Day 2 | Glocalization

I can't remember where I first heard this term, but it’s been more than a few years since I’ve returned to the concept. Since coming on this trip, I've been thinking about it often. The term refers to the fact that even as we think globally, we must act locally in order to operate effective in other countries. Learning about the journey & perspective of Brad Boyson, former Executive Director of SHRM MEA, today was a great case study in glocal thinking.

Brad's career has been truly global, working on multiple continents in an international HR capacity. While he's a Canadian citizen, he's lived so many places that he doesn't truly identify as Canadian anymore. You can tell that he’s lived a nomadic lifestyle by his accent, which is impossible to pin down or classify into a single language or culture and serves as an apt symbol of his career thus far. While Brad has moved around often, you can tell how seriously he takes adapting to the local culture in which he resides. There's no "international" ethos that characterizes how Brad looks at the world and he's not interested in exporting his perspective to other countries; he's more interested in importing the perspective of other culture into his own cognitive portfolio.

Brad sharing with us today his PESTLE analysis of the UAE and his perspective that a "perfect storm"--central location in an increasingly global world, demographic dividend, collateral (oil), and visionary leadership--emerged in the UAE to make the UAE an economic power only 50 years after its founding. While completing pre-work and since we arrived, I've been struggling to understand "how this happened"--namely, how the UAE outpaced other GCC countries to become the economic paragon of the Middle East in such a short time. Brad's perspective on what makes the UAE unique helped tremendously, and I'm looking forward to expanding upon that understanding with cultural observations in the next two weeks to come.