasting progress to be made. Otherwise the world is just spinning its wheels. The story began in 2008, when Chambers took a trip to Ramallah to see Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. During the meeting, he pledged $10 million to help develop the West Bank’s tech ecosystem. The question was how exactly to go about it. Just what did the Palestinians want and need? Cisco went on a mission to meet Palestinian entrepreneurs and ask them directly. “I personally went to Cisco and said, ‘Forget about donating; allocate part of the money and help us create jobs,” says Tariq Maayah, a top Palestinian entrepreneur and business leader who today does cutting-edge R&D outsourcing to Cisco-Israel and HP (via his company, Exalt Technologies.) Cisco bought the idea. And the multinational subsidized the cost (alleviating the final risk) of having individual business units within Cisco-Israel outsource R&D to promising Palestinian companies. Only then, if those units liked and benefitted from the experiences, they would continue working with those Palestinians without a subsidy. And they have. “When we started talking with Palestinian government and private sector leaders, what they said they really wanted and needed was to start a high-tech industry just like Israel’s was maybe 30 years ago,” says Zika Abzuk, the Cisco-Israel senior manager assigned by Chambers to oversee the initiative. “They said, ‘We don’t want you to give us charity, we want you to eventually be able to come and do business with us—that’s our dream. We need your help in changing Palestine’s image as a place open for business.’” Cisco set about interviewing candidates – in a room in a lobby in an old, modest hotel in East Jerusalem. It didn’t always go smoothly, however. Abzuk, led a team that interviewed entrepreneurs from 20 Palestinian firms, ultimately selecting only three (including Maayah) for the outsourcing program. “Out of the 20 companies, most of them didn’t really know how to speak to us, they didn’t have any experience working with the international market,” recalls Gai Hetzroni, a top Cisco R&D manager. “They spoke English, but they didn’t speak the language – the high-tech language. Some of them came dressed very well, they said ‘hello’ very well, they showed a very nice picture – but they didn’t know what project management is, what Agile [software] is, or how to manage groups of engineers.” Nonetheless, some of the rejected Palestinian companies complained to their industry’s association in Ramallah that they didn’t get their piece of the $10 million Cisco outsourcing pie. “They wanted their share,” says Hetzroni. “They felt they deserved it. They didn’t really understand the business issue behind it. So we though that one of the things we can help them with is capacity building, prepare them working in the international market, and teach them how to speak the hi-tech language. So this is what Tamkeen is all about.” The Tamkeen.Net instructors are all Israeli-Jews, but that hasn’t posed a problem. “We didn’t find any Palestinian experts with the kind of credentials or backgrounds we needed,” explains Hetzroni, “and to bring them from the [United] States would be too expensive, so we have to use the Israeli Jews. Because we have plenty of those in Israel.” For Abzuk and Hetzroni – both are Israeli Jews — making trips to Ramallah felt “scary,” at first, but they are now much more relaxed about it. “We’ve made friends there,” says Hetzroni, but when walking the streets they are still careful not to speak Hebrew aloud – only English. Abzuk laments that too many Israelis “think most Palestinians are terrorists,” while most Palestinians think “all Israelis are checkpoint soldiers.” That’s how cut off they are from seeing and knowing one another. While today the Cisco managers look forward to their Ramallah visits, there are some fearful Israeli instructors who refuse to go there. As a result, while roughly 20 trainings have been held in Ramallah, they are now more likely to happen in desolate Dead Sea locations, where cross-border travel (both for Israelis and Palestinians) can be smoother, quieter, and less complicated. “Being an Israeli who works with a Palestinian, you have to always be sensitive to all the complexities,” adds Abzuk. “But we believe we are doing the right thing both for Cisco and for Palestine. It’s win-win. This is a way to create a market for Cisco. And the Palestinians are being helped with creating an entire tech ecosystem. That’s how you can make it from ‘Start-up Nation’ [Israel] to ‘Start-up Region.’ You have great talent right next door, in the same time zone, with a similar culture, and lower costs.” She also hopes this kind of activity will lead to better relations between the peoples and — ultimately — peace and a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, Cisco is the only big company that’s been doing the heavy lifting (and funding) for these trainings. If more multinationals followed John Chambers’ lead and climbed aboard, the initiative would be strengthened – and could even be used as a model to roll out across the Middle East. During my dinner with the Palestinian CEOs in Ramallah, it was impossible not to think about peace, and to visualize these business leaders as forming the backbone of a future state. Nonetheless, “we always say we should not mix the economy and politics,” warned one of my hosts, Ala Alaeddin, a graduate of the Tamkeen trainings. ”Because if you’re doing this for a political reason, it will eventually fail. So we’d like to always highlight it in a very professional business way to sustain and build it out forever. Naturally, when things grow politically, the relations and trust will be built, but that’s not the main issue here. The main issue is building start-ups.” In 1996, Alaeddin launched one of the West Bank’s first web development companies (Intertech). He has since added a whole slew of intriguing projects to his name: From a 3D animation start-up, to a magazine calledDigital Palestine, to an outfit called “Gifts to Palestine” that enables Palestinians living abroad to send perfume, chocolates and flowers to their loved ones here. At one point, I remarked that the martini I was drinking was the best I’d ever had in the Middle East, and how surprised I was by that (“Who would have imagined such a thing?,” I exclaimed, “in Ramallah!”). I then quickly asked if my remark had sounded condescending towards their society, and if any of my hosts were offended. “You’re okay,” laughed LionHeart’s Hussieni,” whose company does the recruiting for the Cisco trainings. “But it reminds me of an experience I had in America once, where I saw a woman walk up to a stroller and told a black mom, ‘Oh My God, your baby is so cute, he doesn’t look so black.’ I think it’s similar to people coming to Ramallah and saying, ‘You guys are so nice and we didn’t expect that.’ It’s as if we were meant to be bad but we happen to be nice.” Hussieni can take pride today. The companies that he and his partner Shehadeh, a Jordanian Palestinian, have enlisted into the trainings appear to have only positive things to say about their experiences. After a session in the ancient city of Jericho (just steps from an Israeli desert border), one attendee summed up the view I heard from so many of his colleagues. “It’s opened new horizons to our way of thinking – all of it very useful for our careers,” said Fadi Fannoun, a web development manager for an accounting software firm (Trusted Systems) based in Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank. But is it strange to be taught by Israeli Jews? “For the moment, yes,” he says. “But when we think about it, every nation learns from other nations. So I see no problem with getting knowledge from any person- Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, anybody. The politics is another thing.” At a second session — this one was held in the backroom of an obscure, desolute Dead Sea-area restaurant – a Palestinian CEO named Saad Tuffaha invited me to visit his office afterwards in Ramallah. His company is AlfaSoft Solutions, and one of his main products is a face-and-fingerprint scanning machine for companies that want to keep tabs on their employees attendance records. “What we learned from the session is marketing management, segmentation and forecasting, building ecosystems, and how to manage people,” he says, adding that he can think of no negatives about the PosiTeam trainings. “All positive.” As he talks from his desk, with a portrait of the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat hanging on the wall behind him, he says it would be fine to take a photograph of him next to it. “It’s good, he is a symbol for Palestinians.” An open window in his office looks out onto a wall filled with Arabic graffiti demanding that Israel release Palestinian prisoners. Tuffaha’s sales are mainly to Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. But, thanks in part to what he’s learning in the Cisco trainings, he hopes to open a branch in Jordan at the end of the year. From Jordan, he hopes to expand his market into the Arab Gulf states. Asked his thoughts about his instructors from PosiTeam being Israeli Jews, he says, “Yeah, why not? I have a lot of Jewish friends. Each side has fanatics, and that’s the problem. I am against the fanatics, not the normal people like me and them.” In fact, even though it was not the intention of the program, friendships are blossoming throughout it. Training leaders Avigdor and Shehadeh are like a Jewish-Muslim spin on the movie, ‘Thelma and Louise.’ They hug often, and talk excitedly about their constant and sometimes frightening escapades trying to cross borders together between Israel and the West Bank. “Nothing can stop us, right, Rima?” laughs Tammy. “Nothing will stop us.” As Hussieni puts it: “There is always this fear in the back of a Palestinian’s mind that this is a program to bring Palestinians and Israelis together like good buddy-buddies, and yet there is the occupation. This is notthe purpose of the program. The objective is to raise the skills of Palestinians so they can do business by themselves. We aspire to peace by doing things that are peaceful, but peace is an outcome of what you do. It’s not to make friends. But the outcome of the program, indirectly, is making friendships.”
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 02:42:23 +0000
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