July 31 Overlooking
the great Mersey river in a very comfortable penthouse at the top of a Liverpool
docks development, Dr Ahmed Sahab, his wife Jo and family of five children together
with their Eritrean maid welcomed me for tea. In fact, two teas – one a ‘red’
tea for elevenses, then, after they insisted I stay for lunch, green tea with
ginger.
“In the Gulf, people will drink red tea all day long. When you go to people’s homes they greet you with two things: Arabian coffee which is in small cups served with cardamom, and then the tea comes. Today people are more health conscious so I see more people drink green tea. I don’t care too much for red tea as a family, not as a culture, we drink green tea and ginger which is very good for digestion. It is a part of daily life.
I’m an electronics engineer but I make my living in computer science and technology. I’ve done a lot of work for government but now I’m an IT consultant and also a businessman investing in R&D in companies.”
Is there much call for that
in Liverpool?
“We have an expression: “The carpenter’s door is always broken”. So
I try to make sure my door is not broken – I use technology to be fully
flexible to manage my business world-wide – working in Liverpool or Dubai or Riyadh or Canada or Bosnia or Russia
or whatever. We have partners and projects wherever it takes us.”
Are you investing in
certain types of businesses?
“No. IT is IT. Solutions, services but also processes, knowledge management and consulting. We are talking to some partners here right now. We are talking to some social services they have good systems but they’re not talking to each other. They have a lot of knowledge in their head. When they quit or die the knowledge goes with them. A lot of companies or government agencies are not benefiting from the 20, 30, 40 years worth of knowledge, they take all the experience with them when they leave. They hire a new person who makes all the same mistakes and starts from the beginning. You lose time, effort and they can’t find information.
So they should build knowledge bases, the best examples is Google. If you take that same model and use it in an organisation you will save yourself all that time.
We built some natural languages to teach it how people think but it needed a lot of research and only succeeded on things that are systematic like military weapons – the military has used it a lot. We don’t invent so much as utilise what already exists.
The Internet is the greatest thing we can utilise, only terrorists are making use of it.
So these are some of the things we’re involved with. We’re three or four years ahead of what people are doing now. Out of 10 things we probably hit one or two, which will give you 50 times, 100 times revenue share. If we’re there first we have no competition.”
Turning back to tea …
“In Saudi Arabia
we would say schai for tea but in Iraq
they say tchai, in Morocco
they would say atay where it is more of a ritual. They put a lot of sugar and
cook it, cook it, cook it. I think Morocco would be the best country
to go to to represent the value of tea. It is done by the book: the making, the
pouring, the taste. Are you going to Saudi Arabia?”
I wish I was but I’m not
sure I can get a ferry from Saudi to Sudan.
“There is - from Jedda to Port Sudan.”
It was also difficult to
get a visa for Saudi.
“I’ll send you a visa. I can get you a visa for your passport anyway if you decide to change your mind.”
What’s life like for you
here in Liverpool?
“My wife is a dentist. She came to Liverpool
to train. We’re here mainly for the weather. I know the English people they
hate this weather but because the weather now in our country is 38 or 40
degrees every day my wife wakes up she prays for rain.”
Advice for the trip?
Jo: Be careful about your health and drink a lot of water
Ahmed: Learn your survival words for Food, Directions, and bring a paragraph explaining what you are doing; bring dates for survival; bring gifts for the people you meet
I'm working to operate my very own website yet I believe its as well standard and I would like to concentrate much more on smaller tips. Becoming all items to all most people is not really all that its crumbled as much as be.
Posted by: Shox NZ | July 15, 2010 at 07:51 AM